Tonsor #12 -- Conservatism, Liberalism, Reaction

View of Washington, DC, on the approach to National.

September 17, 1987, was the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. That morning I was on a jet bound for Washington, DC, to see one of the world's great charters of ordered liberty.

The descent was turbulent. The view from the left side of the plane offered a welcome distraction. On the approach to National I could look east onto the Washington Monument, Capitol Hill, and neoclassical buildings on either side of the Mall. The White House was barely visible, but the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials were vivid and close. This first visit to the nation's capital made me feel like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Besides being infected with a corny kind of enthusiasm for historical sites, I was truly stirred by the monuments of civic republicanism.

But something else was stirring, too. Looking out at nation's capital, I thought the bleached monuments made the city look like a colony of the ancient Roman Empire. The scene reminded me of Stephen Tonsor's words: "Do not become corrupted by the Imperial City, Mr. Whitney. It's where scholars go to die."

In his autobiography, Edward Gibbon recounted his first trip to Rome where he experienced his "Capitoline vision." He ascended steps that overlooked the ruins of ancient Forum, musing as barefooted friars sang Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter. Suddenly he conceived the project to write what the world would later know as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).

My view from the plane did not inspire a correspondingly ambitious project. But I was working hard to understand what Tonsor had said one week before, after our first History 416 class. It was the conversation that left me scratching my head, yet I felt it mattered. What did my professor mean when he said that both "liberal conservatives" and "reactionaries" were his kind of people? How did three quite different -isms -- liberalism, conservatism, reactionaryism -- fit together in one man's head? I sensed that the answer would help me understand not only Tonsor's view of modernity, but also his notions of civilizational decline, cultural decadence, and imperial decay.

*     *     *

On the flight's descent, I found my imagination taking off. I was embarking on a journey that would lead me into territory for which my map had only the broadest contours, and not very accurate contours at that. So the key at the start of the journey was to take Tonsor at his word. No ideologue, the man said that he embraced life's complexities. He contained multitudes.[1]

1. In time I would understand that the conservative in Tonsor was grounded in the West's Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman patrimony. Our civilization's first order had been informed by that synthesis during the Middle Ages. You can see it in the way St. Thomas Aquinas baptized and then went beyond the teachings of Aristotle. It's why the civilization Aquinas helped build was called "Christendom." Significantly Tonsor, a man of the modern age, did not cling to the forms of bygone Christendom. He would later tell me that a book like James J. Walsh's The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries was too nostalgic for his tastes. "The good old days," he like to say, "were not all that good."[2] So it was not the forms but rather the essence of the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman synthesis that inspired him -- its ethical precepts, religious insights, and spiritual comforts in a world wondrously made by its Creator. In essence, then, the conservatives were the guardians of civilization, men and women alive to Tocqueville's habits of the heart that are formed in families, religious communities, civil society, and local politics.

2. In time I would understand that the liberal in Tonsor celebrated the spirit of liberty in human nature. That spirit was always present in the West but emerged quite forcefully in the Enlightenment and challenged Christendom directly. (The Renaissance had challenged Christendom indirectly.) Our civilization succeeded in absorbing many of the resulting intellectual, moral, and spiritual tensions between Christendom and the Enlightenment, but these binary sources of authority led to the de facto renaming of our civilization. Henceforward we would be "the West" or "Western civilization" instead of Christendom. The Enlightenment was epitomized by Thomas Jefferson, whose newly articulated natural right to the pursuit of happiness would prove to be one of the most potent concepts to emerge from the so-called Age of Reason. The pursuit of happiness would justify the efforts of individuals to free themselves from "oppressive authority, outworn customs, arbitrary rules, unfair regulations, and tyrannical taboos." The process of liberation was good -- to a point -- so long as the pursuit was properly ordered to man's imperfect and imperfectible nature. Tonsor was no utopian.

Allow me to pause to emphasize Tonsor's argument that, in a healthy civilization, the liberal type who struggles to expand the empire of freedom must be balanced by the conservative type who is the guardian of the civilization's institutions and teachings. They are complementary types, these two -- the liberal reformer and conservative guardian -- and both are needed in productive tension. Indeed, it was that productive tension that gave rise to the dynamism of the West that we identify with modernity. Tonsor was teaching me to see modernity as successive experiments in freedom -- which sometimes turned out to be excessive experiments in freedom that had to be tested and sifted in light of our older Judeo-Christian patrimony.

3. In time I would understand that the reactionary in Tonsor required me to abandon the security of my Merriam-Webster preconceptions. Reaction, I would learn, was not a temporal concept -- it was not the politics of nostalgia that sought to turn back the clock to some mythic golden age. It was impossible to go back to anything. Rather, reaction was a philosophical or political or perhaps even a sociological concept at the center of what Tonsor called the "West's inner history."

Aristotle, son of the physician Nichomachus 

I had difficulty grasping Tonsor's unconventional notion of the reactionary, but my road-to-Damascus epiphany came when I could see the idea through his eyes as an Aristotelian.[3] If one sees the reactionary as a kind of physician in the Aristotelian mold, then the type makes sense.[4] The Aristotelian physician viewed diseases in terms of excesses or defects of elements in the body. Applied to politics, we see that the reactionary is an Aristotelian-like physician who seeks to restore the balance between the change element and the continuity element in a culture. Reaction is thus the cure for any disease of excess or defect in the body politic. It applied to the excess of liberalism (too much change) and to the excess of conservatism (too much continuity). When confronting liberals, the reactionary sought to reintroduce order in a society whose abuse of liberty had led to widespread disorder, anarchy, and licentiousness; thus the reactionary, seeing liberty abused, fought for order restored. When confronting conservatives, the reactionary sought to enliven the patient with an injection of reform that a dynamic society needs to stay healthy; otherwise the patient does not thrive.

Conservatism. Liberalism. Reaction. These three elements made sense in dynamic relation to one another and as part of the organic development of our civilization. Tonsor adopted the role of the Aristotelian physician. To preserve the West's humane order, the reactionary in him sought a balance between the liberal push for innovation and the conservative temperament for preservation. Thus the civilizational task of the reactionary-liberal-conservative to balance change and continuity was in no way ideological. From generation to generation the ideal is always evolving, always developing out of the tension between innovation and conservation. In his ethical critique of modernity, Tonsor's task was to discern the degree to which change and continuity were in right relation to one another.

I knew that it would take time fully to digest the meaning of these three concepts and their relation to one another. Tonsor's thought was not always easy to understand. His personal interactions were not always easy to navigate either, and in fact could get in the way of understanding his thought. As his colleague, fellow historian John Willson, observed, "Steve was often an enigma to me."[5] Willson's observation reminds me of a passage from Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"[6]

*     *     *

With the plane's descent, the nation's civic monuments disappeared from view, one by one. Then came the bump of the wheels skidding on concrete followed by the rapid deceleration that pushed me forward in my seat. Soon I would be afoot in the Imperial City.

________________________

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 247.
[2] Bernard Tonsor interview with GW, Jerseyville, IL, July 1, 2014.
[3] Ann Tonsor Zeddies correspondence with GW, January 26, 2015.
[4] Aristotle's father, Nichomachus, was the court physician to the king of Macedon.
[5] John Willson correspondence with GW, November 8, 2016.
[6] My thanks to Winston Elliott for this passage by Dickens.

Tonsor #10 -- Enlightenment and Liberalism

"Modernity is the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment is modernity," Tonsor proclaimed in his Shermanesque cadence from the lectern later that morning. "I exaggerate only slightly. In the second half of the seventeenth century and certainly by the first half of the eighteenth, Europe was seeing powerful new forces overtake the traditional thought and culture of Christendom. One of these forces, liberalism, was instantiated in the salons, writings, and reforms of the Enlightenment.

"I would like you to note two things. First, the Enlightenment was revolutionary. It was revolutionary because it would establish a competing source of authority in the European mind and thereby change the fundamental character of our civilization. Henceforward there would be not one source but two sources competing for intellectual and moral authority -- the ancient and medieval source of religious values that developed in Christendom, and the modern source of secular values that developed in the Enlightenment. The former was oriented to the things 'above'; the latter to the things 'below.' The struggle between these two competing sources of intellectual and moral authority would raise the pivotal question in the West's inner history: What should the relation between these two sources of authority be?[1]

"Note, further, that this shift in the fundamental character of our civilization did not follow the French Revolution but preceded it. Indeed, it was the Enlightenment that made the French Revolution and so many subsequent upheavals possible because men had already changed their minds. On our side of the Atlantic, John Adams made a similar point when he said the American Revolution had occurred in the minds of men at least a decade before any shots were fired. This point brings to the fore what I told you in our first class. Ideas have consequences. It is when men change their minds that other changes become possible. Our Marxist friends get it backward."[2]

There I sat in my chair, marveling at what my professor was saying. If we had been at the Met, Tonsor's intellectual dash in the opening minute of class would have been regarded as a bravura performance. The way he laid out "the pivotal question in the West's inner history" gave me the chemical fix I craved, the giddy frisson of discovery.  So, I thought, today's lecture[3] will be the Rosetta Stone, the sacred tablet that encapsulates Tonsor's take on the modern problem. We will see his fierce intellect[4] in all its brilliance reveal his intellectual task to understand modernity and his ethical task to confront modernity. In tandem these tasks comprised the civilizational mission of Stephen J. Tonsor.

Stirred with anticipation, I gripped my pen tightly and pressed down on my looseleaf paper with so much force it became crinkly. It was time to take a deep breath: Reverting to the days when I practiced Transcendental Meditation, I slowly exhaled my mantra to calm myself down.

Suddenly -- an intrusion. As Tonsor was saying, "Our Marxist friends get it backward," a woman with a longish ponytail walked up to the near side of the blackboard and wrote, in large chalk letters, "Learn or die." She coyly smiled at Tonsor, who was staring at her wide-eyed, then slipped out of the classroom. I had never seen anything like this display of audacity, certainly not before an old-school professor. We all wondered what would happen next as Tonsor walked to the end of the blackboard and scowled at her message. His face was red. "Yes," he growled, "learn or die." Just as he was about to rub out her words, he paused, put down the eraser, and said in a brighter register, "A wise one, she!"

We laughed. Her words would survive but she would not. Apparently she was dropping his class because we never saw her again. Tonsor returned to the lectern and resumed as if nothing had happened.

"You may have taken a survey course in Western civilization that has led you into error. If you were taught that the Enlightenment was a unified movement, then you have the wrong idea. Now, it is true: There were certain convictions that were found in virtually all the different manifestations of the Enlightenment -- in France, England, Scotland, Germany. Let us listen to the great intellectual historian and student of the Enlightenment, Sir Isaiah Berlin, tell us what elements the diverse strands had in common:

These were, in effect, the conviction that the world, or nature, was a single whole, subject to a single set of laws, in principle discoverable by the intelligence of man; that man was capable of improvement; that there existed certain objectively recognizable human goals which all men sought after, namely happiness, knowledge, justice, liberty, and virtue; that these goals were common to all men as such, were not unattainable, nor incompatible, and that human misery, vice, and folly were mainly due to ignorance either of what these goals consisted in or of the means of attaining them -- ignorance due in turn to insufficient knowledge of the laws of nature.

Moreover ... it was by and large believed that human nature was fundamentally the same in all times and places; local and historical variations were unimportant compared with the permanent central core in terms of which human beings could be defined as a single species.... Consequently the discovery of general laws that govern human behavior, their clear and logical integration into scientific systems -- of psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and the like [were central to the Enlightenment project].... [A]ll discoverable facts would, by replacing the chaotic amalgam of guesswork, tradition, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy, and 'interested error' that hitherto did service as human knowledge and human wisdom (and of which by far the chief protector and instigator was the Church), create a new, sane, rational, happy, just, and self-perpetuating human society....   

This is the noble, optimistic, and rational doctrine and ideal of the great tradition of the Enlightenment from the Renaissance until the French Revolution, and indeed beyond it, until our own day.

"What interested Berlin even more than the conventional view of the Enlightenment that students get in survey classes were the many important divisions within the movement. I shall give you three. (1) On the question of human nature, not every French Encyclopedist or German rationalist believed that man is by nature good, ruined only by the follies and wickedness of priests and crippling institutions like the Church. Voltaire, for instance, believed that man was quite possibly cruel by nature. (2) When it came to religion, some of the philosophes were devout theists, while others were militant atheists. (3) And when it came to politics, some championed enlightened despotism, others democracy. So the first thing to keep in mind is that the Enlightenment is not one theological, philosophical, social, political, and economic program.

"When I ask you about the Enlightenment on, say, the midterm examination, don't give me the bumper sticker slogans you learned in AP history or college survey. You must specify which Enlightenment, which thinkers, you are referring to."

*     *     *

"Recall how in our first meeting I said that ideas have power; they have consequences when men seize on them and act with the conviction that they are true. If you see how liberalism informed the intellectual and institutional life of the modern West -- if you also see the fierce reaction against liberalism in the modern age -- then you will be well on the way to understanding the last three centuries.

"By liberalism, I do not here mean the politics of Ted Kennedy. I have plenty to say on the politics of Ted Kennedy and his family,[5] but there is not enough time in our class to chase that rabbit down the hole."

Tonsor looked up from his notes: "For you city slickers who do not know, rabbits burrow in holes, and the allusion is to an early scene in Alice in Wonderland."[6] The sarcasm!

"The term 'liberalism' came into existence in the nineteenth century. It serves as a convenient device that intellectual historians use to identify a pattern of behavior and a habit of mind that are historically significant. Note that 'liberalism' is an -ism; that is to say, it is an ideology. Simply defined, an 'ideology' is a system of integrated beliefs, theories, and aims that constitutes a sociopolitical program. Every ideology expresses some deep desire in man to realize a good. Yet in the process every ideology ends up isolating one or two elements of human nature at the expense of others. Marxism, for example, responds to man's envy and desire for equality with others. When such an ideology ossifies into a sociopolitical program, it may capture something essential to the moment. But it becomes just another period piece, it fails to be universally applicable, and it falls into Trotsky's proverbial ash heap of history. Note this paradox about every ideology, every -ism. Every ideology seeks to order the human condition but does so at the cost of disordering some aspect of our human nature."

Those last words struck me and I wrote the sentence down carefully. It was the meat of the nut. It was why the Enlightenment inevitably involved an "endarkenment." Tonsor, again: "Note this paradox about every ideology, every -ism. Every ideology seeks to order the human condition but does so at the cost of disordering some aspect of our human nature."

Tonsor punched his critique of modern ideologies and -isms -- liberalism included -- with lines of verse by the poet, Walt Whitman:

     Do I contradict myself?
     Very well then I contradict myself,
     (I am large, I contain multitudes).[7]

"Now, the modern ideology of liberalism seeks to order the human condition. It is the modern instantiation of an older spirit of liberty that resides deep in the constitution of man. The liberal spirit is ever on the lookout to free the individual -- free him from oppressive authority, outworn customs, arbitrary rules, unfair regulations, and tyrannical taboos. It is premised on man's free will. It rejects determinism. Above all, it recognizes the individual's freedom of conscience, his decision to choose between right and wrong, his freedom to order his life as he chooses within the framework of the historical options available to him. As we shall see, it can also refer to the many misguided things individuals do to liberate themselves from an otherwise reasonable order. In short, liberalism tries to account for the sum total of decisions individuals make when they elect to diminish the realm of necessity and to enlarge the realm of freedom. It is thus no artifice or windy abstraction. It is grounded in historical evidence that strongly suggests the human preference for freedom. Again and again we see the instantiation of freedom in very concrete actions. I shall give you examples.

"Some ten thousand years ago, man chose to quit the paleolithic lifestyle and instead adopt the neolithic lifestyle. Beginning in Asia Minor, he made the decision to stop hunting and gathering in a Hobbesian state of nature, and instead to focus his energies on growing crops. By doing so, he was electing not to get up every morning wondering where his next meal would come from. I emphasize that it was a choice because there was nothing inevitable about the Neolithic turn. Man chose to diminish the realm of necessity imposed by hunger, and to enlarge the realm of freedom made possible by storing surplus food in ceramic pots and granaries. Of course, it was not a linear development. The neolithic era arrived across the face of the earth in fits and starts. It experienced setbacks during droughts and shortages caused by war and pestilence. Yet the point stands: Men apparently calculated that the net result of their preference for the neolithic lifestyle would yield greater liberty. The anthropological evidence shows that once the choice was made, man never voluntarily went back, en mass, to hunting and gathering."

Tonsor paused: "The deer heads mounted in suburban houses suggest that middle-class men miss the call of the wild. Apparently so do the intrepid hunters who travel up to Canada to experience the wilderness by shooting wildlife from a helicopter!" A few of the outdoorsmen in the class laughed.

"Some five thousand years ago, man chose to quit the neolithic lifestyle and instead adopt civilization. Beginning along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, he decided to build walls and provision armies. He apparently did so to diminish the realm of necessity: He sought to buy time before his death and avoid being enslaved in the first organized wars. So he chose to enlarge the realm of freedom made possible by greater security. I again emphasize that it was a choice because there was nothing inevitable about this turning point. Yet civilization spread across the face of the earth, from Sumer to Egypt to India to China to Central and South America. It grew in fits and starts. It experienced setbacks when city walls were breached and when armies invaded, but man apparently calculated that the net result of his choice would be greater liberty. The historical evidence shows that once the choice was made, he never went back voluntarily, en mass, to the neolithic lifestyle.

Tonsor again paused: "I know a few flower children who tried to do so back in the sixties, without success. Today they are all on Wall Street."

The students laughed at Tonsor's display of sarcasm.

"What we call Europe -- the westernmost extension of the Eurasian land mass with its numerous peninsulas and isles -- was a locus of the spirit of liberty. We see it in the democracy of ancient Athens and in the republic of ancient Rome. We see it among the Saxons in the time of Hengist and Horsa (as Thomas Jefferson was at pains to point out). We see it in the interminable struggle between church and state, as well as in the emergence of the medieval commune.

"Beginning in the 1300s and 1400s -- and gathering momentum during the Enlightenment in the late 1600s and 1700s -- the liberal spirit expanded into sphere after sphere of human activity. Men began to see increasing opportunities to diminish the realm of necessity and to enlarge the realm of freedom. In economics, politics, and society -- slowly but surely -- oppressive authorities were overthrown. Dead customs were cast off. Restrictive laws were repealed. Marketplace regulations were lifted. Social taboos were relaxed. All these developments were intended to free the individual from anything that oppressed, anything that kept him down. That impulse to free the individual from arbitrary oppression would always be the true north of the liberal spirit.

"At the dawn of the modern age, in the Renaissance, artists, writers, and men of intellect seized on the opportunity to diminish the realm of necessity and enlarge the realm of freedom. Beginning in the fourteenth century, clerics did a radical thing. They embraced pagan classicism at the inevitable expense of Christian scholasticism. In doing so they inadvertently raised paganism to the point that it almost rivaled Christianity. Now, these men were not apostates -- they regarded themselves as good Catholics. But their love of the classics of ancient Greece and Rome started an intellectual revolution within Christendom, a revolution that would legitimate two sources of civilizational authority where only one had existed before. To the Renaissance mind, the Greco-Roman classics spoke almost as much to the human condition as did Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. Because paganism was elevated, it rivaled Christianity as a source of authority. Men now had a choice in how they would mediate the two. This is the key to understanding how the Renaissance expanded freedom. Indeed, if Jacob Burckhardt's thesis is correct (as developed in his groundbreaking cultural study, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), then it was this freedom that emerged hand-in-hand with a radical new concept: the individual. Now Renaissance Man could publicly laud both the pagan hero and the Christian saint. Each type presented a model of human excellence. Each type generated its own criteria of human flourishing. Renaissance Man accepted both these models of excellence and held them in a state of tension. All the while the Church went along with the development. There was no Albigensian crusade to stamp the pagan ideal out, and even the popes went along with the new pagan humanism. Never before had Christendom given this degree of license to intellectual, moral, and spiritual freedom. You can now see how the Renaissance, by embracing two different sources of authority in paganism and Christianity, and by lauding two different models of excellence in the hero and the saint, became a dress rehearsal of the Enlightenment.

"In the early modern age, men also saw the opportunity to diminish the realm of necessity and enlarge the realm of freedom when it came to shaping their fundamental worldview. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the Age of Exploration, the Europeans' encounter with new worlds opened men's eyes to the proliferating variety of human cultures. Believers lost their innocence. Now they were aware of the possibilities of other worldviews. Were some truer than others? The resulting pluralism opened the way to an a la carte skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism on a scale never before seen in world history. To understand what I mean, I would refer you to a book that is often assigned by my colleagues, The Cheese and the Worms (1980), by Carlos Ginsburg. It is the true story of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller who was put on trial for his heretical musings. Contrast Menocchio's story to that of the more radical philosophes in the Enlightenment, men like Baron D'Holbach and Denis Diderot, who two centuries later could openly proclaim they did not believe in God. The taboo against atheism had been lifted. In the Enlightenment, freedom of conscience and of religion was dramatically expanding.

"In sphere after modern sphere, men willed themselves into greater states of freedom. The spread of freedom did not occur because of some abstract force of history. It was not Hegelian nonsense. Rather it was due to men making the choice, again and again, to be more free.

We see the spread of freedom in the new town charters, the new constitutions, the evolution of Parliament, and newly articulated rights. We see it in marketplace reforms and free labor contracts. We see it in the decline of arranged marriages as well as in the abolition of entail, primogeniture, and ultimogeniture. We see it in religious reforms and in many other concrete actions. To know this quest for freedom is to know the modern age in a major key. The Enlightenment was its spearpoint. None of this should surprise you -- we Americans know it well because the quest for liberty rallied the patriots of the American Revolution.

"Diminishing necessity, enlarging freedom -- these can be good things befitting the nature of man. 'Can be,' because when men enlarge freedom, they do not lose the need for order. Indeed, it is precisely when they enlarge freedom that they need to be attentive to order -- to what Tocqueville called the "habits of the heart." Such habits are formed by family life, religious communities, civil society, and participation in local politics. Think of these habits as part of a culture's unwritten constitution, which is the foundation of the written Constitution.

"Now, there can be too much of a good thing. Liberalism promoted freedom, but its individualism did not reinforce the moral and social restraints that are needed to sustain freedom.When man's freedom outruns his self-imposed restraints, when he has experienced the anxiety that arises from political anarchy and personal licentiousness, he feels the rage for order. Yes, the rage for order. Men will not tolerate chaos. It is not in our nature to tolerate chaos. Chaos has erupted in the modern age and this has provoked numerous reactions against liberty. We have seen chaos when men are uprooted from their traditional communities. We have seen it in the new industrial economy with its ant-heap societies. We have seen it in the wars of competing -isms, so many that fewer and fewer men knew what to believe. We have seen it in political revolutions, first in England, then in America, then in France -- and ultimately in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. What is Nazi Germany but the rage for order after the mounting chaos of World War I, hyperinflation, depression, and confusion in the Weimar Republic?

"Any questions?"

Oh, yes, there were questions, but before anyone could raise a hand, Tonsor seemed to want to plow forward. "Let's next consider rationalism," he said, putting one set of notes into a folder and removing another set from a different folder. As he scanned yellow ruled pages of handwritten notes, he stuck his lower jaw out. His face projected a bulldog determination.

____________________


[1] Stephen J. Tonsor credited Friedrich Heer with the above-below struggle at the heart of "Europe's inner history"; see Tonsor's essay, "Gnostics, Romantics, and Conservatives," in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 263-64. If the West's "inner history" created the tension between classical, medieval Christianity and the modern Enlightenment, an additional tension came about in the 1960s when both classical medieval Christianity AND the modern Enlightenment were overthrown by postmodernism, which rejected both the norms of faith and reason. Adding to the tension was the simultaneous rejection of Western worldviews and the adoption of non-Western worldviews such as Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, and other forms of Eastern thought. Today it is clear that our civilization's inner tensions arise from the fact that large parts of the population now recognize one of three authoritative sources. Nowadays there are Christians, scientists, and counter-cultural thinkers.
[2] Tonsor consistently emphasized how mental, moral, and spiritual changes preceded material changes. See his essay, "Gnostics, Romantics, and Conservatives," in Equality, pp. 266-67.
[3] My reconstruction of Tonsor's lectures is an amalgamation that combines (1) my notes taken during the lecture; (2) further research I undertook to prepare for his midterm and final examinations; and (3) later reading of Tonsor's essays, research in the archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and at the University of Minnesota, and interviews with those familiar with Tonsor's work.
[4] I am grateful to the intellectual historian Seth Bartee for this characterization of Stephen Tonsor as a "fierce intellect," conveyed in private correspondence, October 16, 2016.
[5] At the time Tonsor was giving this lecture, during the fall of 1987, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was leading the campaign in the U.S. Senate against Justice Robert Bork, who had been nominated by President Ronald Reagan to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Conservatives like Tonsor went on record to charge Democrats, who held the majority in the Senate, with being so hostile to Bork that they could not give the nominee a fair confirmation hearing. In the heat of the battle, conservatives coined a new verb, "to bork." To bork means to engage in relentless personal and misleading professional attacks against a judicial nominee to prevent the nominee's advance. Tonsor's public view was expressed as a signatory to Sidney Hook's letter of support of Bork in the Congressional Record, October 22, 1987, and October 23, 1987.
[6] See URL https://aliceproject4.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/down-the-rabbit-hole-what-does-it-mean/, accessed October 18, 2016.
[7] Excerpt from Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," 51, at URL http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/27, accessed October 24, 2016; quoted in Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," in Equality, p. 247.

Tonsor #8 -- 1505 Morton Ave.

She was standing at the front door with a warm smile and an extended hand. Already at hello, it was apparent that Caroline Tonsor was diametrically different from her husband. In physical appearance they were not at all like the cartoon of the married couple that aged alongside each other until they looked exactly alike. Quite the contrary. He was stocky; she was slender. He had short gray-white hair; she, long dark brown hair. His eyes were lighter, impatient, and discerning;[1] her eyes, darker, approachable, and kind.

I would soon learn that their personalities were as different as their looks. Where he came off as forceful and judgmental, she was soft-spoken and accepting. Where he was the know-it-all, she asked questions. Where he liked to sprinkle his conversation with something that surprised, even outraged, she was happy with quiet displays of wit. The differences between the two is perhaps best summed up by the fact that students, among themselves, always referred to him as "Tonsor," to her as "Caroline."

What with her down-home likability, I soon cottoned to Caroline. She looked to be about the age my mother would have been had she been alive. And because my parents had divorced, I couldn't help but wonder if the Tonsors' marriage were like so many between two diametrically different people who nevertheless made the union work.

Their two-story house was modest, with a living room and dining room that seemed typical of a wood-frame dwelling built around 1920. Caroline playfully called it their "summer cottage."[2] Whatever the main floor lacked in size it made up in warmth, owing to three things that worked in concert to give the space an outsized coziness. First were the wingback chairs on either side of the hearth. Great stacks of books and papers formed columns around the left chair. There was no question who sat upon that throne! Second was a Bach fugue playing in the background, which perfectly suited the home of a humanities professor. Third were the delightful sprays of flowers by the fireplace, at the front window, and on the dining room table. They spread sweet fragrance throughout the downstairs.

Caroline noticed me looking closely at a bouquet. "Gardening," she said, "is Stephen's magnificent obsession."

"No," Tonsor protested, "it's a maddening obsession. The weather quite literally almost killed us. It was an extraordinary summer of extreme heat and drought that did not break until mid August, when the blessed rains returned.[3] Up to that point we and the flowers were all wilting together."

Flowers filled the house.

Recalling the mention of grandchildren during the walk, I asked Caroline whether they got to see their children and grandchildren often. She told me that her oldest daughter had been visiting recently with her two children. One of them went to football camp; the other to band camp, at Interlochen.[4]

Tonsor added, "During the summer and on holidays our house is often full of children and grandchildren. They love the fireplace. I am certain that it creates part of the mystique of grandmother's house. Two things are my special province: the garden and the fireplace. To quote a line from Robert Louis Stevenson, 'Flowers in the summer, fires in the fall.'"[5]

"Yes," said Caroline, "and the fireplace always smokes. I suppose it does look mysterious!"[6]

Perhaps wanting me to feel at home, Caroline added that it had long been her husband's custom to invite students over for lunch.[7]

"Yes," said Tonsor. "Back in the sixties, Tom Hayden sat on that couch. He was improbably named, he told me, after St. Thomas Aquinas!" Tonsor waved off the thought as if he did not care one whit that Tom Hayden had sat on his couch.[8]

I followed Tonsor into the dining room. He moved a fat novel off the table to a nearby bookcase and motioned me to sit down. "I've been reading Trollope," he said. "His women are boring. He does an excellent job at depicting them but they are dull and trivial people. The only interesting ones, Lizzy Eustace and the Countess Neroni, are petty criminal types. Come to think of it, most of his men are dull and trivial, too."[9]

"Caroline, it looks as if you've cooked up a storm in the kitchen!" Tonsor exclaimed with much pleasure. We sat down to a hearty lunch, as he had promised: pot roast, potatoes, carrots. The surprise came when Tonsor poured me a glass of sherry. In a professor's house, that was a first.

*     *     *

After our fill of lunch and spirited conversation, Tonsor and I walked back to campus mostly in silence. Although the clouds seemed to lift a little, the air remained warm and humid.

Retracing our steps through Burns Park, I reflected on the fast start of my academic career at Michigan. On this first day of classes, it was not yet 2 p.m., and already I'd had the privilege of spending more than four hours with my graduate advisor and meeting his gracious wife who welcomed me to their home. I was eager to report their hospitality to my circle of family and friends. But as an introvert with two glasses of sherry in me, I was starting to flag. It was time to retreat into the labyrinth of Harlan Hatcher Library, where I could jot down insights from my conversation with Tonsor, prepare for my other classes, and tackle Cassirer in light of everything I had learned that morning.

Once back on the Diag, Tonsor broke the spell of our self-enclosed hike. He made an observation that revealed more about who he was. "I have been reading a doctoral dissertation written by one of your colleagues, Mr. Winnie."[10]

I wondered if Tonsor had drunk too much sherry: Winnie? My name is Whit-ney.

He didn't pause, and I wasn't about to interrupt. "At first I did not want to read it. It's long, it's the sixth dissertation from this past year, and I was supposedly on leave. But I must say it is quite fascinating. It is a history of the Cochin family, one of the great French Catholic families of the high bourgeoisie. The dissertation is based on the family archives made available by the present Baron Cochin. They were liberal conservatives, and the historian Augustin Cochin, who died in World War I, could probably best be called a reactionary. They are my kind of people."[11] With that arresting thought, Tonsor faded into the reflections of Haven Hall's glass doors.

So Tonsor was a "liberal conservative" who was happy to be called a "reactionary."[12] Confused? So was I. I knew that I'd eventually have to sort it all out during my study at U of M. But that would come in due course. For now I enjoyed feeling the warmth of the lunch.

__________________

[1] One of Tonsor's former students, who later became a close friend, said that the unsettling effect of Tonsor's thick lenses was to make him peer at you with "the two glass eyes of a fish."
[2] "Summer cottage" is from Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, June 16, 1980, p. 3; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery. "1920" is from Caroline Tonsor interview with GW, Chelsea, MI, March 15, 2017.
[3] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, July 25, 1987, p. 1; Tonsor to Regnery, August 3, 1987, pp. 2-3; and Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 1; all three letters are in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred S. Regnery.
[4] Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 1.
[5] Tonsor to Regnery, November 17, 1980, p. 1; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.
[6] Caroline Tonsor interview with GW, Chelsea, MI, March 15, 2017.
[7] During these same years, another great European intellectual historian was hosting weekly lunches for his graduate students. At Yale University, Frank M. Turner (1944-2010) took his teaching assistants to Yorkside Pizza near campus. See Frank M. Turner, European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche, ed. Richard A. Lofthouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), Kindle edition, "Editor's Preface," loc. 132.
[8] Tom Hayden died just weeks after I composed this conversation. See URL http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/tom-hayden-dead.html?emc=edit_na_20161024&nlid=30564708&ref=cta&_r=0, accessed October 24, 2016.
[9] Tonsor to Regnery, August 3, 1987, p. 3.
[10] Lawrence Hutchinson Winnie, "Aegis of the Bourgeoisie: The Cochin of Paris, 1750-1922," 2 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1988.
[11] Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2.
[12] Gregory L. Schneider, "Tonsor, Stephen J.," American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, eds. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), p. 862.