This is the fourth in a series of four reviews of Aurelian Craiutu’s Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals.
Tocqueville 21 Forum on Aurelian Craiutu, Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Review by Matthijs Lok, University of Amsterdam
Whereas almost all political scientists and historians study political radicalism in some form, moderation as a political topic is often overlooked. This is an odd lacuna as polarisation and radicalism cannot be studied by ignoring their contra-points. Moderates determine what radicals are, and vice versa. Aurelian Craiutu is one of the first scholars to systematically explore and analyze political moderation as a topic. Almost singlehandedly he created the new field of moderation studies through his masterful, well researched, and beautifully written works on the French doctrinaire liberals in the nineteenth century, moderate ideas in France in the age of Enlightenment and Revolution and, finally, in the twentieth century.
Craiutu, as most readers know, denies that moderation is a weak inability to choose sides or consists of an opportunistic or pragmatic middle way. Instead, he has convincingly argued that moderation consists of a long intellectual tradition that can be traced back to antiquity. For him, moderation is not a single homogenous doctrine, but an “archipelago” of ideas and practices. As he wrote in the volume The Politics of Moderation (Palgrave 2019), moderates are “staunch defenders of pluralism (of ideas, principles and interests) and believe in the importance of dialogue and reasonable compromise. They reject Manicheism and ideological thinking and embrace ideological trimming and political eclecticism (p. 240).” Moderates work hard to keep alive the common ground between competing factions and oppose extremism and fanaticism in all their forms. They believe in civility and self-restraint.
Why Not Moderation? can be regarded as a synopsis of Craiutu’s oeuvre to date. The form of the book is rather unusual: an imaginary dialogue between a somewhat stereotypical young progressive and conservative radical student and himself, the archetypal moderate. This literary form reminds one of the dialogues in the classical treatises of Plato and others between Socrates and his pupils, where Socrates provides insights by dialogue rather than lecturing. To be honest, I am not sure this form is suitable for its purposes, that is engaging with youth and activists. If the intended audience of the book is truly radical students on university campuses around the world today, a vlog or TikTok video probably would perhaps have had more resonance.
As I have personally experienced in my own teaching, courses on radical ideologies draw vastly more students than a lecture series on moderation (although the students who do attend are usually of a higher quality and are more motivated). Moreover, on campuses around the world, the intellectual climate is not favorable to moderation, which is described pejoratively as “bothsidesism.” The call for ‘moral clarity’ does not sit well with a pluralist and nuanced stance. Activists, the heroes of academia in the 2020s, usually are not known for their doubts and hesitations. In an increasingly polarized climate, moderate students (and their lecturers) find it hard to position and express themselves without being placed in one camp or another. Perhaps we must wait for another Thermidor in academic discussion worldwide for moderation to be embraced more widely.
Craiutu’s short book reminds me of the essay Dialogue on Politics (Politisches Gespräch), published by the German historian Leopold von Ranke in 1834 in the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift. This journal was founded in 1832 in Berlin in the polarized climate after the French July revolution by the Prussian minister of foreign affairs, Count von Bernstorff, “to defend the politics of the enlightened Prussian bureaucracy against the liberal critique of the Left.” The Zeitschrift existed only until 1836 and appeared irregularly. The increasingly polarized climate in the 1830s did favor a journal celebrating moderation and many potential authors refused to contribute out of fear for harming their own interests. Ranke’s essay also takes the form of an imagined conversation between, on the one hand, a worldly bureaucrat named Karl, and, on the other, a wise armchair philosopher called Friedrich. In the first instance, the worldly bureaucrat seems to have the upper hand. Karl personally supports the principle of juste milieu, exported from the French example in the 1830s, and exclaims that he does not want to belong to any one of the battling ideological groups. For Karl the main task of a government is to hold a balance of power between the warring parties. Friedrich, like Craiutu, however, is critical of Karl’s understanding of the idea of juste milieu as essentially the middle between two ideological errors and the view that the state consists of contrasting parties in which the government must strike a balance.
According to Friedrich, contrary to conventional wisdom, the truth does not lie in the middle: “From extremes, consequently, you will not be able to derive the truth. Truth, moreover, lies entirely outside the scope of error. You could not abstract it from all the phantoms of error taken together. You must find truth and behold it by itself, in its own sphere.” Craiutu and Friederich thus share the view that moderation is more than a pragmatic middle position between extremes views. However, Craiutu and “Friedrich” differ in their solution to this dilemma. Whereas Craiutu advocates pluralism, Friedrich sees the right middling-ness in a polarized society embodied by the German nation and the Prussian state. The comparison between this older work and Craiutu’s dialogue demonstrates that the writing of imaginary dialogues to advocate moderation is not a new phenomenon, although the solutions proposed by both authors differ radically, as we observed.
The strength of Craiutu’s work lies in his strong personal conviction of the positive value of the virtue of moderation. However, this belief also leaves him somewhat vulnerable. While he very articulately makes the case for moderation, he is somewhat less susceptible to the darker side of moderation. The negative aspects and hidden agendas of moderate rhetoric also need to be explored, even (or precisely) by scholars who personally are sympathetic to the virtue of moderation (and I count myself among them). One of the, for me, unexpected outcomes of the volume I edited with Ido de Haan in 2019 on the Politics of Moderation, was that moderate arguments could be used for a wide range of political agendas, including war and military conquest. Even fascists could imagine themselves as (economic) moderates, finding a middle way between communists and capitalists.[1] As could be observed in recent political campaigns in 2024, Ursula von der Leyen and Emmanuel Macron, to give two examples, posed as moderates in order to strengthen their position vis-à-vis their opponents and win elections. Moreover, socio-economic factors seem a bit absent in Craiutu’s dialogues. Is a certain measure of socio-economic equality not a perquisite for a successful politics of moderation that is legitimate and acceptable among large parts of the population? Moderate views should not be the privilege of the well to do, who are satisfied with their position in society, as they are too often. This socio-economic context remains in my view somewhat underdeveloped in his essay.
Why Not Moderation?, to conclude, is another beautiful island in Craiutu’s impressive and inspiring archipelago of works on the moderate tradition. The topic is ever timelier, both in the political arena in the Western world and beyond. But it is also a topic of scholarly and critical examination, Craiutu has shown the way for generations of future researchers from various academic disciplines such as philosophy, history, political science, and law. Only for him to succeed in his quest to disseminate moderate virtues to a younger generation, less inclined towards compromise and nuance and immersed in social media, he should perhaps have chosen a different medium than the Socratic conversation.
BIO: Matthijs Lok is a senior lecturer in Modern European History at the department of History and European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He was a senior fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advance Study NIAS (2019-2020) and recently held visiting positions in Göttingen and Leuven. In 2023 he published Europe against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment and the Making of the Past (Oxford University Press). He also edited volumes with colleagues on Antiliberal internationalism (Routledge: forthcoming), Atlantic Monarchisms (2 vol. Bloomsbury forthcoming), Cosmopolitan conservatisms (Brill 2021), The Politics of Moderation (Palgrave 2019) and Eurocentrism in European History and Memory (AUP 2019).
[1] Ido de Haan and Matthijs Lok (eds.), The Politics of Moderation in Modern European History (Cham: Palgrave, 2019).