Alexis Carré is the 2022-23 Thomas W. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate of the James Madison Program at Princeton University. His work deals with war and liberal democracy, and both are exactly what he joins the High Noon pod to talk about. Carré explains how, far from being too polarized, our politics have gotten too far away from the natural consequences of disagreement between citizens, and how the degradation of our discourse is more like dogs barking at each other from behind a fence than true enmity. Alexis and Inez also discuss how liberalism and mass democracy cannot evade fundamental and classical questions of governance forever.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. I am really happy to have my friend Alexis Carre on, did I say that right? Because-
Alexis Carré:
No.
Inez Stepman:
… there’s a language barrier always. He, however, has no such language barrier, even though his native language, his native tongue is French, he is fully conversant in our tongue as I am not at all in his. But Alexis is part of the 2022/23 Thomas W. Smith postdoctoral research associate. He’s part of that program, James Madison Program over at Princeton University that’s working under Robbie George. His work has dealt in the past with war and liberal democracy. He got awarded the 2021 Raymond Aron Prize for Research on his dissertation, which was entitled War and Law: The Refounding of Liberalism Against the Conservative Revolution in Leo Strauss and Raymond Aron, so he’s a political philosopher in the academy, one of very few allowed to talk about such serious subjects as politics and war anymore as opposed to 57 genders, so Alexis, welcome to High Noon.
Alexis Carré:
Hi, Inez. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Inez Stepman:
I mentioned in the last episode with Emily Jashinsky, your excellent piece over at Public Discourse about the political and what the political ultimately boils down to. But before we get into that discussion, one of the background things that I think is necessary for it is a German philosopher named Carl Schmitt, so could you maybe lay out that friend-enemy distinction that he became famous for and then we’ll move to your arguments in the piece.
Alexis Carré:
Yeah, just an element of context. I was answering to a piece by David Corey, which was essentially making the case that our politics is too Schmittian, that people polarization was essentially a product of Schmittism, the influence of the ideas of Carl Schmitt in our public discourse on both sides, on the left and on the right. It’s interesting because the argument he’s making in that piece is essentially the argument that Schmitt was answering to in the ’20s and the ’30s within the context of the Weimar Republic, that regime that was born out of the defeat of Germany after World War I, a regime that was chronically weak and that ended up collapsing under the pressure of the Communist Party and the Nazis winning that fight in the end.
What Schmitt was concerned with in that period was essentially what he saw as the excessive trust put by liberals into the power of norms and the prospects of a rule-based in international order. You know that, in that period was created the League of Nations, which is essentially an ancestor to the UN, the same League of Nation that failed to contain Germany once it was taken over by the Nazis.
Schmitt’s argument was, and I have to say also that Schmitt, after the Nazis came to power, joined them, but throughout the ’20s and the early ’30s, his argument was a much more ambiguous one, one that could be used by liberals in their struggle against these hostile totalitarian movements. The argument he was making was essentially that norms and all these abstract notions that we use to organize our mutual relations have a concrete and polemical meaning and therefore, that by ignoring those concrete relations that we have between ourselves in talking about the rules that should organize our collective life, we were essentially abstracting ourselves from important elements of reality.
That was especially important in the case of the Weimar Republic because one of the features of a certain conception of liberal democracy and liberal institutions is that electoral law, the organization of the state should grant equal chances of winning to all the rival ideologies and ideas that are competing within society. That’s something, for example, especially dealt with in his book that’s called “Legality and Legitimacy” that was published right before the Nazi takeover.
The argument he was making was essentially tailored to counteract the strategy that was used by the Nazis, which is essentially to use the rights that are granted on the basis of these very general norms with the purpose and the intention of actually subverting them. When you are devising norms that are indifferent to the intentions of the agents and the political agents and actors, you’re essentially, that’s the argument he made at least, subjecting yourself to the possibility that these intentions are hostile and therefore that these very rights can be used to destroy the regime that is founded on them.
The friend-enemy distinction is essentially an attempt at re-politicizing our experience of collective life by basically making the case that any normative system, a system based on general rules is actually based ultimately not on a higher rule, more general even for example, human rights, but on a decision, a decision that bears with it the possibility of a certain kind of order, a certain kind of concrete relation between the various elements of society.
That situation we mostly experience in periods of intense conflict, such as wars. Wars are situations where we are faced with the possibility or the decision, “Do we want to submit to the threat of violence or do we want to fight?” But in that case, “What do we want to fight for?” That forces us to ask the hard questions. For what purpose does our society exist? I think, to shift to the actual arguments of the article, that we have abstracted ourselves from such questions and my argument is that the kind of hostility that we display towards each other is not a case of enmity, it’s a case of self-aggrandizing abstraction.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I found that all of these questions are incredibly relevant, I think right now as we are similarly, I think the Weimar comparisons are often overdone historically. But one thing I do think is similar is we seem to have come to sort of a sticking point within liberal systems where you have such radically different normative visions of the good that people start to doubt that those kinds of abstract norms are able to actually capture the political distinctions that exist in sort of political life, as you point out.
There is this conception that David, Corey, the piece that you’re responding to, he’s putting forward, which is a quite common one, which is quote-unquote, “Our politics are too polarized.” In other words, to the extent that the friend-enemy distinction is relevant, it’s because we have forgotten that we must be friends. We’ve forgotten the bonds of civility between us and when we scream epithets at each other on Twitter, that this somehow shows that the bonds of our politics are too polarized, too political, and we need to get away from that back to some kind of civil norm.
Your argument is sort of the opposite. You’re saying the reason we can scream at each other is because fundamentally, we have forgotten that what politics is about at the end of the day, it’s a substitute for violence. Hopefully, politics works out because the way that human beings resolve their differences otherwise is through violence.
Alexis Carré:
Yeah. To take a trivial example, but most of us have probably seen dogs barking at each other over a fence, but they only do that because there is a fence. When things come down to actual action, it’s much more difficult to envision that the kind of rhetoric that we have would still be possible. I think, or at least the argument I’m making in the article is that the extremism in our rhetoric, both on the right and on the left, is only made possible by the very peacefulness of modern post-Cold War liberal societies.
It’s almost puzzling to me that you could make the claim that we are in a situation of absolute enmity in our society today when 50 years ago, an American president wasn’t sure to end this term alive because those things happened, people got murdered for political disagreements and those things were much more common than they are today, and yet we seem to live in a world of our own making by drawing these oppositions that are so stark and based on these absolute alternatives, either me or chaos. You find that not only to be sure on the questions that oppose the woke left and the new right. A much more general argument that is made very often today about environmentalism also rests on that kind of absolutist rhetoric. I do think it’s, to a certain level, much more a product of individualism and the atomization of society than a problem of opposing blocks within society.
Inez Stepman:
I think there’s a certain vision of politics, of liberal politics is having no underlying actual substantive assertions of the good where you reference the procedure as the right instead of the underlying. I think the right side of the political spectrum has a particular problem with this or at least sort of the old does. The best example of course, is David French and Sohrab Ahmari arguing about this a few years ago and david French continually pointing back to the norms of liberalism as the substance for which the right actually stands for. What we fight for is the freedom to speak freely, for example. Whereas even the liberal founders of the country would say no, we have a vision of the truth and what it is to be a free person and free speech is a procedural safeguard to get to the substance of that truth because for example, for procedural reasons, we might not trust the government to distinguish between truth and falsity or whatever, but we’ve seen those procedural things take over on the right as the substance.
Do you think that that kind of politics is tenable? How long do you think that kind of politics is tenable? And are we moving towards something, you say we bark at each other because we know the fence is there and ultimately, people aren’t willing to pick up arms over it. But how much longer? Because that seems to me to be sort of one-sided where the left is willing to use political power to carry out normative goals and the right seems reluctant to do that and I’m wondering whether you think it would be a good step or a dangerous step for the right to start essentially directly asserting substantive norm. I don’t want to use the word norms because it’s confusing but substantive-
Alexis Carré:
Principles.
Inez Stepman:
… for example, moral assertions into politics and legislate accordingly?
Alexis Carré:
I think it’s also the case on the left because if you look at the moral appeal of most of the policies that have taken over left-wing platforms quite largely over the West, the moral appeal they have on average voters, the argument you hear all the time is it’s not taking anything from you or it’s not doing you anything so why would you refuse that right to the persons that are asking for it? I think that kind of procedural individualistic politics is a defining aspect of our current situation. I don’t think it’s especially a problem on the right, even though it looks like the left is making a more substantive claim because it’s using institutions to enforce those new rights. But I think at the bottom of this, on both sides is the illusion that we can create collective government on the basis of the primacy of rights.
The thing that polarization makes visible is the extent to which as you said, we take for granted these institutions that are necessary to secure those rights, so much so that in claiming those rights, we come to use a rhetoric that is very strange, very odd. To external observers decades away from us, it will sound very strange that people would talk to each other in such a fashion to ask things from each other. It seems obvious to me that you can only use those words if you think the argument is so obvious and a matter of fact that you don’t actually need to convince others that it’s legitimate. To come back to Carl Schmitt, I mentioned the title of this book and it was all about that, the difference between legitimacy and legality. A certain thing can be legal, it doesn’t necessarily make it legitimate. Legitimacy is a much more evanescent concept, of course, and it’s much harder to pin down, but everyone knows vaguely what it amounts to.
For example, it’s not because someone was elected that everything it does sound reasonable, et cetera. When it does, it does seem to us that its rule is legitimate. I think that’s a nuance that we fail to capture today and that sort of structures the way we interact with each other. I don’t know if you were referring to this when suggesting that the right might make those normative claims or substantive claims about our collective life, but there has been a rising movement on the right sliding towards what is commonly called integralism, for example. I don’t think that’s a more credible platform to restore the kind of unity that we need if we are to govern ourselves. I don’t think it’s a project that’s able in the society that we have, to actually make people feel that political participation is actually a good worth exercising and protecting.
I’ve often heard, not often, but a surprising number of times, people with those ideas suggesting that the only political solution to their project is actually a partition of the US because they acknowledge that that project cannot raise the support of what’s the population? 350 million Americans? Unless you think it’s a good idea to partition the republic, it’s not necessarily a sound idea. But it doesn’t mean that there aren’t substantive claims, moral claims that cannot be made in the name of politics, and certainly, we increasingly lack the kind of civic virtue that makes liberal institutions work because what people often tend to forget, the illusion they live under is that pluralism, the diversity of interest and ideas, what used to be called factions when the Federalist Papers were written, only works if it counters the force that produces majorities.
Having factions in a population that doesn’t want to stick together is not going to produce the common good. The theory of factions by the founder was premised on the idea that people wanted to stick together and that therefore, we needed to protect ourselves from that powerful drive that could lead to tyranny. But in a society where people would rather live far apart, that isn’t like these liberal conceptions of politic actually cease to work. Most of them are premised on a strong idea of civic virtue, despite the fact that most liberal theorists today completely ignore that fact.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. It also implies the existence of, in this case, through and with many checks and balances and sort of balancing acts, but at the end of the day, it implies that there is a legitimacy to a majority making political, like capital P, political decisions, right? Maybe in a different system, it’s not democracy or a majority, it’s a king or whatever, but I agree with you that we don’t solve the problem of modernity by changing the system. It seems like there’s an underlying problem of authority and legitimacy when you don’t accept.
You said something earlier that I think is really right, which is that essentially these asks that we make on each other as a political community living together, right, a body politic, we’re not really making those asks anymore as though they could be refused. There’s no suggestion that those things can be legitimately refused. Whatever the mechanism is for that. Whether it’s democracy, whether it’s monarchy, whatever, there’s no acceptance that the body politic has the ability and the legitimacy to make moral claims at all and properly political claims at all. I sort of disagree with you, the left doesn’t. At least, a portion of the left. I think the post-postmodernist left is making those claims and that’s why you see that part of the left, while The Washington Post or whatever is howling about norms, you see parts of the left actively attacking and delegitimizing any of those liberal norms.
Do you think that some of that inability to get to what I mean, even before the enlightenment was classically called politics, the sort of meat and potatoes of politics, which was deciding on a good through some legitimate means and how you got to a legitimate means was itself the discussion between democracy or oligarchy or authoritarianism or monarchy, right? But that basic of politics, it seems to be connected that we essentially are ruled by bureaucrat, in large degree. It seems to me that a bureaucracy is a function, a method of ruling that necessarily drains a lot of the politics out of some of these moral questions.
To give a concrete example, and this one was about the courts, but I think it’s a similar function where it’s decided by predetermined procedural norms. When the court pulled the issue of abortion out of the body politic in 1973, it essentially said okay, well, this is no longer a political question. We are setting this outside of the political process in America that would be in the state level and basically through Republican representation. We’re pulling it out of that and we’re saying this is no longer a question on the table for that self-government, where one set of neighbors talks to another set of neighbors and says, “I want abortion to be legal,” and the other one says, “Well, I don’t want it to be legal. I believe it’s wrong,” and there’s some way of adjudicating that, it got pulled out of that process. It seems like there’s a lot of issues, whether it’s through the courts or through the bureaucracy, that that muscle of American self-government is incredibly atrophied on any questions of substance. Like we yell at each other over which sort of leader to elect, but on those questions of substance, there’s so few questions actually left to that adjudication of the political process that it’s hard for me to imagine a substantive politics in that sense.
Alexis Carré:
Yeah. I mean, once you understand politics to be based on the primacy of rights and therefore on the exercise of those rights and that you understand freedom to be nothing but the exercise of rights, what you mean is that no idea that I have about how I should live my life should be a sufficient basis for me claiming to exercise power and therefore give duties to others, which was the way politics, as you said, worked before the modern invention. That’s where another element of the article comes up, which was more developed in Corey’s essay, which is the problem of anthropology.
Because once you refuse to have a vision of the good life, you are still forced to think about what humans do. But you no longer ask the question, what should a good human being do? You’re forced to ask the question in very general terms because since any idea that I can have about ethics shouldn’t grant me any political power so if I want to actually think about institutions, I’m forced to ask not what I will do in given circumstances, but what men in general do. That’s where you have this strange thing in the history of political philosophy that philosophers start to ask the question, is human nature inherently good or inherently bad? Various philosophers have provided various answers to that question, but it all comes down to if you’re pessimistic about human nature, what you mean by that is that we need to have very constraining and powerful institutions to be able to live peacefully. If you’re very optimistic, you argue to the contrary. We need very little external constraints to be able to live peacefully.
But in both case, the claim you are making is that the goal of politics is peace at all costs. Peace understood as coexistence, so peace essentially without a moral order. Peace made possible by impersonal rules and institution that make people that have various ideas about ethics capable of not killing each other. I think that’s basically the kind of deep movement in the history of our political philosophy that led to the bureaucratic rule that you were hinting at.
It reminds me also of something you said in the previous podcast, or maybe it was the person you were interviewing, I can’t remember her name, about people no longer being able to talk to neighbors. One of the big innovations of political modernity is the emergence of nations. Most of what we understand about politics before modernity comes from the Greek city. The Greek city was essentially composed of as many citizens as one person can know by face. It was a very natural unit, about 20,000 people or a bit more, so citizens were essentially people who knew each other personally, even at a relatively low level, but at least knowing your face.
Nations can’t have that. You might know your neighbors, you might know a lot of people in the city you live in, you might know a lot of people in the state you live in. But our political condition is defined by a very important thing, which is we ignore, we don’t know most of the fellow citizens we govern ourselves with, which means that we can only get to know them at some level through discourse, through things heard and said about each other. That’s why we have a public discussion in a way that’s very different from the Greek assembly.
What we do in the media is not voting laws or making political decisions. We talk about things in a way as if our words don’t have consequences and I think that’s one of the metrics of polarization. The metrics of polarization is shouting insults at each other as if words didn’t lead to action. I mean, it’s something we can’t do without, because as I said, nations are very different political units than Greek cities, but it’s something we should be very mindful of because words do have consequences. If you don’t have that sense of civic unity, some restrain in the use of public discourse, I think you’re basically unraveling the whole fabric of what makes modern freedom to a certain extent, something worth preserving.
Inez Stepman:
There are two additions even to the sort of scaling up problems that you’re referencing from the city, the sort of classical political philosophy, the city to essentially mass, right? Either mass democracy, mass nationhood. That itself is quite new, as you point out. But even more so now, there’s the next level of the abstraction of the unit where now, we have international discourse and that has been helped along by the communication revolution that is the internet and before that, instant communication via phones. We can communicate with people who are not proximate to us in a very immediate way that was unthinkable even 50 years ago or a hundred years ago. I mean, how does that impact this aspect of, to use a new analogy as opposed to the two dogs with the fence in front of them, what you’re saying now is that we’re all like drunks in a bar yelling insults at each other, but sometimes you say the wrong thing and somebody smacks you in the face.
You’re saying we have forgotten that in fact, there are tangible consequences to our politics because we’ve abstracted so much away from this. But how is that all impacted by what I would say is the decline of the nation state in comparison to the ability to talk to people all over the world? Just one subset of that of course, is now we’re seeing in a lot of different countries, a sort of national level backlash to an international recognition between elites that they might actually have more interest in common with each other than they do sort of vertically within the nation. That a nation’s elites may have more in common with another nation’s elites in terms of interests than they may have in common with their, quote-unquote, national citizen brothers, right?
Alexis Carré:
It’s certainly the case that the communication revolution has aggravated to a large extent something that was underneath from the beginning. 50 years ago, you might have had any kind of politics, but most of the people you had to live with on a daily basis and work with and act with might be of a different mind, and so that connection to immediate and concrete circumstances of living and to a world of concrete action, I think tempered that potential for abstraction that is contained in modern politics. Certainly, social networks have basically provided us with a means to relate to people that are very far away and set ourselves against others that might be our neighbors, but again, in a very remote fashion that increases even more the likelihood that you will be tempted by extreme rhetoric. Behind the safety of your screen, it’s very easy to insult others.
I remember back in France when I was teaching philosophy, one of my students was from Chechnya and we were discussing between class and he made a funny comment, at that time I didn’t pay much attention to it, but he told me about a fight he had had in the streets here and he said, “Back home, people don’t talk like that to each other because they know that any word beyond the line might lead to a fight and a fight might lead to terrible consequences. But here in France, people, they’re very loose on what they tell each other.” Of course, no one wants to be like Chechnya, but I think it was funny that he would notice that aspect that is infused in our daily life, that we’re so sure that thanks to our institutions, we’re safe and that from being safe and not needing to seek peace because we have it, we can make grandiose claims to the world and demand that those claims be satisfied.
A lot of our politics is actually, I think, a substitute to actual conversation or actual collective action. We ask things in such a way that our discourse is not really addressed at our fellow citizens and equals. It is addressed at impersonal institutions that are tasked with satisfying our individual claims. But we wouldn’t talk like that if we were actually no, not in a position, but if we were actually under the necessity to make the case to people that are our equals that these things are good and I have a right to them. Sorry, I’m not sure I answered your question, I digressed.
Inez Stepman:
No, no, you answered the question. I was thinking as you were saying that, that there’s all these surveys both in Western European countries and it tends to be a little bit different. I’m sure it’s even more different in Chechnya, but as you go east and the immediacy of international politics and war becomes more real, and as we see now in Ukraine, of course, there tends to be higher numbers of this. But when you go to Western Europe or the United States and the US until recently, was pretty high numbers and then started to plunge. But you ask in surveys, would you be willing to fight for your country in a war? You see some astronomically low numbers across like Scandinavia, France, you get numbers like 23% or 30% of citizens say that they’ll fight for their country.
As you’re saying, on the national level, it’s also true on the international level that we’ve like forgotten that in fact, that the state of nature, of people is when they come up against conflict, whether that’s citizen versus citizen who have substantively different and opposing views of the good or between nation and nation with opposing interests, that actually the state of nature is that they fight in a very real and tangible way and one vanishes the other and imposes its will on the other who either gives up and surrenders or continues to fight until they’re all dead. That is actually the underlying state that we’ve layered all of these institutions and on the national level, what you would call discourse on top of it.
At the bottom of it is this reality on the national level, like let’s bring it back to the United States, that if you have a Catholic, person with a conception of what’s the good derived from Catholic doctrine, so teachings about the human person, what is ethical, what is unethical, what kind of behavior and then you have let’s say secular modernist atheist with a totally different conception of what the good and the good life and what is ethical, right?
At the end of the day, if you had a polity made up of let’s say 51% of these Catholics and 49% of the atheists, and they fight, they either fight with each other because they want to live substantively very different lives and in very different polities, or they essentially both agree to adjudicate those concerns through this institution mediating whatever it is, that they both accept the legitimacy of that institution, kind of like arbitration in law, both accept the mediating process so that we can adjudicate this. But what’s happened over time is we have such strong process in place that has brought an enormous amount of peace between people that we’ve forgotten that there’s an underlying fight. Is that kind of what you’re saying?
Alexis Carré:
Yeah. I think it’s always risky to confuse or forget that a certain organization or a certain concept works as a counterbalance to attention and to just assume that once the process or the organization works, the underlying tension has essentially disappeared. That’s essentially the assumption that’s made by progressivism. You find this phrase in Kant, that political moderni produces a good that once here, will perpetuate itself. When Carl Schmitt talks about anthropological pessimism, isn’t actually making a claim that is substantive about the evilness of human nature, is just reminding us that no amount of illusion about the progress of humanity can erase the underlying fact that all that can disappear by a snap of a finger if actual conflicts emerge and that the kind of societies that are based on these premises of a radical transformation of human nature that would make us all peaceful, that such societies are incapable of defending themselves because precisely, they have forgotten the kind of political possibilities that are contained in having a political life and especially conflict, of course.
Inez Stepman:
Forgetting about conflict perhaps, and there’s an implication in all of this, both in your article and what you just said, that the forgetting of these things can’t last forever.
Alexis Carré:
Oh, yeah because you chase nature, it comes back with a fork.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I know exactly the quote you’re referencing. You can chase nature out with a pitchfork and yet she keeps hurrying back. That’s Horace, yeah.
Alexis Carré:
You see my English is not so good, but-
Inez Stepman:
It’s been very good thus far. That’s why I told you privately, I’m really impressed. Obviously, I know people know many different languages and as an American, I’m probably overly impressed by that fact because we don’t do that because we have a giant country with no need to learn a lot of these languages on the border, but to talk about complex political topics is a different thing than having a conversation about ordering coffee. It’s just a different level of precision required. Go ahead.
Alexis Carré:
To come back to part of the discussion before, because I feel I digressed too quickly. You were talking about the asks we make on each other, I think, and then on that possibility of a secular party and a Catholic one part of the same political entity. I think, today’s politics is based on making a lot of asks for ourselves while being unwilling to make those asks from each other and duties are essentially that. You’re granted things as a private man or an individual because exists that collective that is making interpersonal claims that make such a collectivity possible. I think taking, again, the possibility of people committing politically in the name of their religion, I think it’s something that we should bear in mind in making such a community possible.
The kind of scale at which nations work, to a certain extent, doesn’t allow for the moral thickness and unity that you could find in the Greek city, and so there is a degree of, and even like to preserve freedom, as the founders talked about factions, there is a degree of diversity in ideas, opinions, and interest that is inevitable after a certain scale in human societies. But that doesn’t mean in any way that substantive demands couldn’t be made in the name of society if only for the preservation of it.
You were mentioning also earlier about the divide between elites and basically the nowheres, those who have no choice but to live where they live and they’re not part of the educated urban international class. I think it’s also part of that process of abstraction that people could think for a minute that they are part of some kind of elevated organism and living such a wonderful life without realizing that, especially now, given the instability that is coming back within the international system without realizing that the conditions of their status are very nation bound and that all the wealth you can have has actually no value unless it is secured by actual political power and that political power doesn’t exist beyond political sovereigns. We may have international institutions and they’re very useful in many contexts, but they only exist because certain kinds of relations exist between certain specific nations. Those things are very fragile.
Inez Stepman:
To wrap it up here, there are two concrete examples to take what you’re saying and bring them I think down to our recent politics, I can think of two. One, what you just described came home to a lot of people during COVID, especially people who had business contacts or even friends and family in different nations. All of a sudden with the global entry and all of that, the easiness of flying all around the world suddenly shut down and national borders became incredibly important again.
The second example I can think of is domestic, where CNN had to apologize to its angry viewers for actually, quote-unquote, platforming a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, because a lot of those viewers would like to forget that there’s an entire part of America that likes Trump. I think often, the left behaves this way. They act as though Trump supporters will disappear into the ether if they keep certain arguments out of the discourse or whatever else, they like don’t seem to grapple with the physical reality of millions of people who hold those views in the same country as they are. Those are two examples from our modern politics, I think of what you’re highlighting. But Alexis, where can people find more of your work before we wrap up here?
Alexis Carré:
If they speak French, they might go on the Figaro websites, there is a list of articles. But for English speakers, I’ve published in the National Review on foreign policy. For those of you who are bored enough to read academic articles, I have a piece out on Raymond Aron and the moral and political conditions of liberal democracy during wartime, which has been published in the Review of History of European Ideas and that piece on public discourse.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, it’s been interesting to figure out, now I really understand how the two halves of what you write about join together, so your work is on war and international relations, but it turns out there are a surprising number or perhaps which shouldn’t be surprising, number of insights to apply within nations as well and between citizens. Alexis, thank you so much for joining High Noon today.
Alexis Carré:
Thank you, Inez. It was a pleasure, really. Bye-bye. It was awesome to be here.
Inez Stepman:
Thank you to our listeners. High Noon Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or a review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
