The Virtue of Nationalism (Yoram Hazony, 2018)
Yoram Hazony’s foundational text for the National Conservatism movement; argues that the nation-state is the superior political form and that universalist (imperial) projects — including liberal internationalism and the EU — inevitably produce tyranny; won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Conservative Book of the Year award (2018); launched the Edmund Burke Foundation and the NatCon conference series
Core Argument
Hazony presents the political world as structured by a perennial tension between two organizing principles:
- Nationalism — governance organized around particular nations with shared history, language, religion, and culture; the tradition of the Hebrew Bible; Protestant political order
- Imperialism — governance organized around universal principles, seeking to bring all peoples under a single legal or ideological order; the tradition of Rome, the Catholic Church, liberal internationalism, and the EU
Hazony argues that imperial projects, however well-intentioned, inevitably suppress the particular loyalties that make genuine political community possible. The nation-state, by contrast, allows different peoples to govern themselves according to their own traditions. This is not relativism — Hazony believes some nations are better than others — but it is anti-universalism.
Significance for the New Right
The book gave National Conservatism an intellectual framework that was respectable enough for mainstream conservative conferences while providing cover for ethnic and religious homogeneity as political goods. Critics noted that the book’s celebration of the Hebrew Bible and Protestant Christianity as the basis for nationalism was difficult to square with pluralist or secular political orders.
The book attracted enough donors to fund the Edmund Burke Foundation and the NatCon conference series, which became the formal institutional vehicle for National Conservatism.
Cross-References
- Yoram Hazony — author
- National Conservatism — the movement launched by this book
- Edmund Burke Foundation — organization created in the book’s wake
- Paleoconservatism — earlier American nationalism the book implicitly rehabilitates
- Postliberalism — overlapping project rejecting liberal universalism