Luke Ford

Part Two

Yoram Reuben Hazony (b. 1964) belongs to a small group of contemporary thinkers who build not only books but movements. He writes philosophy, founds institutes, recruits donors, organizes conferences, and places himself at the center of a global ideological coalition. To assess his intellectual significance one must read both his arguments and the conditions under which those arguments acquired their reach.
He was born in Rehovot to parents who had come to Israel from the United States. His father Yehonathan Hazony (1932-2011), a physicist, soon took up a post at Princeton, and Hazony grew up between American suburbs and Israeli national life. Israel offered him a country still arguing over its founding categories: sovereignty, Zionism, religion, memory, the rights of minorities. Princeton offered analytic philosophy, Anglo-American liberalism, the legacy of John Rawls (1921-2002), and the Cold War defense of liberal universalism. He studied East Asian Studies as an undergraduate, founded The Princeton Tory in 1984, and went on to a doctorate in political theory at Rutgers. His dissertation studied the political teaching of the prophet Jeremiah. The choice announced his program. He treated the Hebrew Bible as a source of political philosophy rather than a body of religious literature subordinate to Athens.
In the early 1990s he served as an aide and speechwriter to Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949), then a rising opposition figure. The work taught him how political coalitions form and how a public language gets built. It also gave him a close view of Israel’s intellectual situation. Israel had no equivalent of the Anglo-American conservative magazines or the European center-right party intellectuals. Its right was electorally strong and intellectually thin. Its left held the universities, the courts, and the prestige journals. Hazony concluded that political durability requires elite-producing institutions, not only votes.
That conclusion produced the Shalem Center, founded in Jerusalem in 1994. Shalem combined a research institute, a press that translated Western philosophy into Hebrew, and in 2013 it became Israel’s first liberal arts college (currently presided over by economist Russ Roberts). Shalem trained Israeli students in the Anglo-American canon while attempting to recover Jewish political and philosophical sources. Hazony launched the Herzl Institute in 2012, which focuses on Jewish philosophical theology. By the late 2010s he had added the Edmund Burke Foundation, based in Washington, and through it the National Conservatism Conferences, which began in 2019. The career, read as a sequence, shows a man who long ago decided that ideas travel through institutions and that institutions require patient construction.
His scholarly project rests on a contrast. The dominant tradition of Western political philosophy descends from Athens and Jerusalem unevenly. Athens supplies the language of universal reason, abstract rights, perfect being, and rational consent. Jerusalem, in Hazony’s reading, supplies a different vocabulary: covenant, inheritance, loyalty, particular peoples bound by shared law and shared memory. Modern political theory, from Hobbes through Locke and Kant, draws on the Athenian register and treats the Hebraic register as religious decoration. Hazony’s lifelong argument, set out across his books, holds that the Hebraic register contains a coherent and superior account of how political communities form and sustain themselves.
The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (2012) makes the case in philosophical terms. Hazony argues that the Hebrew Bible is a work of political and moral philosophy. The biblical God is no abstract Perfect Being. He acts in history, responds to human choices, binds Himself to a particular people through covenant, and reveals truth through narrative rather than syllogism. Knowledge in the biblical mode comes through experience across generations. Wisdom accumulates. It cannot be deduced. Hazony reads Jeremiah, Genesis, Samuel, and Kings as offering arguments about kingship, prophecy, law, exile, and national survival that compete with anything in Plato (c. 428-348 BC) or Aristotle (384-322 BC).
The political extension of this Hebraic empiricism appears in The Virtue of Nationalism (2018). The book reframes modern political conflict as a struggle between two rival visions of order. The first is a world of independent nations, each governing itself according to its own traditions. The second is recurring imperial ambition, the attempt to impose one law, one creed, one administrative system on diverse peoples. Hazony places the European Union, the post-1945 liberal international order, and the universalist rights tradition on the imperial side of this divide. He places the Hebrew Bible, the Westphalian settlement, the Anglo-American common law tradition, and modern Zionism on the national side.
The argument has three moves. First, the historical claim: that the worst political evils of the modern age, including the totalitarian projects of the twentieth century, stem from universalist ambitions to remake humanity according to a single template.
Second, the philosophical claim: that abstract universal rights are constructions, not discoveries, and that political communities cohere through inherited loyalties rather than rational consent.
Third, the normative claim: that nationalism is morally good because it preserves human plurality, protects local self-government, and grounds political obligation in concrete relationships. The empire flattens. The nation distinguishes. The empire issues edicts from a center. The nation argues with itself in an inherited language.
Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022) extends the project from political philosophy to genealogy. He distinguishes the Anglo-American conservative tradition tradition from a rival Lockean liberalism that he argues took over American conservatism in the mid-twentieth century and hollowed it out.
The book also has an autobiographical chapter where Hazony writes about marriage, large families, religious observance, and the costs of liberal individualism for the cultivation of children and the transmission of tradition.
Several tensions run through the project.
The first concerns the Anglo-Hebraic synthesis. Hazony reads the American founding as a Hebraic-Burkean settlement rather than a Lockean one. Critics across the political spectrum have argued that this account underplays the Lockean and natural-rights vocabulary at work in 1776 and 1787. The Declaration of Independence speaks the language of self-evident truths and inalienable rights. Hazony either has to read this language as a thin overlay on a substantively Hebraic-customary order, or he has to concede a Lockean strand he prefers to minimize.
The second tension concerns the diaspora question. Liberal universalism, with its talk of universal rights independent of religion or ethnicity, served Jews well across two centuries. Emancipation, civil rights, equal citizenship, the dismantling of legal antisemitism: these owe much to the abstract universalism Hazony treats as suspect. His bet, in effect, is that Jews are now safer in a world of nationalist regimes that recognize Jewish nationhood than in a world of universalist regimes that treat Jews as one tolerated minority among many.
The third tension concerns interstate order. A world of sovereign nations governing themselves needs some account of how they cooperate, restrain themselves, and resolve disputes short of war. Hazony’s writing on this is comparatively thin. He treats supranational institutions with suspicion bordering on contempt. Yet pre-1914 Europe was a world of sovereign nations and it produced the worst military catastrophe to that point in human history. The challenge is to give a serious account of what stable peace among nations requires.
The fourth tension is harder to name. Hazony’s coalition stretches from religious traditionalists to economic nationalists, from American Catholics drawn to integralism to secular populists worried about migration, from European post-liberals to Israeli religious Zionists. The shared enemies are clear: the European Union, progressive cultural authority, transnational managerial elites, the post-1989 liberal consensus. The shared affirmations are less clear. The coalition holds together so long as the enemies feel more threatening than the internal disagreements. When the alliances begin to strain, the architect has hard choices to make.
The events of 2025 and 2026 have brought those choices into the open. The American populist right has produced a string of antisemitism controversies, most visibly through Tucker Carlson (b. 1969), Nick Fuentes (b. 1998), and the spread of anti-Jewish content across the right-wing podcast world. Hazony’s response has been complicated. In late January 2026, at the Second International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, he gave a keynote condemning Carlson’s program in strong terms, calling it a circus of anti-Jewish propaganda. In the same speech he argued that mainstream Jewish organizations had failed to make the case against Carlson with sufficient skill, charging the “anti-Semitism-industrial complex” with incompetence. He called for a fifteen-minute video assembling the evidence.
His former spokeswoman Orit Arfa published an essay in Tablet days later. She wrote that she and other Edmund Burke Foundation staff members had assembled exactly such an explainer, fourteen minutes and fifty-seven seconds in length, and that Hazony had kept it unlisted in an obscure account rather than release it. The essay broke publicly with him and accused him of erasing the work of his employees. The episode placed him at an uncomfortable intersection. He had built a coalition that includes the figures whose audiences are now consuming antisemitic content. He needs the coalition. He also needs to oppose the antisemitism. The speech tried to do both at once and satisfied neither side. Several Jewish conservative writers, including Gabriel Schoenfeld at The Bulwark, charged him with absolving the Republican right at the expense of the Jews who built the case against Carlson.
The moment exposes a structural problem in the national-conservative project. A politics of inherited national community offers no neutral procedural ground from which to defend minorities when the inherited community turns against them. Hazony’s reply across his career has been that strong nationalism produces room for Jewish particularism. The American situation in 2026 puts that thesis under field test.
The fifth tension concerns biology. Hazony treats the nation as an inheritance of language, religion, custom, and historical memory. He writes as though cultural transmission carries the full weight of national continuity. The biological substrate stays out of view. Yet his project depends on the assumption that nations remain durable across generations, that they resist dissolution into universal mush, that imported populations cannot be assimilated quickly or perhaps at all without harm to the receiving order. The cultural account alone struggles to carry that weight.
Behavioral genetics has produced four decades of evidence that traits like cognitive ability, time preference, impulse control, and personality run high in heritability and stable in their population distributions. If those traits sit downstream of biology to a substantial degree, then no amount of civic instruction remakes a population in one or two generations. The malleability premise shared by liberal universalists and culturalist nationalists alike comes under pressure. Hazony needs the premise to fail. He cannot say so.
To name the genetic constraint places a writer in the company of Charles Murray (b. 1943), Steve Sailer, Amy Wax, and Nathan Cofnas. That company carries professional and reputational costs Hazony has spent his career avoiding. His project sits in the respectable wing of national conservatism, hosted at universities and policy institutes, courted by senators and prime ministers. The figures who make the heritability argument openly sit outside those rooms. Hazony wants the political conclusion that flows from limited malleability without the social cost of arguing for it.
His readers feel the gap. The audiences drawn to national conservatism include many who suspect the universalist anthropology is false and who quietly read Murray, Sailer, or Cofnas. They take Hazony’s customary nationalism as the polite surface of a harder argument running underneath. Whether he intends that effect or resents it, the structure of his rhetoric leaves room for it.
Hazony picks public fights happily. He names Hayek, Buckley, the fusionist establishment, Bret Stephens, the progressive Jewish institutional world, and a long roster of liberal theorists. He seems to enjoy the combat. While he condemns racial determinism, he does so in broad, general terms without naming prominent hereditarian thinkers. His heart isn’t in the fight.
Several forces operate together, and they pull the same direction.
Coalitional cost comes first. NatCon needs Jewish donors, evangelical allies, Catholic populists, and working ties with Heritage, Claremont, and the respectable conservative apparatus. Engaging Charles Murray, Richard Lynn (1930–2023), Arthur Jensen (1923–2012), or Nathan Cofnas by name requires a fight on their data. Win or lose, the engagement legitimates them as serious interlocutors. The tent cannot afford that.
Terrain matters next. Hazony trained as a political theorist and biblical scholar. Behavioral genetics and psychometrics are foreign country. A named engagement with Cofnas or Murray drags him onto ground where he might lose on facts.
Buckley purged the Birchers by name once and let the principle do the work afterward. Hazony skips the naming step and goes straight to the principle. Naming creates martyrs and forces a public debate about underlying claims. Principled exclusion accomplishes the same exile without the debate. The figures stay outside the tent and the data stays unexamined.
NatCon offers covenant, loyalty, tradition, religion, history, mutual obligation. Hereditarian nationalism offers kinship, genetic interest, ethnic continuity. Both can produce nationalism, and they sometimes produce the same nationalism by different routes. Direct engagement reveals the family resemblance and risks contamination. Hazony needs the covenantal frame to read as the only respectable nationalism on offer, which requires keeping the rival frame nameless and fringe.
Cofnas argues the right cannot answer disparate-impact arguments without hereditarian premises. If group outcomes differ for partly genetic reasons, structural-racism claims lose their force. Hazony’s answer is that the disparate-impact framework should be rejected on covenantal and traditional grounds. The answer holds together only as long as he does not engage Cofnas. Direct engagement might force him to address the empirical claim that left-wing premises about equal innate ability are false. The moral argument is easier to make than the empirical one is to refute.
Hazony’s role is the philosopher who recovers biblical-Anglo-American conservatism and builds a respectable nationalist tent. The hero who debates hereditarians is a different hero, the truth-teller against pieties. The two heroisms compete for the same conservative intellectual audience. Hazony keeps the field by refusing to share the stage.
The Jewish case sharpens the problem. Jewish peoplehood in halakhic terms runs through matrilineal descent. The Israeli Law of Return takes Jewish ancestry as a basis for citizenship. Hazony stands inside a polity that operates on a principle his framework cannot defend in the open.
The Jewish Agency exists to bring Jews home. Birthright pays for young Diaspora Jews to visit. The Chief Rabbinate controls conversion inside Israel and rejects most applicants. Marriage in Israel runs through religious courts; a civil marriage cannot be performed on Israeli soil. Mixed marriages happen abroad and get registered on return. The state takes inherited Jewish identity as a real category and builds its civil law around it.
Population genetics has confirmed the descent claim with hard data. Studies by Doron Behar, Harry Ostrer, and others document shared ancestry among Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi populations. The Cohen modal haplotype appears in roughly half of self-identified kohanim across communities separated for two thousand years. Studies show that Ashkenazi mean IQ runs around 110 to 112 and that this distribution, combined with other heritable traits and urban concentration, accounts for much of the Jewish overrepresentation in cognitively demanding fields. These results circulate openly in Israeli and Jewish American discussion. They feature in mainstream coverage and synagogue education programs. The same category of finding about other groups receives a different reception. Hazony has not needed to defend the genetic side of Jewish peoplehood because his own community treats the data as unremarkable.
Cofnas complicates the picture from the diaspora side. He attacks the MacDonald (b. 1944) accusation that Jews preach universalism for gentile countries while practicing separatism at home. The Pew 2020 study shows 72 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews who married after 2010 have a non-Jewish spouse, while the Orthodox marry in at 98 percent. The intermarriage rate among children of intermarried parents runs 82 percent. By the Reform movement’s own analysts, three quarters of newly formed American Jewish households are interfaith. The Reform Jewish establishment promotes intermarriage and interracial conversion as a stated priority and treats the racial diversification of the Jewish community as a major goal. Felix Adler, the German-born American Reform Jewish thinker who founded Ethical Culture, said the Jewish race should die through assimilation once it had completed its mission of spreading monotheism. The argument has run for over a century inside Reform Judaism that Jews should universalize themselves out of existence. The 2020 data shows the argument winning.
The result splits world Jewry into two camps pulling apart in real time. The Orthodox and the Israeli political establishment operate on halakhic and statutory descent and reproduce above replacement. The Reform and secular American mainstream operates on universalist principles and dissolves at 72 percent intermarriage and rising. Hazony belongs to the first camp and writes for a coalition that includes the first camp. His American Reform critics, who make up most of organized American Jewry now, do not apply descent-based nationalism to their own community. They apply it to Israel as a special case and apply universalism at home, and the home community is going away.
The Anti-Defamation League illustrates the move that holds the two camps together. The ADL opposes immigration restriction and replacement language in America while opposing a one-state solution that turns Israeli Jews into a minority. Cofnas treats this as the strongest case for Jewish hypocrisy that MacDonald has ever built, and then defends the ADL as non-hypocritical. The ADL does not treat Jewish as a race. The ADL says Israel exists as a haven for a persecuted religious minority. The ADL lobbies the Israeli government to accept African refugees and promotes Jewish religious pluralism inside Israel. The ADL operates on something close to Hazony’s official framework: nations as cultural and historical, Israel as special because of persecution. The accusation of hypocrisy fails on this framework. It succeeds only if you insist that the underlying logic of Israeli citizenship law is descent rather than culture and persecution.
The descent logic is the operating principle of Israeli citizenship law. The Law of Return runs on descent. The Chief Rabbinate runs on halakhic descent. The Jewish Agency runs on descent. The public theory says cultural inheritance plus refuge from persecution. The civil law says grandparent clause modeled on Nuremberg. The ADL maintains the gap. Hazony maintains the gap. Cofnas does not address the gap.
Hazony’s American allies cannot reproduce the Israeli arrangement at home. An American who proposed a Law of Return for descendants of the colonial settlers, or who said the United States should restrict immigration to maintain Anglo-Protestant founding stock, or who argued the nation has a biological core that mass immigration dilutes, faces immediate expulsion from respectable institutions. The phrase “blood and soil” carries the charge of Nuremberg. The phrase “Law of Return” does not, even though the second statute inverts the first. A French intellectual who treats French identity as ancestral runs into the same wall. A Hungarian writer can say more than a German one, and a German one almost nothing. Israel sits at the top of the permission scale. The American conservative sits near the bottom.
Cofnas shows the cost. He is Jewish, he writes from inside a Jewish intellectual frame, he makes the heritability argument, and Cambridge forced him out for related claims about hereditarianism and group differences. The Israeli philosophy journal Philosophia, which had published a MacDonald reply to him, retracted the reply under pressure. The editor-in-chief lost his post.
This creates a coalition problem Hazony does not address. The American Catholic integralists, the Evangelical post-liberals, the secular populist writers, and the European national conservatives who attend his conferences look at Israel and see a model. They cannot reproduce the model at home. They cannot even articulate the model at home. They develop a workaround: cultural nationalism, civic nationalism, common-good constitutionalism, anything that gestures at inherited community without naming descent. Hazony provides the theoretical cover. His books treat the nation as cultural-customary inheritance, which is the version the American can repeat in public.
Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and the constellation of online figures around them have noticed the gap. The accusation runs: Diaspora Jews lecture us about the dangers of nationalism in our countries while supporting a Jewish nationalism abroad that operates on the principles they tell us we cannot use. Cofnas rebuts the accusation in its strong form. Most Diaspora Jews are not separatists.
Hazony cannot answer the observation because the framework he has built cannot answer it. He could say Jews are a special case because of two thousand years of persecution culminating in extermination. He believes that. But the answer concedes that descent-based nationalism is sometimes legitimate, which opens the question of when, and who decides. He could say every nation has the right to its own form, and the American form is civic rather than ancestral. But this contradicts his Burkean theory of inherited community, which sounds closer to the Israeli arrangement than the American one. He could say the Jewish form does not depend on blood at all, conversion is open, peoplehood is cultural. The halakhic and statutory facts contradict him.
The asymmetry sits inside the coalition unaddressed because no answer holds. The framework needs a theory of when descent-based nationalism is legitimate and when it is not, and the theory cannot be constructed without either elevating Jews to a unique category, which destabilizes the coalition on different grounds, or extending the same legitimacy to other peoples, which produces conclusions Hazony will not sign. Cofnas pushed the genetic argument further than Hazony permits himself, and Cambridge cast him out. Hazony watched the expulsion and did not defend the man. The reader notes the silence and draws the lesson.
Hazony doesn’t spend much time attacking antisemites (there’s no commandment in Torah to fight antisemitism). Instead, he reserves his sharpest polemics for Jews inside the gate. In The Jewish State, he attacks Martin Buber (1878–1965), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Hans Kohn (1891–1971), and Judah Magnes (1877–1948) as Zionism’s internal saboteurs. In The Virtue of Nationalism and across the National Conservatism project, he aims at liberal elites, secularizing Jews, post-Zionists, and Reform Judaism.
The pattern has several sources.
Coalition logic comes first. Hazony builds a transnational traditionalist alliance with Christian conservatives, Catholic integralists, Hindu nationalists, and post-liberal philosophers. Attacking external antisemites costs him nothing inside that coalition but earns him nothing either. Attacking internal Jewish liberals defines the boundary of his coalition and tells his Christian allies who counts as a serious Jew worth taking seriously. Internal enemies do coalition-defining work.
Hero system threat comes second. Hazony’s hero system is an Orthodox-flavored Zionism rooted in Hebrew scripture and national tradition. Liberal Jews offer Jews an exit from that hero system. Antisemites push Jews back toward it. The internal critic is the deeper threat because he offers an alternative path that competes for the same souls. The external enemy confirms Hazony’s frame.
Alliance hazards come third. His American allies include figures with uncomfortable proximities to antisemitism. Some NatCon speakers and adjacent voices have flirted with Holocaust revisionism, with “Christ is King” trolling, with replacement theory. If Hazony made antisemitism his primary target, his coalition fractures. So his polemic shifts toward targets that pose no risk: Reform rabbis, Tikkun Olam Jews, J Street, secular Israeli academics, the New York Times.
Market positioning comes fourth. The American Jewish establishment produces vast quantities of anti-antisemitism content already. ADL, AJC, the Federation system, Bari Weiss (b. 1984), the Tikvah-adjacent press. Hazony adds little by joining that chorus. He distinguishes himself by attacking those organizations as compromised by liberalism.
Psychic stakes come fifth. The internal critic wounds identity in a way the external enemy cannot. The antisemite hates Jews for being Jews and confirms the boundary. The assimilated liberal Jew suggests the boundary is optional. To a nationalist sensibility, the second figure cuts deeper.
A nationalist who fears assimilation more than pogrom tells you something about where he thinks the Jewish people lose itself. For Hazony, the answer sits closer to home than across enemy lines.

The Five Strands of Nationalism

Every functioning nationalism runs on five strands at once: blood, soil, faith, custom, and creed. Blood is descent and biological inheritance. Soil is territorial attachment and the particular landscape. Faith is the religious tradition that consecrates the people. Custom is the language, manners, food, family forms, work habits, and everyday rituals transmitted across generations. Creed is the explicit political and moral commitments the people takes itself to embody. No real nationalism runs on one strand alone. The American Founding generation were Anglo-Protestants who inherited English liberty and English Protestantism, settled American land, and committed to a republican creed. All five strands were present and integrated. The same holds for every nationalism that has held a polity together for more than a generation.
What changes across cases is not the presence of the strands but which strand the public theory foregrounds. The choice is strategic. The surrounding moral climate sets which strands a writer can name. A Christian nationalist in America leads with faith and custom because the blood strand is unspeakable in public. A civic nationalist leads with creed because creed is the strand that polite society rewards. A cultural nationalist leads with custom and inheritance because it’s convenient. An ethnic nationalist leads with blood and accepts the social cost.
Almost every right-wing intellectual I know privately accepts the Charles Murray-Steve Sailer perspective on group differences in IQ. I suspect that Hazony does so as well. He stands inside an Orthodox Jewish framework that defines membership through the body.
For him to hold the strict cultural-customary position with no blood strand operative in his private thinking, he must be an extraordinary outlier inside his own community, his own theoretical tradition, and his own intellectual class. Possible, but unlikely. The simpler reading is that he holds something close to the standard view of educated Zionists, which assumes a biological substrate to Jewish peoplehood and treats the cultural-customary frame as the public-facing layer rather than the whole story.
Hazony’s national conservatism is the maximum nationalism he can put in public. The view he holds privately likely sits a few clicks past it in the direction of blood and inheritance. The exact distance between the public framework and the private view is a question for biographers who can read his letters and listen to him talk in Hebrew at his own Shabbat table.
The hidden strands of nationalism keep operating regardless of public performance. A creed-first nationalism still depends on a population that reproduces, a territory that holds, a customary inheritance that transmits the creed across generations, and a religious or quasi-religious account of what makes the creed binding. Strip out the other four strands and the creed has no carrier. Pure civic nationalism has never held a polity together for long anywhere it has been tried. The creed-first description is the polite story a nation tells once the other strands are already in place and doing the work.
Walker Connor (1926-2017), the political scientist who spent his career on this question, argued that all durable nationalisms are ethnic at their root and that civic framings are public-relations decisions taken by nations that already have the ethnic substrate. Eric Kaufmann (b. 1970) makes the related case in Whiteshift, which Cofnas cites, that ethnic majorities are now reasserting majority identity politics under various civic and cultural covers because the direct ethnic frame is closed off. Anthony D. Smith (1939-2016) showed that even the most apparently civic nations have an ethnic core, an ethnie, that supplied the original carrier population and continues to do most of the cultural transmission. Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026) proposed the cleanest pure-civic alternative, Verfassungspatriotismus or constitutional patriotism, as a postwar German solution to the problem of belonging after Nazism. The proposal has produced essays and conferences and no functioning polities.
Hazony promotes nationalism, which has blood and soil and faith and custom and creed in it, and he chooses which strands to put on the public surface. The choice is rational under the constraints he faces. The customary frame is the strand his audience can hear. The descent strand stays operative inside the Law of Return, the Chief Rabbinate, the Jewish Agency, and the halakhic definition of who is a Jew. He does not need to name it. The institutions name it for him by their existence.
His American allies face a tighter palette. They have access to creed, faith, custom, and a thin version of soil. The blood strand is closed off. They make do by emphasizing the available strands and trusting the hidden ones to do the rest. Christian nationalism is the most flexible of the available frames because faith can carry custom, soil, and creed at once and can imply blood without naming it. Civic nationalism is the safest frame and the emptiest. Cultural nationalism is the Hazony-style middle position. Each frame is a strategic vocabulary, not a description of a different underlying phenomenon.
The asymmetry inside Hazony’s coalition is not between his nationalism and his allies’ nationalism. They are running the same five-strand machine. The asymmetry is in which strands they put on the surface. Israel can put descent in the statute book and call it haven-from-persecution theory. America cannot. France cannot. Hungary partly can, and Germany cannot. The same machine, different ventilation systems. The coalition holds when the members agree to respect each other’s permitted vocabularies. It strains when one member, like Carlson, decides the permitted vocabulary lies about what is running underneath.
Paul Gottfried reviewed The Virtue of Nationalism in 2019:

Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony has produced a book on the merits of nationalism that is well worth reading. Hazony treats the development of nation-states in early modern Europe as one of the unique, invaluable accomplishments of the West. Moreover, Hazony, who is a proud Israeli Jew, recognizes the value of ethnic and cultural identity in providing cohesion and meaningful self-government to societies throughout the world. It is not “diversity” but homogeneity, as the German political theorist Carl Schmitt pointed out, that distinguishes self-governing peoples from empires. In the absence of a sense of the nation generated and sustained by shared ancestry and shared history, countries become a battlefield for contending ethnicities that require an iron hand to prevent continuing civil strife. The only apparently less coercive alternative, which has come with the expansion of the modern managerial state, is a pervasive form of social engineering. This is intended by globalist elites to “sensitize” majority populations and to render them more accepting of ethnic and lifestyle minorities…
Hazony at least intermittently gives the impression of throwing together all empires and imperialists into one undifferentiated heap; thus he lists as seemingly related evils neoconservative megalomania, the imperial overreach of the EU, and such creatures of the past as the British, Roman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires…
Kudos to Hazony and the German philosopher Hegel for explaining that the nation-state may be the best political means for reconciling freedom and order…
It pays to look at the context in which supranational governments have functioned to understand their relative value. Some of these governments were the best ones available in a particular time and place. The Hapsburg Empire protected ethnic minorities that were later persecuted under the newly formed nation-states that arose in East Central Europe after World War I. The British Empire often played a similar protective role, and one would be hard-pressed to present the failed or highly problematic nation-states that emerged in Africa after Britain’s retreat from empire as politically more beneficial than what preceded them.
…Hazony correctly observes that the Nazi experiment in universal biological reconstruction cannot be viewed in the framework of the nation-state. The Third Reich did not represent a supersized nation-state. It was something far less grounded in real-ity and humanity and exemplified imperialism at its worst…
…the modern West coming out of early modern Europe is essentially Protestant and that the Reformation more than any other development gave birth to the nation-state…
Hazony is also correct to view Kant and his tract On Perpetual Peace as a “hateful” attack on the national principle… In Kant’s political conception, however, there are no nations and peoples. There are only collections of autonomous individuals who must educate themselves to be governed by universal rational principles. Only in the “republic of reason,” stripped of national specificity, can humankind allegedly achieve perpetual peace in a world community of rationalists.
…Hazony tells us a truth that most Jews outside his country adamantly refuse to hear: “If Germany and France have no right to exist as independent states, why should Israel? And if so many are prepared to remain dry-eyed on the day that Britain and the Netherlands are gone, why should they feel differently about Israel?” Those Jews who cheer on the victory of multiculturalism in gentile lands but who hope to preserve the national principle in Israel are not only applying a hypocritical double standard but also pursuing a course that, according to Hazony, will delegitimize a Jewish nation-state while sowing discord elsewhere.

Lineage

Hazony’s father Yehonathan Hazony was an experimental physicist who later crossed into computer science. His early academic work was in Mössbauer spectroscopy and the electronic structure of transition-metal complexes. In 1972 he published “3d(t2g) density distribution in covalent transition metal complexes from Mossbauer and EPR experiments” in the Journal of Physics C: Solid State Physics. He came up through the Brookhaven National Laboratory circle that built the early American Mössbauer program. By the mid-1970s he held an appointment at Princeton in the School of Engineering, which is why the family relocated from Rehovot to Princeton, New Jersey while Yoram was a small child.
By the late 1970s Yehonathan’s work had moved into computer graphics, interactive cartography, and APL-based engineering tools. He published “Algorithms for parallel processing: curve and surface definition with Q-splines” in Computers & Graphics in 1979, plus papers on interactive cartography and APL-graphics tools the same year. He later went to Boston University, where he led the Boston University Manufacturing Expert System (BUMES) project and published on customized engineering systems, nested-array databases for engineering design, and APL system generators through the early 1990s. His later work ran in the IBM Systems Journal. He maintains a Boston University academia.edu page to this day.
In the dedication to God and Politics in Esther, Yoram describes his father’s “ongoing research into the behavior of quantum bodies, and his dissent from accepted theory on this subject despite the hardship of such an unpopular road.” That dissent has continued into Yehonathan’s later years. He co-published with Dov Hazony in Physics Essays a paper framed as an apparent challenge to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, drawn from monochromatic ultrasonic phonon studies of condensed matter. The unfashionable physics matters for understanding Yoram. The son of a man who builds his career around dissent from accepted theory grows up watching what that costs.
Yehonathan was raised in a pro-Ben-Gurion home in pre-state and early-state Israel and went through the labor-Zionist youth movement HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed. His political formation was secular labor Zionism, not religious Zionism and not the right. Yoram has said his parents had “a leaning towards tradition” but did not run a religious home.
Yoram’s mother appears in the autobiographical chapters of Conservatism: A Rediscovery. He describes a home shattered by his father’s three marriages and by what he calls a “violent and mentally ill” mother. No public sources name her. Yoram notes that most of his New Jersey high-school friends were going through the breakup of their families at the same time, and that few of them ended up married with children of their own. The book gives little more detail and pivots to the conservative life Yoram and his wife Yael (born Julie Fulton, an American Princeton classmate who converted to Judaism) have built in answer to that childhood.
The paternal grandparents are the Hazanovich family, who came to Mandate Palestine from Poland and Ukraine at the end of the 1920s. Hazony is the Hebraized form of Hazanovich. The grandparents arrived inside the labor-Zionist migration of the late Yishuv period and settled into the world that elected Ben-Gurion’s coalition.
Yehonathan’s brother is Yitzhak Hazony, who with his wife Linda raised six children in Elon Moreh and was among the founders of Kedumim, the first Gush Emunim settlement in Samaria, established on Hanukkah 1975 after the Sebastia confrontation with the Rabin government. Yoram spent Shabbatot and festivals with his uncle and aunt during his post-high-school year in Israel and credits those visits with his decision to make aliyah and become observant. The two sons of the Hazanovich home split. Yehonathan went into physics, then computer science, left for the United States, and lived a secular American academic life with three marriages. Yitzhak went religious-Zionist and into the post-1967 settlement project, raising six children in a cubicle-sized apartment in Elon Moreh.

Literary Analysis

Yoram Hazony writes in a register few American intellectuals attempt. His sentences carry the cadence of a pulpit and the syntax of a 19th-century essayist. He builds arguments through the accumulation of declarative premises rather than through the testing of objections. The prose performs authority before it earns it.
Consider the opening of The Virtue of Nationalism. The first sentence runs nearly ninety words. It announces two antithetical visions of world order, ranks them, and assigns the reader a side. The structure is periodic, the parallelism balanced, the diction high. Hazony writes as if addressing a synod. He stages a confrontation. He casts himself as the only man willing to name what everyone has been thinking.
This is a Burkean costume, but the tailoring is biblical. Edmund Burke argued through historical example, layered qualification, and a willingness to admit human limitation. Hazony argues through ex cathedra declaration. He cites Burke often. He sounds nothing like him. The closer prose ancestor is the Hebrew prophet, retooled for political philosophy seminars.
His vocabulary clusters around a small set of nouns. Nation. Family. Tribe. Honor. Loyalty. Transcendence. These words appear in patterns that imply hierarchy without proving it. A nation rests on tribes; tribes rest on clans; clans rest on families. The sequence reads like genealogy. The argument hides inside the cadence. By the time a reader asks whether tribes in fact compose modern nations, the prose has already moved three rungs up the ladder.
Hazony’s sentences reward reading aloud. He builds in triplets. He repeats key terms across paragraphs rather than varying them. He resists the academic urge to qualify. Where a contemporary political theorist might write “tends to,” “often,” “in certain conditions,” Hazony writes “is.” The copula does heavy work in his prose. He uses it the way scripture does, to fix categories.
The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture deploys the same instrument on a different surface. Hazony reads the Tanakh as political philosophy, not narrative. He treats Jeremiah and Isaiah as theorists. The book reverses the standard scholarly humility about reading ancient texts through modern categories. Hazony does not apologize for the projection. He insists the categories were there first and that the Greeks renamed them late. The prose performs a recovery operation.
The literary effect is initiation rather than persuasion. Hazony’s prose recruits. He writes to confirm a tribe, not to test a hypothesis.
By Conservatism: A Rediscovery, the register tightens. The book reads as a catechism. He numbers his principles. He states each as obvious. He builds toward a program rather than an inquiry. The earlier echoes of Burke and the prophets give way to something closer to a party platform. The prose adjusts to the new audience. Where The Virtue of Nationalism still tried to persuade liberals, Conservatism: A Rediscovery addresses men who have already crossed over and want their crossing dignified.
The proportion of metaphor falls across his career. Early Hazony reaches for analogy, parable, and biblical example. Later Hazony states. The prose grows shorter, blunter, less ornamented. The man who once wrote sentences shaped like classical arches now writes sentences shaped like signs.
His family analogy deserves attention as a literary figure. The nation is a family writ large. The family teaches honor, loyalty, sacrifice. The state extends these habits. Hazony returns to this figure across every book. He never tests it against the cases that strain it. He never asks what happens when families fail, when loyalty turns abusive, when honor demands cruelty. The figure operates as a closed circuit. It produces a feeling of rightness rather than an argument.
This is the literary signature of a writer who has chosen his audience. Hazony does not stoop to convert. He dignifies. He supplies vocabulary. He gives the willing reader sentences he can quote in his own arguments. The Virtue of Nationalism became a manual not because it persuaded its critics but because it equipped its allies.
His treatment of opponents follows the same pattern. Liberalism, in his prose, is a thin abstraction. He refers to “the liberal,” “the rationalist,” “the Enlightenment thinker” as composite figures. He does not engage particular liberal arguments in their strongest forms. He paints a movement. The reader who already mistrusts liberalism finds his mistrust confirmed in vivid type. The reader who came to test Hazony finds the air thin.
The God of the Hebrew Bible appears throughout Hazony’s prose, named and capitalized, His authority assumed rather than argued. The reverence is constant. His sentences treat scripture as binding without flagging the move. This is unusual in contemporary political theory written in English. Most American conservative intellectuals who appeal to scripture do so through Christian frames and with apologetic care. Hazony writes from inside the Hebrew Bible as a living political constitution. The literary effect on a Jewish reader who shares his orientation is profound. The effect on a reader outside that orientation is that the argument feels addressed to someone else.
His prose almost never admits a counter-example. When Hazony discusses Britain or Israel or America, he selects episodes that fit. The selection is invisible because the cadence is confident. A patient reader can list the missing cases. Hazony does not list them.
His punctuation is restrained. He prefers the period to the comma, the comma to the dash. He rarely uses parenthesis. He almost never qualifies a sentence mid-clause. The visual field of his page is clean, almost severe. The reader sees rows of confident declarations rather than the cluttered hedging of academic prose.
His paragraphs build by repetition rather than by argument. He states a claim. He restates it with a slight variation. He restates it again with biblical illustration. He moves on. The progression feels like liturgy. A reader who tries to extract a chain of premises and conclusions finds the chain thinner than the music suggests.
His tone never breaks. He does not joke. He does not wink. He does not allow himself the small ironies that lighten Burke or the self-deprecation that humanizes Hume. The voice stays elevated from first page to last. This is rare in contemporary English prose, and it accounts for much of Hazony’s reach. Readers exhausted by the snark and qualification of mainstream commentary find his seriousness restorative.
The price of that seriousness is a prose that cannot examine its own foundations. A writer who never lowers his register cannot ask whether his register has misled him. Hazony has built a sound chamber. The chamber holds. The cost is that nothing outside it can be heard.

Influence

Hazony draws his influence from coalition coordination, not from scholarly accuracy. He could be wrong about Bismarck, wrong about Locke, wrong about Westphalia, and his standing inside the national conservative coalition would not change.
His real product is the convening. National conservatism needs a brand, a conference circuit, a vocabulary, and a figurehead who credentials the project across Jewish, Christian, and secular nationalist audiences. Hazony supplies all of it. The NatCon conferences gather senators, donors, journalists, and activists. The Edmund Burke Foundation issues manifestos. The books give the movement something to cite.
Academics have flagged serious problems with the work. His reading of the Hebrew Bible as sustained political philosophy strains the text. His historical claims about Westphalia, Bismarck, the development of European nationalism, and Locke have drawn criticism from historians and political theorists on the right and left. Patrick Deneen (b. 1964), Samuel Goldman, Daniel Drezner (b. 1968), and several reviewers of The Virtue of Nationalism have pushed back. None of it has slowed him down.
The books target the senator’s chief of staff, the donor looking for a frame, the magazine editor commissioning a piece, the aide to Orbán, the Heritage Foundation fellow drafting talking points. These readers want a coherent-sounding story that licenses positions they already hold. They will not check the footnotes. They want the story tellable, not airtight.
Hazony’s credentials do quiet work. A Rutgers PhD gives him academic cover. His Israeli base lets him speak to American Jewish donors as a peer and gives him distance from American culture wars. His Hebrew Bible work earns him standing with Christian Zionists who treat the text as sacred. His decades running the Shalem Center and now the Herzl Institute supply institutional infrastructure. He crosses between worlds that rarely share a figurehead.
The political theory world treats Hazony as a polemicist, not a thinker. Academic journals in political philosophy rarely cite him. The major figures in conservative political thought, the Straussians, the Catholic integralists, the post-liberal communitarians, operate from different sources. J.D. Vance (b. 1984) cites Deneen. Adrian Vermeule (b. 1968) cites de Maistre and Catholic social teaching. Thiel cites Girard. None cite Hazony as having shaped their thinking.
When serious people praise him, the praise tracks his use. Roger Scruton (1944–2020) praised The Virtue of Nationalism, but Scruton stood as the senior philosopher articulating his own long-held views, not as a student of Hazony’s. Christopher DeMuth (b. 1946) has called the project important, but DeMuth speaks as a movement architect celebrating a coalition asset. R.R. Reno (b. 1959) at First Things runs friendly coverage. None of this reads as “this argument changed how I think.” It reads as “this man does useful work for our side.”
Hazony’s work functions as chizuk (strengthening) for the national-conservative/traditionalist camp. He rebuilds intellectual, cultural, and moral foundations for those who are already inclined in a traditional direction by giving them stronger arguments, historical grounding, and communal confidence so they can stand up for themselves.
One qualification: the Hebrew Bible scholarship has earned engagement. The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture and his subsequent biblical work get cited in Jewish thought, biblical studies, and some Christian theology. Joshua Berman, Jon Levenson, and the late Jonathan Sacks (1948–2020) treated the work as a contribution.
Politicians cite Hazony for cover. Donors back him for convening. Movement editors praise him for output. Academics do not adopt his arguments. The praise that comes from serious thinkers reads as coalition affirmation, not testimony of intellectual debt.
Hazony’s authority comes from holding a position the coalition needs filled, not from arguments that change minds. He holds the figurehead role. The coalition accepts his claims because he holds the role, not because the claims convince.
Money runs through the operation. Tikvah Fund networks, Adelson-adjacent donors, and a long roster of American Jewish and Israeli philanthropists have backed the Shalem project since the 1990s. This funding base does not ask for peer review. It asks for ideological output, conference convening, and political access. Hazony delivers.
Defenders treat scholarly criticism as the predictable hostility of academics who oppose Zionism, nationalism, and conservatism on principle. The criticism becomes evidence of his importance, not evidence against him.
Hazony must avoid disgrace, not error. He must keep convening. His skill is entrepreneurial and ecumenical, not philosophical. The books are the calling card. The conferences are the product.

‘God: A Biography’ by Jack Miles (1995)

Jack Miles (b. 1942) and Yoram Hazony both read the Hebrew Bible as a unified literary object. Both reject the historical-critical fragmentation that dominates academic biblical studies. Both write for educated readers outside the seminary. There the agreement ends.
Miles reads the Tanakh as a novel and treats God as its protagonist. Hazony reads it as political philosophy and treats God as its authority. Two incompatible Gods result.
Miles’s God develops across the canonical sequence. He creates, then floods, then promises, then liberates, then legislates, then conquers, then woos, then divorces, then falls silent. Miles tracks the change. He treats the contradictions between divine acts and divine words as the dramatic material of the book rather than as embarrassments to be smoothed. The God of Genesis 1 who calls the world good is not the God of Genesis 6 who drowns it. The God who chooses Saul is not the God who rejects him. The God who hardens Pharaoh’s heart is not the God who later complains that Israel will not soften its own. Miles lets these tensions stand. He reads them as character.
Hazony reads the same text and finds none of this drama. His God speaks with one voice from Genesis to Chronicles. The political philosophy is consistent because the teacher is consistent. Where Miles sees a character in motion, Hazony sees a doctrine unfolded. The contradictions Miles foregrounds, Hazony either harmonizes or sets aside. The biblical text becomes a curriculum rather than a story.
Take the Book of Job.
In Miles’s reading, Job is the hinge of the Tanakh. God permits the destruction of an innocent man on a wager, refuses to explain Himself when challenged, and never speaks to a human again in the Hebrew canonical sequence. The God who has dominated the text for thirty-five books goes quiet. The remaining books trace the consequences of that silence. By Chronicles, God has receded into a temple. The drama ends with absence.
For Hazony, Job is a wisdom text about the limits of human inquiry. The Voice from the whirlwind teaches humility before created order. The political lesson is that men must accept the bounds of what they can know. The silence Miles makes the engine of the entire canon does not register in Hazony’s reading. His God does not withdraw. His God presides.
Each writer’s prose performs his theology.
Miles writes like a novelist. He varies his pace. He lingers on small scenes. He allows the reader to hear the text’s hesitations. He admits that he might be wrong about a passage. He distinguishes his reading from rabbinic and Christian readings without dismissing either. His sentences breathe. He treats his subject the way a serious biographer treats a serious man, with sympathy, attention, and the willingness to register flaws.
Hazony writes like a prophet. His sentences are long, periodic, declarative, untroubled by hesitation. The prose performs the authority it ascribes to its subject. A reader who finds Miles’s God conflicted, jealous, regretful, and finally silent cannot find that God in Hazony’s sentences. The prose will not let Him appear.
The two writers also handle the canonical ending differently. Miles reads the Tanakh in its Jewish order on purpose, because the Christian reordering changes the close. The Tanakh ends with Chronicles and the imperial decree of Cyrus, a God all but gone. Hazony’s God speaks at the end of Chronicles as fully as at the beginning of Genesis.
Miles wants to recover the literary power of a text that centuries of theological harmonization have flattened. He wants to show that the Hebrew Bible is stranger, wilder, and more dramatic than its custodians admit. His God is recognizable to anyone who has read King Lear or the Iliad. He is a great character.
Hazony wants to recover the political authority of a text that centuries of liberal interpretation have domesticated. He wants to show that the Hebrew Bible teaches nationhood, family, honor, and the limits of reason. His God is recognizable to anyone who has stood at attention during a national anthem. He is a foundation.
Miles’s God can lose. Hazony’s God cannot. That is the deepest difference between the two readings.
A character who can lose is one a reader can love. A foundation that can lose is no foundation. Miles can afford a fallible God because the book is literature. Hazony cannot afford a fallible God because the book is politics. Each writer’s project sets the constraint, and the constraint produces the God on the page.
Miles’s literary God cannot ground a political order. He is too conflicted, too withdrawing, too much the protagonist of a tragedy. A reader cannot build a nation on a God who falls silent after Job. Hazony’s political God cannot withstand sustained literary attention. He is too consistent, too unbroken, too much the principle of a system.
Between the two readings sits the text, which is large enough to support both and to embarrass both. Miles has the better ear. Hazony has the firmer purpose.

‘The End of Zionism?’ (1996)

Hazony published this in the summer 1996 issue of Azure shortly after Benjamin Netanyahu won his first national election and three years into the Oslo period. The essay reads as a political intervention written in the heat of a national argument, but its lasting interest lies in the broader claim it makes about how nation-states survive. Hazony argues that Israel’s gravest threat does not lie in territorial concessions or military weakness but in the loss of belief among Israeli elites in the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism. The Jewish state, he claims, keeps its institutions and symbols while losing the historical purpose that once justified them.
Hazony opens with an exchange between two columnists at Ha’aretz, both on the left. Yoel Marcus celebrates the readiness of an Israeli government to return to the pre-1967 borders. He argues that Israelis have tired of carrying Zionism on their shoulders and seek “personal safety and a ‘normal’ life.” Gidon Samet replies that the Oslo agreement has broken down “the ingredient that was the cement in the wall of our old national identity,” opening Israel to Madonna and Big Macs and the end of “the terrible fear of everything that is foreign and strange.” Hazony seizes on the shared keyword: normaliut. The Hebrew term carries an older Jewish coding. It means “like the gentiles.” A people that prizes normaliut above all has decided that Jewish distinctiveness is a burden to shed.
This opening sets up the essay’s central claim. The argument over Oslo at heart is not a debate over guns and butter. The argument runs over whether Jewish national identity remains an asset or a problem.
Hazony then turns to the intellectual history of Jewish nationalism. He reminds the reader that few major Jewish thinkers at the founding of Zionism in 1897 endorsed the project. Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), Martin Buber (1878-1965), Haim Soloveitchik, and the Hasidic rebbes of Lubavitch and Satmar all rejected it. The Jewish people, in their account, was a thing of the spirit, and a state of tanks and bureaucracies would degrade Judaism into a Judaism of explosives, intrigue, and capital. The Holocaust crushed this anti-Zionist consensus. By 1948 the empowerment of the Jewish people seemed not only justified but obligatory. Hazony argues that the older suspicion of Jewish power never died among Jewish intellectuals. It went underground and reemerged after 1967 as post-Zionism.
Hazony treats post-Zionism as the resurfacing of a current that has long lived inside Jewish life. The anti-Zionism of Buber and Yehuda Magnes (1877-1948) returns in new clothing, now dressed in the language of human rights, colonial critique, and cosmopolitan ethics. Hazony reads the work of the new historians, Benny Morris (b. 1948) on the 1948 refugees, Ilan Pappé (b. 1954) on settler colonialism, Boas Evron on the fabricated land connection, and Tom Segev (b. 1945) on the political use of the Holocaust, as a continuation of an older Jewish ambivalence about Jewish power. His treatment of literary figures pursues the same theme. Amos Oz (1939-2018) portrays Jerusalem in My Michael as a city of brooding insanity. A.B. Yehoshua (1936-2022), in “Before the Forest,” sends a young Jew to burn down a “Zionist” forest planted over an Arab village. Moshe Shamir (1921-2004), quoted by Hazony, captures the perverse logic: the Holocaust “is becoming the common homeland of the Jews, their promised land.”
The third section of Hazony’s essay catalogues the institutional translation of post-Zionist thinking under the Rabin-Peres government. Hazony focuses on the Ministry of Education under Shulamit Aloni (1928-2014) and later Amnon Rubinstein (1931-2024). He cites Aloni’s removal of references to God from IDF memorial ceremonies, her dismissal of school trips to Auschwitz as nationalist agitation, and Rubinstein’s call to delete “archaic” references to “Jewish values,” “love of the homeland,” and “loyalty to the Jewish people” from curricular directives. He notes the appointment of Moshe Zimmermann as chairman of the Committee for History Curriculum Reform, the same Zimmermann who had compared Orthodox Jewish children to Hitler Youth and the IDF to the SS.
The catalogue continues across ministries. The National Insurance Institute phases out family benefits tied to military service to avoid disadvantaging Arabs who do not serve. Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak (b. 1936) articulates the doctrine that the “enlightened public in Israel,” not Jewish or Zionist values, sets the benchmark against which Israeli law gets interpreted. The Jewish Agency under Avraham Burg (b. 1955) develops plans to redirect resources from Jewish immigration toward “pluralistic” Internet content. The Foreign Ministry takes on fundraising for Arab regimes, sends post-nationalist ambassadors who declare “there is no such thing as Jewish land,” and pursues membership in the Arab League as a strategic goal under Shimon Peres (1923-2016).
Hazony argues that an ideological shift becomes serious only when it gets encoded into the routines of state institutions. Doctrine carried by a few professors is a curiosity. The same doctrine encoded in curricula, ethics codes, benefits formulas, judicial doctrines, and ministerial priorities becomes a regime. Hazony shows the post-Zionist outlook moving from seminars to the operational core of the state.
He argues that the Oslo formula, with its “mutual legitimate and political rights” phrase, does not merely permit Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. It concedes that the Arab claim to the land of Israel matches the Jewish claim in legitimacy. If the Arabs hold a legitimate national right to the land, then Zionist history reads as a long act of dispossession previously justified by the absence of an Arab claim. Hazony reads Peres’s The New Middle East as the explicit theory behind this concession. Peres dreams of an “ultranational” entity that absorbs Jewish and Arab nationalisms into a regional government, army, and economy. Self-awareness will rest on this new reality. The “citizen of the world” will replace the citizen of the Jewish state.
The Soviet Union, he notes, fell not because its armies failed but because belief in the Soviet national idea had drained away. Israel risks the same fate. Its weapons systems function. Its factories produce. Its fighter planes look impressive. The idea that holds the whole arrangement together has lost its hold on those who staff the commanding heights. Hazony then makes a more revealing concession. Labor Zionists built farms and factories and air forces but did not build the idea of the Jewish state in the minds of the people. The Israeli right inherited the political mantle of Jewish nationalism without inheriting any intellectual tradition that could defend it. Israel has no Smith, no Burke, no Hayek translated into Hebrew. The founders translated Marx. The result is a country with strong arms and weak arguments.
Hazony names a deficit on his own side of the argument. The complaint that post-Zionism captured the universities, the media, and the bureaucracy doubles as a complaint that Jewish nationalism did not produce a serious intellectual class to contest that terrain. The essay reads, in part, as a recruiting document for a project Hazony will later pursue through the Shalem Center and his subsequent books, a project to build an intellectual conservatism inside Israel where none has existed.
The essay closes with a brief reflection on Netanyahu as the last of the believing Zionist prime ministers, paired with the warning that no single politician can reverse a cultural process whose center of gravity lies outside electoral politics. Hazony reminds his readers that the Likud and its allies held power for fifteen years before the Rabin-Peres government and that post-Zionism captured the commanding heights during that stretch. Cultural authority migrates apart from voting patterns.
The essay identifies a question that Western politics will spend the next three decades arguing about: can a liberal democracy preserve the cultural particularity that gives democratic citizenship its emotional weight? Hazony saw earlier than most that the cultural authority of universalist liberalism coexists uneasily with the affective claims of national peoplehood, even in a country whose founding charter rests on those claims. His emphasis on institutions over slogans, on curricula and ethics codes and benefits formulas, points the reader toward where political conflict gets settled rather than where it gets performed.
Read three decades later, “The End of Zionism?” repays attention for its diagnostic clarity about how national identity gets transmitted. The essay shows how a culture moves, paragraph by paragraph, across ethics codes, school curricula, and ministerial directives, and how those small textual shifts compound into a transformation of state purpose. Hazony saw that culture flows downstream of institutional language and that institutional language gets shaped by who staffs the commanding heights. He understood, before most Western conservatives did, that the contest over the legitimacy of the nation-state would become a defining argument of the post-Cold War era.

‘The Jewish State at 100’ (1997)

Hazony published this essay in Azure, the journal of the Shalem Center, which he co-founded in 1997. The essay marks the centennial of Theodor Herzl’s (1860-1904) Der Judenstaat and reads less as commemoration than as cultural autopsy. Hazony writes in the aftermath of Oslo, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995), and during the first Netanyahu government. The historical setting clarifies the essay’s tone of urgent diagnosis. Israel’s centennial passed without ceremony. Hazony treats this silence as symptom, and the symptom as the disease.
The piece belongs to a recognizable genre of Zionist self-criticism running from Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927) through Gershom Scholem and Yehoshua Arieli, but Hazony pushes the genre rightward. Earlier critics worried that Zionism had not gone far enough in cultivating a Hebrew renaissance or that it had drifted from socialist ideals. Hazony’s target is the reverse. The Jewish state, in his account, has been built on assumptions inherited from Russian Marxism that mistook physical settlement for spiritual achievement. The crisis of 1997 is the crisis of an experiment that won its material battles and lost its meaning.
Hazony compares the American Bicentennial of 1976 to the muted Israeli observance of Herzl’s centennial. The contrast carries weight not because Israel lacks scale but because the absence of feeling indicates something deeper. Hazony treats commemoration, school curricula, newspaper coverage, and public ceremony as diagnostic instruments. Cultural behavior, in this argument, is not epiphenomenal. It is where political reality discloses itself. A country that cannot remember its founder cannot transmit a national idea to its children.
Hazony recovers Herzl as a theorist of attraction rather than coercion. The Jewish state, on this account, succeeds when it draws Jews toward it by addressing the aspirations that move them, and fails when it tries to compel attachment through state structures. Herzl named three sources of such attraction. The first is the entrepreneurial center, which addresses ambition. The second is the religious center, which addresses memory and continuity. The third is the cultural center, which addresses the desire for participation in the universal. Together these three constitute what Herzl called “home.”
Hazony extends the same critique to the religious nationalist movement that grew out of Merkaz Harav Kook after 1967. The settler movement spoke a theological language drawn from Rav Kook (1865-1935) and his son Tzvi Yehuda, but its practice replicated Ben-Gurion’s. Settlement, farming, military service, and physical presence on the land became the measures of redemption. The vocabulary changed; the underlying premise did not. Hazony argues that the religious nationalists believed, like the Labor Zionists before them, that facts on the ground might produce ideological loyalty. They were wrong for the same reasons.
Most Israeli commentary of the period treated the religious right and the post-Zionist left as opposites. Hazony argues that the religious right is the post-Zionist left’s mirror image, sharing its inheritance from the materialism it claims to reject. The argument is uncomfortable for both sides. It denies the settlers their self-image as the last Zionists. It also denies the secular left its picture of itself as the carrier of a modern, post-tribal politics. Each, in Hazony’s reading, is a partial survival of Ben-Gurionism.
From this symmetry Hazony develops a sociology of institutions. He contrasts what he calls “linear” politics, the politics of an additional house built and an additional Jew settled, with the “exponential” influence of universities, courts, newspapers, novels, and films. The settlers expended enormous energy on linear achievements while their opponents captured the institutions that produce meaning. For each new settlement, the other side produced a novel, a legal theory, a documentary, a textbook revision. The asymmetry compounds over decades. By 1997, the secular liberal establishment controls almost every channel through which Israelis form their picture of the country, while the religious right controls hilltops.
Hazony’s economic critique runs parallel to the cultural one. Israel in 1997 retains the regulatory apparatus of its socialist founding, with capital controls, business licensing, university cartels, and a broadcasting regime designed to manage rather than enable. He argues that this apparatus alienates the kind of ambitious Jew Herzl hoped the state would attract. The complaint is consonant with the broader liberalization happening in Israel under Netanyahu’s first government, but Hazony’s framing is distinctive. He defends economic freedom not as efficient policy but as a precondition for national attachment. A state that suffocates initiative cannot become the home of an ambitious people.
Hazony surveys Israeli literature, film, historiography, jurisprudence, and academic philosophy and finds in each a culture organized around negation. The novelists write about the Arab claim and Zionist guilt. The historians expose the crimes of the founders. The filmmakers attack the army and the religious. The legal scholars import Canadian constitutional models. The philosophers identify Zionism with various pathologies. The result, on Hazony’s account, is a culture incapable of inspiring its own citizens, let alone outsiders.
Hazony rejects the assumption that material strength secures national survival. He cites the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia as cases of states that possessed armies, industries, and bureaucracies and nonetheless dissolved because their citizens stopped believing in them. The comparison provoked objection at the time. Israel, the objectors said, is not the Soviet Union. Hazony’s point is not that Israel will follow the same path. His point is that material strength alone cannot prevent dissolution once the national idea has hollowed out. The argument prefigures debates that have continued through the subsequent quarter-century about the durability of liberal democracies that cannot articulate what they are for.
Hazony calls for cultural vitality while condemning much of the intellectual pluralism that produces it. He celebrates Jewish entrepreneurial energy while distrusting the cosmopolitan openness that has historically accompanied it. He wants strong traditional attachment without the closed communities in which such attachment tends to flourish. The tensions are present in the original essay and have not been dissolved in the subsequent work.

‘The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience Tradition’

Hazony argues that the Western doctrine of justified resistance to unjust political authority originates in the Hebrew Bible and entered the West through the Jewish prophetic tradition. Against the historiography that locates the origins of liberty in Greece, Rome, and the secular Enlightenment, Hazony places the decisive moral revolution in ancient Israel. The Hebrew Bible introduces into history the proposition that a standard of justice transcends the state and that men therefore hold obligations higher than obedience to political power.

Hazony writes history, theology, political philosophy, and polemic at once. He reconstructs a genealogy stretching from Abraham and Moses to Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), and treats this genealogy not as detached intellectual history but as an intervention into contemporary debates concerning sovereignty, conscience, legitimacy, and the moral hazards of bureaucratic obedience. Civilizations collapse morally, he writes, when they identify legality with justice and political obedience with virtue. The Nuremberg defense, “I was just obeying orders,” becomes for him not a modern excuse but the return of an ancient pagan conception of politics that the Hebrew Bible first arose to oppose.

Hazony depicts the ancient Near Eastern empires not as authoritarian states in the modern sense but as a “stillborn world,” a total political-religious order where ruler, cosmos, law, and morality fused into a single structure of domination. Religion served as the “intellectual and spiritual mortar” binding the masses into obedience. The ruler did not stand merely supreme. He embodied cosmic order.

In Egypt, justice was “what Pharaoh loves.” The state priesthood monopolized knowledge. Astronomy, mathematics, architecture, engineering, and ritual reinforced the authority of the ruler and the inevitability of his commands. Disobedience thus constituted not mere political rebellion but rebellion against the structure of reality. The punishment awaiting dissenters was both earthly and cosmic. The empire promised an “earthly hell” in this life and annihilation in the next.

The Hebrew Bible introduces into this world a different conception of political life. Abraham’s departure from Mesopotamia is a revolt against the sacralized state, not a religious migration alone. The patriarch rejects the civilization where ruler and cosmos fuse, entering a covenant grounded in moral obligation beyond political power.

Abraham and his descendants are shepherds and the shepherd views civilization “from the outside.” The nomadic existence of the patriarchs creates ideological independence. The shepherd is not absorbed into the institutions, bureaucracies, and cosmologies of imperial society. He retains the capacity to judge the city-state because he stands partly beyond it. This “outside observation” runs through the essay as a governing theme. Freedom requires some degree of distance from centralized power. The biblical shepherd stands in contrast to the urban subject whose consciousness has been shaped by imperial ideology. The Hebrew political tradition emerges not only from theological revelation but from a social architecture resistant to total incorporation.

The prophets function, in Hazony’s telling, as the first “watchdog” institution in political history. Unlike pagan priests, who legitimize rulers, the Hebrew prophets stand outside formal state power while retaining moral authority sufficient to rebuke kings in public. Nathan condemns David over Bathsheba. Elijah denounces Ahab. Jeremiah challenges royal policy. The prophet survives because his legitimacy stands independent of political office. Hazony describes the arrangement in constitutional terms. Prophecy constitutes an institutionalized counter-power within Jewish civilization. The prophet does not serve as an official of the state. He preserves the independence needed to judge it. This structure, Hazony contends, ranks among the foundational achievements of biblical politics because it creates a sphere of moral authority external to government.

The limits imposed on Jewish kings illustrate the anti-pagan logic further. Unlike the rulers of Egypt or Assyria, the Jewish king is denied divinity. Deuteronomy prohibits him from accumulating excessive horses, wives, gold, or silver. He must carry a copy of the Teaching and remain conscious that he is not above his brethren. Moral limits bind sovereignty from the start.

The Hebrew Bible accepts the necessity of political authority while denying its finality. The state is necessary but dangerous. Kingship is legitimate but morally precarious. The Jewish political tradition seeks to balance sovereignty with prophetic resistance. Hazony reads this tension as a foundation of Western liberty.

The biblical narratives reinforce the ethic of resistance through cumulative repetition. Hazony treats the Hebrew Bible as a sustained handbook of justified disobedience. The Hebrew midwives, Shifra and Pu’a, refuse Pharaoh’s genocidal decree. Moses kills an Egyptian taskmaster and confronts imperial authority directly. Balaam refuses royal pressure despite repeated demands from the king of Moab. Esther violates Persian law to save her people. Daniel’s companions refuse idolatrous commands. Biblical heroes resist unjust power in the name of higher obligation again and again.

Balaam’s donkey carries the lesson. The ruler blinded by his own authority cannot perceive reality. Even a donkey can recognize the catastrophe the king cannot see. The episode reads as an allegory of political power. Authority narrows perception. The outsider retains clarity. Centralized political systems produce intellectual blindness because they demand conformity from those within them.

Israel means “will struggle with God.” Hazony reads this not as spiritual symbolism alone but as the elevation of struggle into a national principle. Confrontation, argument, and resistance constitute the Jewish people, not passive submission. Refusal to accept authority uncritically becomes part of Jewish political identity.

Hazony argues that classical Greek civilization never escapes the pagan identification of morality with the state. Socrates (470-399 BCE) submits to execution rather than endorse resistance to law. Greek tragedy questions authority on occasion. Greek political philosophy preserves the supremacy of the polis. Even Antigone offers an incomplete challenge because Greek thought never develops a sustained doctrine of justified disobedience comparable to that of the Hebrew Bible.

Hazony contends that nineteenth-century German scholarship erased the Jewish origins of Western political liberty. Hegelian narratives credited Greece with every valuable Western idea while marginalizing Jerusalem. The Hebrew Bible was dismissed as politically primitive or irrelevant. Hazony treats this tradition as a distortion of Western self-understanding and implies that anti-Semitic assumptions contributed to the erasure.

Hazony argues that early Christianity partly abandons the activist political tradition of Judaism to survive Roman imperial domination. Justice shifted from “this world” to the next. Submission to worldly rulers became a theological virtue. Paul’s injunction in Romans 13 and Peter’s command to obey even “perverse” masters represent, in Hazony’s telling, a “fateful compromise” with imperial power. The transformation altered the political psychology of resistance. Undeserved suffering acquired spiritual meaning. Passive endurance replaced prophetic confrontation. Rome could tolerate Christianity because Christianity redirected justice into the afterlife rather than immediate political action.

Hazony grants that Christianity later revives the Hebrew resistance tradition. Much of the essay traces the gradual reactivation of prophetic politics within Christian civilization. The decisive turn arrives with Ambrose of Milan (340-397). Ambrose resurrects the Nathan-David model by rebuking Emperor Theodosius in public after the massacre at Thessalonica. A religious authority again stands above political power and demands repentance from the ruler.

From there Hazony traces the development of resistance theory through medieval conflicts between Church and empire, Protestant doctrines of conscience, Calvinist resistance theories, Puritan political culture, and the American Revolution. Protestantism stands out because it decentralizes authority and restores the primacy of individual conscience. The believer gains direct responsibility for interpreting scripture and judging political authority.

The essay advances a larger philosophical claim about political order. Civilizations require institutions and traditions capable of judging power from outside power. A state without sovereignty collapses into chaos. A state without prophetic conscience collapses into tyranny. The health of Western civilization rests on preserving the uneasy tension between authority and resistance, law and conscience, nation and prophecy.

‘The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul’ (2000)

Hazony published this book at a moment when Oslo-era liberalism, judicial universalism, and post-Zionist discourse held the commanding heights of Israeli academia and media. It is an ambitious work of Zionist political thought, combining intellectual history, political theology, civilizational argument, and cultural polemic in a single volume. Hazony does not defend Zionism against its Arab or international critics. He argues that the gravest threat to the Jewish state comes from within Israel, from the intellectual, legal, educational, and cultural elites who no longer believe in the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood as a substantive principle of political life.
Hazony recovers what he takes to be the original meaning of the Jewish state and explains how universalist intellectual currents hollowed that meaning out. The central drama is a contest over the metaphysical and civilizational foundations of sovereignty. Modern Israel, in his telling, becomes the battleground between two rival conceptions of Jewish existence. One rests on nationhood, historical continuity, and political power. The other rests on cosmopolitan ethics, juridical universalism, and suspicion of sovereignty as such.
The book holds a central place in Hazony’s larger trajectory. Long before he emerged as the principal theorist of national conservatism, he had laid out the architecture of his later political philosophy. The themes that define his subsequent writings appear here in embryo: hostility toward abstract universalism, admiration for historically rooted traditions, skepticism toward neutral-state liberalism, insistence on the legitimacy of national particularism, and the conviction that civilizations survive only through institutions that transmit inherited forms of life.
At the center stands Hazony’s reinterpretation of political Zionism as a theory of Jewish civilizational renewal. This above all on his reading of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), whom Hazony treats as a theorist of power, dignity, and national psychology.
Herzl, in this account, grasped what many assimilated liberal Jews of nineteenth-century Europe refused to acknowledge. Legal emancipation without political sovereignty could never secure Jewish freedom. Formal equality was insufficient because political life is governed not by abstract rights but by power relations between peoples. Minorities that lack sovereign institutions remain vulnerable to social resentment, nationalist reaction, and eventual persecution.
Herzl’s insight extended beyond physical security. The deeper problem facing assimilated Jews was spiritual and civilizational dependency. Jews who lived permanently as minorities within dominant gentile societies adapted themselves psychologically and culturally to the expectations of the majority. Political weakness produced not only insecurity but imitation, self-erasure, and a loss of collective confidence. Only sovereignty could create the conditions for an independent Jewish civilization rooted in Jewish historical experience rather than in accommodation to external norms. Herzl’s ambition, Hazony argues, was to restore “our own character” to the Jewish people.
Hazony rejects the liberal conception of the state as a neutral procedural framework detached from substantive historical identity. No state is neutral. Every political order embodies particular traditions, collective memories, and inherited moral assumptions. The effort to redescribe Israel as a generic liberal democracy stripped of Jewish national content is the substitution of one civilizational framework for another.
Hazony’s critique of liberal universalism anticipates later post-liberal and communitarian political theory. Nations are not contractual arrangements formed by abstract consent. They are historical communities sustained through shared memory, language, sacrifice, and inherited loyalty. Political legitimacy cannot be reduced to procedural fairness. A society that cannot transmit its historical identity loses the cultural foundations for solidarity and political endurance.
The autobiographical introduction functions as both personal narrative and symbolic diagnosis. Hazony recounts his return to Israel after a childhood in the United States in a Ben-Gurionist milieu shaped by Labor Zionism and a belief in Jewish statehood as a redemptive national project. Upon his return as an adult, he found a society militarily mobilized but unable to articulate why the Jewish state should exist at all.
His descriptions of conversations with Israeli soldiers are among the strongest passages in the book. He recounts officers unfamiliar with foundational episodes of Jewish history, soldiers alienated from Jewish identity, and military environments where ancient traditions were observed as ritual without substantive understanding. The problem was not a shortage of courage or patriotism in the narrow sense. Israelis remained willing to fight. The crisis was existential and civilizational. They no longer possessed a coherent account of the purpose their sacrifices served.
The diagnosis broadens into an institutional critique once Hazony turns to education, law, media, and the academy. He argues that the post-Jewish state was institutionalized through educational reform. He gives sustained attention to curricular transformations in Israel’s public schools and reads them as evidence that state institutions had abandoned the Zionist conception of Jewish nationhood.
He raises alarms over reforms tied to the New Historians and educators such as Moshe Zimmermann (b. 1943). Revised middle-school history curricula no longer began with the Kingdom of David or the political history of ancient Israel. Jewish history was reframed as the story of a minority culture responding to larger imperial civilizations such as Hellenism. For Hazony this is a profound ideological transformation. Jewish history is no longer the story of a people striving toward sovereignty and collective continuity. It becomes the experience of a dispersed cultural group within wider world history.
Hazony finds parallel tendencies in archaeology education, where curricular reforms emphasized “human civilization” and “world culture” and distanced themselves from nationalist narratives of Jewish attachment to the land. He reads the shift as part of a wider effort to uproot what educational elites regarded as dangerous or fundamentalist forms of historical consciousness. Such universalist frameworks, in his analysis, are not neutral scholarly approaches. They dissolve Jewish particularity into cosmopolitan discourse.
His treatment of civics education sharpens the critique. Newer civics textbooks presented Israel as “a state of all its citizens” in neutral constitutional language, treating the Jewish character of the state as one interpretation among many rather than as the foundational principle embedded in Zionist statehood. Procedural neutrality conceals substantive ideological transformation. Once the Jewish state is redescribed as a generic liberal democracy detached from Jewish collective identity, Zionism becomes conceptually unstable.
The legal dimension of this transformation finds its embodiment in the jurisprudence of Chief Justice Aharon Barak (b. 1936), whom Hazony portrays as the architect of Israel’s constitutional revolution. His critique of Barak anticipates later Israeli battles over judicial supremacy and constitutional identity.
Hazony focuses on Barak’s doctrine that the Jewish nature of the state should be interpreted “at the highest level of abstraction,” such that Jewish values become indistinguishable from universal democratic principles acceptable within any liberal constitutional order. The move empties Jewish identity of substantive content. Once Jewishness is interpreted only at a level compatible with universal liberalism, the Jewish state ceases to carry distinctively Jewish civilizational meaning.
Hazony analyzes Barak’s invocation of the “enlightened community” as a source of constitutional legitimacy. He reads the phrase as evidence that legal authority had concentrated in the hands of secular intellectual elites detached from the traditions and loyalties of the broader Israeli public. The book here anticipates later populist critiques of technocracy and elite judicial governance. Constitutional universalism, for Hazony, is a route through which culturally dominant elites impose post-national norms on a still national society.
The concern with institutional transformation extends into Hazony’s discussion of the Law of Return, which he describes as the “bill of rights” of the Jewish people. He traces the growing normalization of elite attacks on the law, including arguments by David Grossman (b. 1954) and A. B. Yehoshua (1936-2022) that democratic equality required revising or suspending the law’s privileging of Jewish immigration.
Hazony treats these debates as symbolically decisive because the Law of Return institutionalizes the core Zionist principle that Israel exists as the political home of the Jewish people. Weakening the law might transform Israel from the sovereign expression of Jewish peoplehood into a territorially bounded liberal state detached from global Jewish historical destiny. Hazony also criticizes media rhetoric portraying the law as demographically reckless, including the Haaretz argument caricaturing Israel as a national home for “a billion Chinese.” He reads such rhetoric as elite hostility toward the foundational assumptions of Zionism.
The military sphere occupies a similar place in Hazony’s institutional analysis. He devotes extensive attention to The Spirit of the IDF, the 1994 military ethics code authored by the philosopher Asa Kasher (b. 1940). The document dejudaized the army by grounding military loyalty in abstract commitments to “state, citizens, and democracy” while omitting reference to Zionism, Jewish peoplehood, or attachment to the land of Israel. Revealing for Hazony was the explicit rejection of love of the land as a military value on the grounds that such attachment represented dangerous fetishization.
Armies do not fight for procedures or administrative entities. They fight for historical communities, inherited loyalties, and collective identities. The removal of Jewish and Zionist concepts from the moral language of the military symbolized a broader transformation of Israel from a civilizational nation-state into a procedural liberal polity.
Among the ambitious aspects of the book is Hazony’s effort to trace the intellectual genealogy of post-Zionism back to the founding of the Hebrew University and the influence of German Jewish intellectual traditions. Anti-nationalist forms of Jewish thought tied to figures such as Martin Buber (1878-1965), Judah Magnes (1877-1948), and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) regarded Jewish sovereignty with suspicion because they believed political power corrupted Judaism’s spiritual mission.
Buber occupies a central place in Hazony’s narrative. He appears as the principal intellectual antagonist to Herzl and Ben-Gurion, the representative of a Jewish universalism uncomfortable with statehood, coercion, and national particularity. Buber’s advocacy of binationalism expresses a political innocence rooted in refusal to acknowledge the tragic realities of sovereignty.
Hazony characterizes the contemporary Israeli crisis as “Martin Buber’s revenge.” Although Buber and the binationalists lost politically during the founding of the state, they triumphed culturally through their influence in universities, media, humanities faculties, and elite intellectual discourse. The Hebrew University becomes the incubator of post-national Jewish thought. Through education and cultural authority, anti-sovereign conceptions of Judaism reshaped the moral self-understanding of Israeli elites.
Against this tradition, Hazony elevates David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) as the heroic architect of Jewish sovereignty. Ben-Gurion’s greatness lay not in military leadership or statecraft alone but in his understanding that political independence required the deliberate construction of a shared national consciousness. Sovereignty depends on cultural transmission, historical memory, and civilizational confidence. The state therefore had to cultivate what Hazony calls a “Jewish state of mind.”
Long before constitutional conflict became central to Israeli politics, Hazony identified judicial universalism, educational deracination, elite alienation from national identity, and institutional hostility toward inherited traditions as major fault lines. His account anticipated later disputes over constitutional reform, judicial authority, military ethos, demographic identity, and the place of national history in public education.
The book transcends the Israeli context. Beneath its specific arguments about Zionism lies a wider meditation on the fragility of collective identity in liberal modernity. Can democratic societies survive without thick historical narratives? Can national traditions coexist with universal moral aspirations? What happens when intellectual elites lose faith in the legitimacy of the civilizations that produced them? Can political communities preserve continuity once their educational, legal, and cultural institutions cease transmitting a substantive account of national purpose?
Hazony’s answer is clear and uncompromising. A nation that no longer regards its own inheritance as worth defending loses the capacity to sustain sovereignty. >The Jewish State is a warning about the civilizational preconditions of political endurance in the modern world.

‘Did Herzl Want a ‘Jewish’ State?’ (2000)

Hazony argues for the legitimacy of national particularism in modern political life. A generation of Israeli intellectuals had argued that Theodor Herzl’s (1860-1904) Der Judenstaat had been mistranslated for a century. On this revisionist reading, Herzl sought a “state of the Jews,” meaning a politically neutral liberal regime with a Jewish demographic majority but no constitutional commitment to Jewish national purposes. Hazony rejects this reading on philological, historical, philosophical, and theological grounds. The ambition reaches further than translation. The essay defends the moral and political legitimacy of a state organized around the protection and continuity of a historical people.
Hazony treats the reinterpretation of Herzl as part of an attempt to dissolve the normative ground of Jewish sovereignty. The shift from “Jewish state” to “state of the Jews” recodes Israel from a nation-state with substantive obligations toward the Jewish people into a procedurally neutral polity whose duties extend only to atomized individuals within its borders. The dispute over Herzl’s terminology becomes a dispute over whether democratic states may legitimately possess historical and civilizational purposes beyond the administration of universal rights.
Hazony begins with philology because political revolutions frequently begin with shifts in vocabulary. Several influential Israelis, among them Amnon Rubinstein, Shulamit Aloni (1928-2014), Moshe Zimmermann, and the novelist Amos Oz (1939-2018), have insisted that Der Judenstaat should be rendered “The State of the Jews” rather than “The Jewish State.” Their case rests on the claim that the German prefix Juden- refers descriptively to Jews as a population rather than adjectivally to a Jewish political character. Hazony dismantles the argument through Herzl’s multilingual publication history.
Herzl personally supervised and financed the French and English editions of his pamphlet, titling them L’État Juif and A Jewish State. He later approved a Yiddish edition called Die Yudische Medineh. Hazony shows that Herzl used Juden- and jüdisch interchangeably when referring to Jewish institutions, culture, and identity. Terms such as Jewish community, Jewish spirit, and Jewish congress appear in both forms throughout Herzl’s writings. Herzl did more than tolerate “Jewish state” as one option among others. He coined and popularized the phrase as a political concept across every language he controlled. The Hebrew title Medinat Hayehudim emerged from a translator, Michael Berkowicz, whose work Herzl did not closely supervise. Even Berkowicz used the phrase medina yehudit at points in his translation.
Philology alone cannot settle the matter. Even if Herzl preferred “Jewish state,” a critic might still argue that he envisioned a culturally neutral liberal regime populated by Jews. The essay therefore moves from semantics to political theory.
Herzl’s political thought, on his reading, departs from the social-contract tradition associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau imagined the state as an abstract association of formally equal individuals united through universal consent. Herzl’s state emerges from historical necessity. The Jewish people require political guardianship because centuries of dispersion have left them dependent on the fluctuating tolerance of others. The state exists not as a neutral framework for autonomous individuals but as an instrument for the protection and continuity of a particular people.
Hazony emphasizes that Herzl’s proposed “Society of Jews” was meant to become a sovereign political authority charged with advancing Jewish collective welfare. The legitimacy of this authority arose not from universal abstractions but from what Herzl called “higher necessity.” Sovereignty in Herzl’s vision carries a substantive moral purpose. The state serves as guardian of the Jewish people.
The principle of guardianship shaped Herzl’s politics even before any state existed. Hazony points to Herzl’s testimony before the British Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1902. Herzl argued there that Jews should arrive in a Jewish territory “as citizens just because they are Jews.” The statement reveals that Herzl did not imagine citizenship as a universally interchangeable legal category detached from national identity. Citizenship in the Jewish state expresses a prior historical relationship between the state and the Jewish people.
The essay becomes most striking when Hazony links the constitutional theory to Herzl’s understanding of Jewish character. Herzl did not seek merely to relocate assimilated European Jews into safer territory. He sought cultural and moral reconstruction. Hazony’s treatment of Herzl’s essay “The Menora” carries this argument. He reconstructs Herzl’s gradual “return to Judaism” not as a conversion to Orthodoxy but as a recovery of civilizational rootedness. Herzl’s decision to celebrate Hanukkah with his children stands as the symbol of Zionism: the recovery of historical continuity after a period of cultural estrangement.
The Jewish state exists not only to protect Jewish bodies but to restore Jewish character. Herzl feared that diaspora life had pressed Jews to suppress their historical identity to survive within European societies. In a passage Hazony quotes with evident relish, Herzl writes that only the Zionists wished to become “Jewish Jews,” whereas others sought to disappear into surrounding nations. Sovereignty becomes a means for recovering integrity.
Hazony expresses skepticism toward liberal neutrality. He suggests that no enduring state functions as a purely procedural framework. Every political order embodies historical loyalties, inherited traditions, and substantive moral commitments. The difference is that some states acknowledge these commitments openly while others obscure them behind universalist rhetoric. The attempt to redefine Israel as a neutral “state of the Jews” represents not the transcendence of nationalism but the erasure of Jewish national legitimacy. The argument anticipates Hazony’s later trajectory in The Virtue of Nationalism and Conservatism: A Rediscovery. The themes are already visible: distrust of universalist rationalism, defense of historically evolved institutions, emphasis on collective memory, and criticism of procedural liberalism detached from substantive national purpose.

‘Who Removed Zionism from Israel’s Textbooks?’ (April 17, 2000)

This essay appeared during the final months of the Oslo peace process and the early period of Ehud Barak’s premiership. The piece reframes a curricular controversy as a constitutional question. Hazony argues that Israeli academic elites have rewritten the historical narrative taught in state schools and that the rewriting amounts to a quiet repudiation of the Zionist premise of the Israeli state. The textbooks become the visible artifact of a deeper transformation in elite self-understanding.
Hazony reads schools as state-forming institutions. The State Education Law of 1953 charged Israeli schools with instilling “the values of Jewish culture,” “love of the homeland,” and “loyalty to the Jewish state.” Ben-Gurion named the law one of the two “supreme laws” of the new state, alongside the Law of Return. Curriculum carried this weight, on the older account, because a sovereign Jewish polity required a generation prepared to identify with its founding purpose. Hazony’s claim is that the academics who took control of textbook production starting in the early 1990s rejected that purpose and treated it as embarrassing rather than constitutive.
The essay’s clearest analytical move is the contrast between two historiographic programs. The first is the Jerusalem School associated with Ben-Zion Dinur (1884-1973), which reads Jewish history as the continuous record of a single people moving across exile toward eventual political restoration. The second is the program advanced by Moshe Zimmermann and Israel Bartal, which treats Jewish experience as fragmented across host civilizations and refuses the unifying frame of national continuity. Zimmermann’s phrase “universal history” carries the polemical weight. It positions Jewish particularism as the parochial deviation and treats the integration of Jewish history into broader European and Mediterranean narratives as the corrective.
Hazony’s documentation of curricular change is the essay’s strongest section. He moves through the textbooks in detail. The new ninth-grade text, A World of Changes, cuts Zionist, Israeli, and Holocaust content from roughly sixty percent of the volume to under thirty. Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) loses his role as Israel’s first president. Menachem Begin (1913-1992) appears only after he reaches the prime ministership, with his underground career against the British removed. The 1939 White Paper disappears. Jewish armed resistance against the British, which had received nineteen pages, receives two sentences. The War of Independence shrinks from twenty pages to two paragraphs. Photographs of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion are gone, while Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dalí, and the Beatles remain.
Hazony shows that revision operates through subtraction rather than addition. The new curriculum does not chiefly correct Zionist falsehoods. It removes Jewish agency, Jewish vulnerability, and Jewish attachment from the central frame. The Six Day War loses Syrian water diversion, the closing of the Straits of Tiran, and Arab declarations about Israel’s destruction. Jerusalem’s reunification appears as occupation rather than return. The archaeology curriculum, designed by a committee under Yoram Tzafrir, replaces Jewish historical themes with “the spirit of man,” “the culture of mankind,” and “the heritage of world civilization.”
The textbook To Be Citizens in Israel, produced under Benyamin Neuberger and advised by Emanuel Gutmann, presents Israel’s Jewish character as one option among six competing constitutional models, including a sixth model holding that Israel should not be a Jewish nation-state at all but a “state of all its citizens.” The book then tells students that “each person defines his own identity for himself.” The civics text turns active duties toward Jewish national life into passive comprehension of contested approaches. The student learns that the Jewish state is a position one might hold rather than an inheritance one receives.
Hazony argues that the universalist program presents itself as the absence of ideology while operating as an ideology of its own. The older Zionist textbooks selected, emphasized, and shaped emotional response. The new textbooks do the same. The difference is that the old curriculum cultivated identification with the Jewish national project, while the new curriculum cultivates moral distance from it. Neither curriculum is neutral. Hazony’s sharpest critical observation is that the post-Zionist program claims a neutrality its own pedagogical practice denies.
Yossi Sarid, education minister at the time of the no-confidence vote over Mahmoud Darwish, served as a convenient political target but not as the operative cause. The curricular revolution Hazony describes began under the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir, which appointed the Zimmermann committee in 1991. The Education Ministry committees responsible for syllabi and approved textbooks have functioned with substantial autonomy from political oversight across both Labor and Likud governments. Hazony’s account treats curricular transformation as a long bureaucratic project sustained across party turnover, which strengthens his thesis about elite succession, which is the part that has aged best. Hazony observed in 2000 that a generation of Israeli academics had reached intellectual independence from Zionist commitments and had begun identifying with transnational scholarly norms rather than national ones. The same pattern, with local variation, became visible across the Western academy in the following two decades. Disputes over national narrative, colonialism, civic education, and historical memory in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia recapitulate the structure Hazony identifies in the Israeli case. The Israeli academy reached the post-national turn early. The essay reads, in retrospect, as a report from the leading edge of a broader transformation.

‘On the National State, Part 1: Empire and Anarchy’ (2002)

This essay defends the sovereign national state as the constitutional precondition for liberty, representative government, and political moderation.
The piece does several things at once. It is a defense of Zionism written for Israeli readers reeling from the Second Intifada. It is a polemic against post-national Europe. It is a reconstruction of a Western political tradition Hazony locates in the Hebrew Bible, English Protestantism, and the early modern resistance to Habsburg and later French imperial pretensions. It is an essay in political prudence, arguing that even noble principles destroy themselves when pressed beyond the limits of finite political capacity. What gives the essay its force is that Hazony does not appeal primarily to sentiment or cultural attachment. He treats the nation-state as a constitutional equilibrium that emerged from a long historical reckoning with two recurring forms of disorder: empire and anarchy.
Hazony situates his analysis between two camps in the scholarly literature on nationalism, though he engages neither systematically in this essay. The dominant academic view since the 1980s, associated with Benedict Anderson (1936-2015), Ernest Gellner (1925-1995), Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), and Elie Kedourie (1926-1992), treats the nation as a modern construction, a product of print capitalism, mass schooling, industrial mobility, or romantic German philosophy. Hazony’s footnotes show familiarity with this literature but his commitments lie with the perennialist counter-tradition: Anthony D. Smith (1939-2016), Adrian Hastings (1929-2001), and Steven Grosby (b. 1957), who locate national consciousness in older religious, ethnic, and linguistic communities and assign the Hebrew Bible a foundational place. Hazony’s English genealogy follows Hastings closely. His broader political theory leans on John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and Roger Scruton (1944-2020).
The conceptual core of the essay is a tripartite typology: empire, anarchy, and the national state. Hazony defines these not by territorial scale or population but by the structure of political allegiance. Under empire, the individual owes loyalty to an abstract jurisdiction that aspires to universal extent. Imperial legitimacy rests on the claim that the state acts on behalf of mankind as such. Under anarchy, loyalty runs to a familiar person: clan head, feudal lord, militia chief, gang leader. The familiar individual offers protection and demands devotion. Law and violence remain private. The national state occupies the conceptual midpoint. Loyalty runs neither to universal humanity nor to a personal patron but to the nation: a historically continuous community possessing shared memory, intrinsic distinction from other communities, and a collective will.
Five claims structure the argument. The national state depersonalizes both law and warfare, severing them from clan loyalty and private commitment. It limits political ambition, treating the state’s task as the protection of one people rather than the redemption of all peoples. It accepts the legitimacy of other states pursuing their own purposes, allowing for genuine plurality among forms of self-government. It places rulers in competition with other rulers, creating an external check on internal tyranny because talented citizens can leave. And it generates the cultural conditions under which men of ability flourish, since the order of competing states offers refuge and patronage to those who fall out of favor at home.
Even the most binding moral norms, he argues, cease to function at the limits of the range of possible experience. A state committed to apprehending every murderer without regard to cost eventually meets a case that requires full-scale war. A state committed to the principle of self-determination for every people without regard to strategic context eventually proliferates sovereignties until none retains the monopoly of force that makes sovereignty meaningful. The principle negates itself when applied without regard to the conditions of its own realization.
Hazony rejects the Kantian view that principle should be applied without regard to power. He rejects the Schmittian view that the political is reducible to the friend-enemy distinction. He occupies a middle position: principles bind, but their applicability depends on the capacity to realize them. A state that pursues justice beyond its means impairs its capacity to pursue justice at all.
The argument has obvious bearing on the gap between domestic and international politics. Within the established state, the sovereign monopoly of force allows law to operate as if it were absolute. Among states, the absence of any such monopoly means that every principle collides with limits. Hazony refuses both liberal universalism and cynical raison d’etat. He insists that morality binds in international affairs but only within constraints set by finite power and competing sovereignties. Political prudence becomes a condition for preserving moral order over time rather than a betrayal of it.
The application of this argument to Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) is one of the essay’s sharper polemical moments and follows Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) closely. Hazony argues that Wilson transformed the legitimate aspiration for national liberty into a universal moral imperative detached from strategic reality. The dismantling of Austria-Hungary at Versailles produced half a dozen weak states that Hitler (1889-1945) devoured in succession. The principle of self-determination, applied without regard to the geopolitical conditions of its realization, undermined the very order it was meant to secure.
The historical claim is contestable. Margaret MacMillan and other historians of Versailles argue that the collapse of Austria-Hungary preceded the application of Wilsonian principle and was driven by wartime national mobilization in the empire’s successor regions. Wilson’s Fourteen Points endorsed an outcome already underway rather than producing it. The argument from prudence may still hold: the successor states were indeed weak and the postwar settlement did fail catastrophically. But Hazony’s causal story underplays the structural pressures that Wilsonian rhetoric tracked rather than caused.
The deeper philosophical point survives the historical quibble. A principle that requires more power than its bearers possess cannot serve as the basis for a stable political order. The idea has wider application than Hazony pursues. It bears on contemporary debates over humanitarian intervention, climate governance, international criminal law, and the institutional architecture of liberal internationalism. Hazony’s essay anticipates by more than a decade the populist backlash against transnational governance that gathered force after the 2008 financial crisis and the migration pressures of the following decade.
Hazony’s treatment of multinational states draws on Mill’s argument in On Representative Government that representative institutions require “fellow feeling” among citizens. Without shared language, memory, and identity, public opinion cannot form. Representative government degenerates into ethnic bargaining, bureaucratic management, or what Mill called the executions of liberty conducted by armies whose only bond is the flag. Hazony presses Mill’s argument into a critique of the European Union and a defense of the United States as a culturally cohesive national state.
Hazony argues that minority welfare is not a humanitarian supplement added onto nationalism. It is structurally necessary for sovereignty to persist. Once minorities lose confidence in state protection, they look elsewhere: to local strongmen, to foreign powers, to criminal organizations, to militias. Political loyalty reverts downward into anarchic forms. The state begins to fragment internally. Once such fragmentation produces what Hazony calls “graduates,” men trained in the construction of alternative orders, the problem migrates to other states.
The argument cuts against the easy assumption that nationalism and minority protection stand in tension. On Hazony’s account, a state that fails to protect its minorities undermines the very principle by which it claims sovereign authority. The state’s monopoly of force depends on the loyalty even of those whose deepest attachments lie elsewhere. Where that loyalty fails, the state is no longer national in the relevant sense; it has become an imperial or anarchic order under a national flag.
What scale of political community is necessary for liberty to survive? The question presses on contemporary debates over devolution, secession, federation, and supranational governance. Hazony’s answer is bounded solidarity. Liberty requires neither universal human community nor private local attachment but a middle scale at which fellow feeling and impartial law can coexist. Empire dissolves the conditions of fellow feeling. Anarchy dissolves the conditions of impartial law. The national state holds the difficult middle.

‘On the National State, Part 2: The Guardian of the Jews’ (2003)

This offers a comprehensive defense of Jewish sovereignty grounded in an older European tradition of political theory. Israel exists not as a refuge but as an instrument of agency. Its three tasks, ordered hierarchically, are physical protection of the Jews, cultivation of an independent Jewish intellectual tradition, and the formation of a character suited to sovereign life.
Liberal internationalism treats national particularity as suspect, transitional, or morally arbitrary. Hazony reverses the priority. Nations preserve rival traditions, competing moral visions, and divergent intellectual inheritances. Political plurality therefore depends on national plurality. A world stripped of sovereign nations does not become morally universal. It becomes intellectually uniform.
The first section of the essay develops a stern realist account of political protection. Hazony rejects the sentimental Zionist image of Israel as a passive shelter for endangered Jews. Sovereignty matters because it creates organized power. Drawing on Burke’s 1781 parliamentary speech, Hazony notes that the British and Dutch protect their nationals abroad through armies, fleets, and foreign service. The Jews in exile lacked these instruments. Their vulnerability stemmed not from insufficient moral sympathy among other peoples but from statelessness as such. This distinction between refuge and sovereign agency carries the argument. British power did not turn Britain into a hiding place. It shaped calculations abroad because enemies understood that the British state possessed the will and capacity to intervene. Zionism, by extension, is not the construction of a safe haven but the recovery of political agency.
The Holocaust analysis sharpens this point. Hazony does not primarily accuse Britain and the United States of cruelty. He argues that even humane liberal states pursued their own purposes rather than Jewish rescue. Britain and America fought for liberty, constitutional order, and victory over Germany. Those purposes did not translate into a willingness to divert resources toward saving endangered Jews. Germany, by contrast, made extermination part of its war aim and pursued it with consistency. Hazony’s claim is structural rather than moral. States defend those they regard as their own. No foreign power, however benevolent, can permanently substitute for a sovereign Jewish state whose purpose is Jewish protection. The argument has force because it does not require attributing malice to the Allies. It requires only that one accept that states act in accordance with their declared purposes.
The essay returns repeatedly to the claim that modernity has not transcended national loyalty or political conflict. The treatment of assimilated German Jewry illustrates the point. Hermann Cohen’s 1915 essay “Germanism and Judaism” announced that the German and Jewish spirits had merged in a shared messianism of universal brotherhood. Eighteen years later, the German state began the murder of two-thirds of European Jewry. Hazony uses Cohen as a warning. The cultivated Jewish intellectuals of imperial Germany mistook a temporary easing of hostility for permanent transformation in human affairs. They believed liberal civilization had dissolved older loyalties. History destroyed the illusion with terrible force.
The essay’s pessimism here is structural rather than misanthropic. Hazony denies that humanity progresses steadily toward cosmopolitan fraternity. Nations continue to divide the world into insiders and outsiders. Competition, partial loyalties, and the possibility of catastrophic reversal remain permanent features of political life. He therefore dismisses recurring announcements of the end of history as forms of wishful thinking that political prudence cannot afford. The future, he insists, is for us a closed book.
Hazony argues that survival alone cannot sustain a civilization. Postwar Jewish life often reduced itself to preservation and memory. Such a posture may mobilize one generation shaped by the catastrophe, but it cannot inspire descendants who inherit neither the immediacy of terror nor the urgency of state-building. A people organized around persistence eventually loses the capacity to explain why it wishes to persist.
Historic nations do not reproduce themselves through demography alone. They understand themselves as bearers of an idea and as participants in history. The Jews survived exile not because they pursued survival but because generations believed they carried a calling worth sacrifice. Hazony reverses the standard sociological reading of Jewish endurance. Jewish continuity emerges from loyalty to a civilizational ideal, not from adaptation alone. The argument has obvious affinities with Franz Rosenzweig and, more distantly, with Yehuda Halevi, though Hazony’s framing is more political than theological.
Hazony portrays Judaism as a rival civilizational tradition with its own epistemology, moral psychology, and political theory. Jewish thought, he argues, rejects many of the conceptual divisions characteristic of modern Western philosophy. It refuses sharp separations between is and ought, prudence and duty, politics and theology. It emphasizes collective responsibility, historical continuity, legal reasoning, and covenantal obligation. He locates the Jewish tradition as a participant in the intellectual life of seventeenth-century Europe through Hobbes, Grotius, Selden, Milton, Cunaeus, and Newton, and through Rousseau’s engagement with the Hebrew Bible in The Social Contract and The Government of Poland.
Self-government requires a moral psychology suited to responsibility and sacrifice. Exile encouraged habits of dependence, caution, and political passivity. Sovereignty demands the opposite, namely citizens willing to wield power, defend borders, make judgments, and accept historical burden. The Jewish state therefore aims to transform Jews into a people capable of sustaining political independence over centuries, not only to protect them.

‘On the National State, Part 3: Character’ (2003)

This essay claims that political independence depends less on constitutional design, economic capacity, or military hardware than on the moral and psychological quality of the men who compose the nation. Procedure and productivity have their place, but they cannot substitute for citizens able to sustain commitments under fear, humiliation, and external pressure. The essay treats sovereignty as an educational and spiritual enterprise. The Jewish state succeeds or fails according to whether it cultivates men of sufficient steadiness to bear the burdens it imposes.
Hazony opens with a complaint about contemporary political discourse. Modern societies prefer the language of rights, justice, and equality and shy from serious discussion of the concrete qualities those ideals demand in practice. The avoidance has a cause. Character implies hierarchy. Courage, steadiness, loyalty, and resilience appear unequally across any population. To praise them invites accusations of aristocratic or exclusionary sympathy. Hazony reads the avoidance as dangerous. A democracy cannot survive on the strength of citizens who affirm abstract principles. It survives because enough men can defend those principles when defending them costs something.
The argument rests on a moral psychology drawn from classical and biblical sources. Hazony divides personality into intellect, spirit, and appetites. Character resides in the spirit, the faculty that detects disorder and rallies the passions that restore stability. Fear and anger are not pathologies to eliminate. They are intermediate states between exhilaration, which represents mastery, and despair, which represents collapse. Fear warns of danger and mobilizes resources for survival. Anger alerts the man to threats against order and supplies the energy to resist. The problem is not the existence of these passions but their disproportion.
Character is the quality that lets a man hold his prior bearing and commitments under duress. He still feels fear. He does not dissolve. His spirit retains tzura, or shape. The metaphor moves character from sentimental virtue to structural property. Some men remain internally coherent under pressure. Others deform.
Hazony develops the model through the Exodus. The Hebrew slaves panic whenever danger appears. They oscillate between exhilaration and despair, longing for liberation one moment and yearning for Egypt the next. Their fear overwhelms their capacity to sustain chosen commitments. Moses experiences fear without surrendering to it. He doubts himself at the burning bush. He fears Pharaoh. His spirit holds its shape. Hazony treats Moses as the archetype of political steadiness.
Long subordination deforms personality. Slavery produces not only political weakness but spiritual instability. Men habituated to chronic vulnerability lose the capacity for independent action and orient themselves toward avoidance rather than purpose. Hazony extends the diagnosis to diaspora life. Centuries of insecurity and dependence cultivated habits of fear, accommodation, and emotional volatility.
Hazony’s ideal Jew is neither cosmopolitan in the liberal sense nor separatist in the defensive sense. He moves through Western civilization without losing his cultural center. Jewish ideas remain his native intellectual language. Because he does not fear gentile civilization, he can admire what is worthy in it without capitulating or recoiling. Cultural confidence is a form of character. Intellectual independence depends on holding civilizational shape under external pressure.
The argument explains why Hazony places such weight on sovereign statehood as a school for character. The state has value not because it secures territory but because it generates the pressures that force a society to cultivate resilient men. Diplomacy, war, taxation, administration, and law enforcement all require men who can endure intense pressure without abandoning obligation. Sovereignty imposes a continuous educational demand on the nation.
Hazony frames the central political problem of independence as educational rather than procedural: how can a nation produce ten thousand men of superb character in every generation? The formulation is classically republican. From Aristotle (384–322 BCE) through Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), republican theorists held that free states depend on civic virtue. Institutions alone cannot sustain independence. States survive only where enough citizens and leaders possess the steadiness to resist corruption, fear, comfort, and dependency.
The discussion of military training clarifies a subtlety in the argument. Basic discipline serves as a prototype for character formation. Recruits learn that endurance is possible beyond what they imagined. Hazony separates physical toughness from full civic character. Battlefield courage alone is insufficient. A general may remain fearless under fire and prove psychologically submissive in diplomacy or in intellectual life. Military training supplies a template, not a complete education. What counts is the capacity to preserve coherence across all domains of public life.
The critique of contemporary Israel follows from the framework. Zionism removed many of the formal humiliations of diaspora life. Israeli Jews no longer need to hide their identity to participate in society. Theodor Herzl’s (1860–1904) dream of restoring Jewish inner wholeness has been achieved in significant measure. Hazony holds that Israel has largely failed in the harder task of cultivating character beyond the military sphere.
The decline of the kibbutz carries symbolic weight in Hazony’s account. He calls the kibbutzim assembly lines for the production of character. Whatever their economic limits, they tried to build institutions oriented toward moral formation. Their collapse left Israel without a comparable framework. Universities became mass bureaucratic institutions ill-suited to individualized moral cultivation. The army remained almost the only sphere where character formation continued in any systematic way.
The overreliance on the military produces an imbalance in Israeli public life. Israelis show extraordinary battlefield resilience, especially under prolonged conflict and terrorism. Military courage does not translate automatically into political, intellectual, or economic steadiness. Hazony’s complaint about political leadership is severe. Leaders avoid speaking honestly about sacrifice, austerity, or prolonged hardship because they fear electoral backlash. Public rhetoric grows therapeutic and evasive. Governments promise rapid improvement rather than demand disciplined endurance.
The diagnosis identifies a wider weakness in modern democratic culture. Democracies struggle to sustain painful long-term policies because leaders and citizens orient themselves toward immediate comfort and emotional reassurance. A political system that cannot confront hardship honestly loses strategic coherence. In Hazony’s vocabulary, it loses character.
The cultural critique runs parallel. Israeli universities imitate foreign academic fashions. Religious institutions isolate themselves from broader intellectual engagement. The polarized tendencies of nineteenth-century Jewish Europe reappear in new forms. Assimilationist cosmopolitanism and defensive separatism return. What vanishes is the confident Jewish cultural mainstream capable of engaging external civilization without self-erasure.

‘Judaism and the Modern State’ (2005)

This essay works as intellectual history, polemic against secular historiography, and philosophical brief for a particular conception of religion. It attacks a foundational story of modernity: that the liberal state arose through emancipation from religious authority, and that Judaism stood outside the architecture of constitutional government. Hazony argues this account is a self-serving myth that erased the Hebraic sources of Western political thought and recast modern liberty as the product of secular rationalism alone.
The essay moves on two registers. The first is historical. Hazony recovers a suppressed tradition of Jewish and biblical political reasoning at the heart of early modern constitutional thought. The second is philosophical. He defends a model of religion compatible with free inquiry, pluralism, and constitutional argument. The two registers depend on each other. Hazony does not simply claim that Jewish texts influenced Hobbes and Locke. He claims that rabbinic habits of interpretation supplied the epistemic temperament that makes free political argument possible.
Hazony opens by attacking the standard academic account of modern political development. In that account, the architects of the modern state purged religion from public life after the religious wars and the abuses of medieval Christendom. Hobbes and Locke appear as secularizers who replaced revelation with reason. Judaism and the Hebrew Bible enter only as background, perhaps as ancient curiosities. Hazony captures the tone of this story in a single phrase. Modernity tells religious tradition, “We built this city without your help.”
The essay’s first achievement is to deny that this story is a neutral description. Hazony reads it as a civilizational myth lodged within modern academic institutions. He traces the myth through canonical histories of political thought, above all George H. Sabine’s (1880-1961) A History of Political Theory and Sheldon Wolin’s (1922-2015) Politics and Vision. Despite the saturation of Western political vocabulary by biblical language, both works almost entirely omit the Hebrew Bible from the genealogy of political ideas. Concepts of social justice, national liberation, civil disobedience, and human dignity appear as Greek or Enlightenment inheritances rather than as developments shaped by the Hebrew prophets and the rabbinic tradition.
Hazony’s treatment of Wolin is the sharpest passage in this opening section. Wolin reduces a millennium of Jewish political thought to three sentences and a charge of tribal ambition: that the messianic expectation was at bottom a desire for Jewish rule over the world. Hazony counters less by citing alternative passages than by showing what kind of compression is required to reduce centuries of reflection to ethnic triumphalism. The broader claim is that modern intellectual history treats Judaism as a primitive ethnic stage rather than as a contributor to universal political reason.
The philosophical sources of this exclusion emerge in Hazony’s account of Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831). Kant describes Judaism as a merely statutory order of political laws and denies that it amounts to a religion at all. Hegel describes Jewish consciousness as a state of alienation and abjectness preceding the spiritual reconciliation of Christianity. From these two thinkers, Hazony argues, German academic culture inherited a developmental schema in which Greece produced philosophy, Christianity produced spirit, and Judaism became either derivative or obsolete. Once that schema took hold, the exclusion of Jewish political thought from university curricula became self-reinforcing.
Hazony recovers political Hebraism. Against the secularization narrative, he argues that Protestant thinkers facing the universal claims of Rome turned not away from scripture but more deeply into it, and that they turned in particular to the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic sources. The search for models of sovereignty, republican government, constitutional order, and national independence drove them into Hebraic legal and political traditions.
Cornelius Bertram’s De Politia Judaeorum (1574), Petrus Cunaeus’s The Hebrew Republic (1617), and above all the corpus of John Selden (1584-1654) treated Jewish law, biblical history, and rabbinic interpretation as living political resources. Selden’s work on natural law, parliamentary authority, maritime sovereignty, and constitutional order draws on Talmudic and rabbinic sources at a scale modern readers find startling. Hazony catalogues Selden’s citations: Maimonides, Ibn Ezra, Kimche, Joseph Karo, Nahmanides, and many others. Selden’s The Law of Nature and of the Gentiles According to the Learning of the Jews (1640) runs to 840 pages on natural law and the Talmudic laws of Noah. His On the Assemblies and Legal Authorities of the Ancient Hebrews (1650-1655) extends to 1,130 pages on the Sanhedrin as a model parliament.
Hobbes and Locke routinely appear as founders of secular rationalism. Hazony presents them as thinkers immersed in scriptural and Hebraic reasoning. Hobbes devotes more than three hundred pages of Leviathan to biblical interpretation. The First Treatise of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is a theological and scriptural argument from start to finish. Hazony does not claim that these men were theocrats. He claims that modern constitutionalism arose through engagement with biblical and rabbinic sources rather than against them.
Hazony observes that universities teach only the supposedly secular portions of foundational texts and quietly drop the rest. Students read the first half of Leviathan and ignore the second half on scripture. They read the Second Treatise and bypass the First. Paperback editions print only the secular halves. Hebrew translations used in Israeli universities, Hazony notes, frequently omit the sections engaging Jewish sources altogether. This is more than selective emphasis. It is retrospective secularization of the canon through editorial subtraction. The texts come down to students already cleansed of the material that complicates the secular self-image.
Many central works of political Hebraism remain untranslated. They sit in Latin, with citations in Hebrew and Aramaic, accessible only to specialists. The result is a closed loop. Because the texts are inaccessible, the secular narrative goes unchallenged. Because the narrative dominates, no institutional incentive exists to translate the texts. Exclusion has both an ideological and a philological face.
Hazony distinguishes two conceptions of religion that yield two political possibilities. The first, central to much of historical Christianity, divides body from soul and the City of Man from the City of God. Within that frame, revelation arrives as a perfect incursion of absolute truth into a fallen world. The model is one of miraculous knowledge. Scripture transmits an unmediated divine content that breaks through the corruption of human reason.
Hazony argues that this conception creates a problem for constitutional politics. If revelation grants access to absolute truth, disagreement appears not as legitimate inquiry but as resistance to perfection. Public debate cannot proceed on equal terms once one party believes itself in possession of certainty. The institutional consequences follow. Inquisitions and indices do not arise only from political ambition. They arise from an epistemology of certainty that delegitimizes ordinary deliberation. Pluralistic deliberation cannot survive a participant who believes he holds infallible knowledge sufficient to override every competing argument. Once political reasoning is subordinated to claims of miraculous certainty, constitutional argument has nowhere to stand.
Against this model Hazony places the rabbinic tradition. The Talmudic principle that the Torah has seventy faces rules out singular interpretive certainty. Competing interpretations are not signs of failure. They are the permanent condition of human encounter with revelation. Appeals to heavenly authority are barred from legal adjudication. The law is not in heaven. Political decision proceeds through argument, majority opinion, and prudential judgment among fallible interpreters.
Hazony reframes rabbinic Judaism as a constitutional tradition. Interpretive plurality becomes the structural analogue of political pluralism. The Talmudic refusal to let revelation terminate debate produces the conditions under which public reasoning might continue without collapsing into relativism on one side or authoritarian certainty on the other.
The practical consequences appear in the Talmudic legal categories Hazony cites: tzarchei tzibur (needs of the public), darchei shalom (ways of peace), dina demalchuta (law of the land), kevod habriot (human dignity), migdar milta (something necessary for the public good). These categories let present political realities shape legal interpretation. Public necessity, civic peace, and pragmatic governance are not external pressures on the tradition. They are written into its interpretive grammar.
Hazony does not advocate theocracy. He argues that certain religious traditions carry internal resources for negotiating between inherited wisdom and changing political circumstances. Rabbinic jurisprudence, as he presents it, institutionalizes humility, argument, and prudential reasoning rather than the absolute claim.
The essay closes with a critique of the category of the secular. Hazony argues that secularization is not a neutral withdrawal from religion but a concept that depends on Christian metaphysical assumptions. The distinction between a spiritual realm and a secular realm presupposes the dualism that separates divine truth from ordinary political life. Reject the dualism and the secular ceases to exist as an autonomous protected sphere.
Hazony warns that religious communities remain susceptible to the intoxication of certainty. Treating scripture as a direct transmission of absolute truth can produce the same political damage as treating Marxist doctrine in that manner. The defense of rabbinic humility and interpretive pluralism functions as a warning against all forms of ideological absolutism, not as Jewish self-congratulation.
The essay is an argument about the fragility of civilizations that forget the sources of their own constitutional inheritance. Hazony presses the reader toward an uncomfortable possibility: that liberal societies continue to depend on interpretive habits and moral assumptions drawn from traditions they no longer understand and have begun to disown.

‘Does the Bible Have a Political Teaching?’ (2006)

Hazony says the principal narrative of the Hebrew Bible, running from Genesis through Kings, presents a coherent political teaching that rejects two extremes. The first is the imperial state of the ancient Near East, embodied by Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. The second is anarchy, embodied by Israel during the period of the Judges. Between these stands the biblical ideal: a limited national state ruled by a king “whose heart is not lifted above his brothers.” Such a state restrains its territorial ambitions, the size of its army, and its fiscal demands on its people. The essay concludes that the collapse of the Israelite kingdom is attributed by the biblical authors to the abandonment of this teaching by Israel’s own kings.
The argument restores political seriousness to a text that modern scholarship has often treated as theological poetry, sacred history, or anthology of cultic regulation. It offers a reading of the canon that takes its narrative structure as deliberate rather than accidental. It supplies a framework where biblical Israel becomes an interlocutor for modern constitutional thought rather than a prelude to it.

‘Jerusalem and Carthage’ (2006)

Hazony attempts to redraw the intellectual map through which the West has long read the Hebrew Bible. His central claim is direct. The “Jerusalem” invoked from Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220) through Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is not Jerusalem. It is Carthage.
The essay is intellectual history, theological polemic, epistemological reconstruction, and political philosophy. Hazony argues that a particular Christian tradition associated with Tertullian created a conception of faith defined by doctrinal closure, hostility to open inquiry, and the celebration of belief precisely insofar as that belief appears irrational. Later writers then projected this conception backward onto the Hebrew Bible, producing the durable but mistaken dichotomy between biblical faith and Greek reason. Hazony’s counter-thesis is that the Hebrew Scriptures present a different intellectual orientation altogether, one grounded in inquiry, historical experience, practical reasoning, political judgment, and an unfinished search for truth.
The argument turns on Tertullian, though Hazony treats him less as a theologian than as a symbolic representative of an epistemological posture. Tertullian’s famous question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”, serves Hazony as the founding statement of a worldview that opposes revelation and philosophy categorically. His “rule of faith” terminates inquiry through the establishment of a definitive catechism. Hazony emphasizes that Tertullian does not merely subordinate reason to revelation. He attacks the independent pursuit of truth as such. Once the believer accepts the authoritative paragraph of doctrine handed down by the Church, further inquiry endangers his soul because it threatens his faith. Philosophy stands condemned as the art of building up and pulling down arguments. Christians must avoid knowledge that might destabilize belief.
The culmination of this posture appears in Tertullian’s notorious declaration regarding Christ’s death and resurrection: “It is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.” Hazony reads this statement not as rhetorical excess but as the distilled essence of Carthaginian faith. Truth finds validation through its contradiction of ordinary human standards of reason and experience. Kierkegaard’s account of the absurd as the object of faith, and C.S. Lewis’s (1898–1963) characterization of Christ’s claims as asinine fatuity absent divinity, extend this line into the modern period and demonstrate its durability.
The Hebrew Scriptures nowhere glorify irrationality, celebrate absurdity, or present piety as submission to propositions recognized as repugnant to understanding. The God of the Hebrew Bible does not demand assent to epistemological impossibility. Biblical religion belongs to a different intellectual world.
Hazony observes that the Hebrew Bible resists reduction to catechism. Unlike Tertullian’s rule of faith, the Bible presents no definitive and exhaustive list of propositions whose acceptance terminates inquiry. The canon, Hazony contends, was assembled in a manner that frustrates doctrinal closure. The observation cuts deeper than a remark about textual diversity. The form of the Hebrew Bible reflects a realistic and tragic epistemology. Truth is hard to obtain. Man encounters it only partially and through struggle. The plurality of voices within the canon embodies the nature of the search. Hazony cites the divergent political theologies that coexist within the canon. Daniel’s politics differ sharply from Esther’s. Isaiah’s universal vision differs from Micah’s pluralism, where each nation walks with its own god while Israel walks with Him. Joel’s vision of judgment on the battlefield, where the nations beat their plowshares into swords, differs from Isaiah’s peaceable eschatology, where the same instruments turn to ploughs. The Bible, Hazony writes, is an artful compendium rather than a catechism.
From this emerges Hazony’s strongest conceptual formulation, that biblical religion forces man to traverse what he calls an epistemic jungle. Truth resides in the world but lies obscured by conflicting traditions, false prophets, corrupted institutions, inherited illusions, and human frailty. The biblical man cannot escape this thicket through submission to a single authoritative formula. He must hack through competing claims in search of what endures. Hazony describes the world of the prophets as one where tradition, prophecy, and scriptural interpretation have grown unstable and contested. The metaphor reveals why the Hebrew Bible cannot accommodate Tertullianic religion. Carthage seeks epistemological closure. Jerusalem dwells in interpretive struggle. The variegated nature of the biblical canon is not editorial accident. It is the literary embodiment of biblical epistemology.
Hazony’s treatment of truth deserves attention. Biblical emet does not correspond neatly to Greek metaphysical notions of truth as abstract correspondence. Biblical truth carries the connotations of reliability, steadfastness, and trustworthiness. What is true is what stands in reality, what proves enduring within historical experience. This conception generates what Hazony calls Hebrew empiricism. Biblical claims find their authentication not through absurdity or logical impossibility but through reliability in practice. The prophets repeatedly insist that God’s word will stand while falsehood collapses. Deuteronomy proposes an empirical criterion for prophecy. If the prediction fails to occur, the prophet has not spoken in His name.
The claim is radical. It introduces a partially falsifiable dimension into biblical religion. Hazony’s prophets do not demand belief insulated from historical reality. Their legitimacy remains vulnerable to experience and outcome. The truth of God’s word stays inseparable from its practical success and historical endurance. Hazony’s biblical world is therefore anti-utopian. A failed prediction discredits a prophet. Outcomes shape authority.
Hazony argues that the Hebrew Bible portrays men as capable of moral and political insight apart from direct revelation. The Hebrew midwives Shifra and Pua defy Pharaoh’s genocidal command without prophetic instruction. Pharaoh’s daughter saves Moses through independent moral judgment, in contravention of her father’s decree. Moses kills the Egyptian taskmaster before hearing God’s voice at the burning bush. The text does not condemn these figures for acting autonomously. It celebrates them because they reason and judge correctly before revelation intervenes. The Bible repeatedly presents such men and women as exemplars. Jeremiah urges the people to stand on the highways and discern which road is good. Proverbs depicts wisdom crying aloud in the streets. Biblical wisdom comes through observation, experience, and reflection on ordinary life.
The examples Hazony selects are strikingly empirical. Drunkenness draws condemnation because it destroys judgment and produces addiction. Adultery draws condemnation because it produces jealousy, vengeance, and social ruin. Idolatry draws condemnation because it attributes divine power to objects visibly incapable of helping themselves. The arguments work from lived reality rather than from abstract metaphysical deduction. The distinction between biblical wisdom and philosophy therefore begins to blur. Hazony argues that the Hebrew Bible possesses more affinity with philosophical inquiry than Tertullianic theology allows. Biblical religion encourages the search for truth rather than abolishing it.
The theme reaches its sharpest expression in Hazony’s treatment of prophecy and divine encounter. In the Hebrew Bible, revelation often depends on human initiative. God waits for man to seek. Moses turns aside toward the burning bush before God calls his name. Isaiah volunteers after hearing the divine question, “Who shall I send?” Jeremiah hears the question repeatedly: “What do you see?” God promises Jeremiah that if he calls out, hidden things will come revealed to him. The pattern matters to Hazony’s argument. The biblical God is not a deity demanding passive acceptance of a finished catechism. He longs for questioning, initiative, searching, and response. Revelation here is dialogical rather than unilateral.
The dialogical structure culminates in the Bible’s tradition of disputation with God. Abraham argues against the destruction of Sodom. Moses challenges His wrath against Israel on two occasions. Job contests divine justice. Jacob wrestles with the angel and receives the name Israel because he has striven with God and with men and prevailed. The narratives form the capstone of Hazony’s biblical anthropology. The biblical man is no passive recipient of commands. He is an active moral agent expected to struggle courageously even before God Himself. Piety consists not in intellectual submission but in the willingness to seek, question, judge, and contend. The political consequence runs deep. Hazony’s biblical vision is anti-authoritarian at the root. The Hebrew Bible does not idealize passive obedience. It valorizes strenuous moral agency. Men must stand by truth as they understand it, even under conditions of uncertainty and danger. Job’s declaration that he will maintain his own ways before Him becomes emblematic of biblical integrity.
Hazony rejects the assumption that law represents submission to arbitrary authority or the suppression of reason. Law is instead an instrument of intergenerational reasoning. Men cannot refound society from first principles each morning. The accumulated wisdom of previous generations therefore proves indispensable. Sound reasoning requires not only generating new arguments but understanding the inherited judgments embedded within law, custom, and historical memory. The theme connects the essay to Hazony’s later defense of nationalism and traditionalist conservatism. His biblical epistemology resembles common-law reasoning more than Cartesian rationalism. Truth emerges historically through inherited practices tested over time rather than through deductive systems constructed abstractly. Hazony’s Hebrew Bible thus reads as a profoundly anti-rationalist text without slipping into irrationalism.
The essay preserves a tension between epistemic humility and confidence in historical judgment. Hazony refuses both rationalist certainty and postmodern skepticism. Truth exists. Men can approach it. They do so imperfectly, historically, and through struggle. The search for wisdom never ends because finite creatures remain vulnerable to illusion, corruption, and error. The metaphorical geography carries the argument’s weight. Jerusalem and Carthage represent rival civilizations of knowledge. Carthage seeks certainty through doctrinal closure and submission to authority. Jerusalem embraces inquiry, historical experience, disputation, prudence, and interpretive struggle.
The Hebrew Bible, on Hazony’s reading, portrays truth as struggle rather than as possession. Man seeks it through memory, law, argument, experience, courage, and interpretation. Even revelation does not end the search. The biblical hero is neither the passive believer nor the detached philosopher. He is the man willing to wrestle with reality, with history, with his fellow man, and with God Himself in pursuit of what stands true. The name Israel encodes the condition: a people defined by striving, not by submission.

‘The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture’ (2012)

Hazony claims that the Hebrew Scriptures have been misread for centuries because Western intellectual culture inherited a false split between reason and revelation. Once classified as revelation, the Bible was barred from rational inquiry and philosophical discourse. Greek texts became “philosophy.” Hebrew texts became “religion.” Hazony aims to reverse this civilizational sorting and recover the Hebrew Bible as a coherent work of moral, political, epistemological, and metaphysical reasoning.
The scale of his ambition sets the book apart from conventional biblical scholarship. He offers more than a literary reading of scripture, and more than a defense of religion against secular criticism. He works to reposition the Hebrew Bible within the canon of works that form the intellectual foundations of the West. The book intervenes in biblical studies, intellectual history, political theory, epistemology, and the philosophy of culture. It also polemicizes against the structure of the modern university and against the Enlightenment narrative that elevated Greek rationalism while sidelining Hebrew thought as irrational or pre-philosophical.
Hazony’s argument begins with a critique of the familiar opposition between reason and revelation. The Hebrew Bible came centuries before this split emerged within Christian theology and Enlightenment philosophy. The line between rational philosophy and divinely revealed truth does not come from the biblical world. Later traditions imposed it retrospectively on Hebrew texts to define Christianity against pagan philosophy, and later still Enlightenment thinkers used it to discredit biblical religion altogether.
This critique grounds the rest of the book. Once the Bible got classified as revelation, generations of scholars stopped reading it as a source of serious reflection on ethics, politics, metaphysics, and human nature. Greek philosophy carried the associations of rational inquiry, universal principles, and intellectual sophistication. Biblical literature became tied to miracle, obedience, irrationality, and tribal myth. Hazony returns again and again to an asymmetry: divine speech in Greek philosophical texts gets read symbolically or metaphorically, while divine speech in biblical texts gets read as evidence of irrationality. His extended comparison between Jeremiah and Parmenides drives the point home.
Pre-Socratic philosophers often portrayed their ideas as deriving from divine revelation or communion with gods. Parmenides receives metaphysical truth from a goddess. Socrates hears a divine voice. Yet these figures sit secure in the philosophical canon. Biblical prophets get excluded from philosophy because they speak in the name of God. Hazony treats the distinction as historically arbitrary and intellectually inconsistent. He does not deny revelation. He challenges the assumption that revelation and rational inquiry exclude each other.
The argument leads him to a broader proposal: read the Hebrew Bible as philosophy. Read it as a work that advances general claims about human life through narrative, prophetic speech, poetry, and historical reflection rather than through abstract deductive systems. The Bible does not seek to produce a Platonic metaphysics or Aristotelian taxonomy. Its reasoning is historical, narrative, and empirical.
The emphasis on narrative reasoning counts among the book’s strongest contributions. Hazony argues that biblical stories function as “instructional narratives.” They are not mere chronicles of sacred history but constructed arguments about recurring patterns of human behavior. The Bible teaches through examples, typologies, and historical episodes rather than through formal propositions.
His strongest case here turns on the recurring biblical theme of liberated peoples seeking visible idols. Aaron’s golden calf and Gideon’s golden ephod are not isolated acts of disobedience. They generalize an observation about political psychology. Human beings often fear the burdens of freedom and seek tangible, stable authorities who can relieve them of uncertainty and responsibility. Biblical narrative plays a role analogous to the thought experiments of political philosophy. Instead of constructing hypothetical social contracts or states of nature, the Hebrew Bible dramatizes recurring tendencies within human communities.
The approach lets Hazony reinterpret biblical history as a sustained reflection on political order and human nature. The narratives of Genesis through Kings become a political philosophy of nationhood, leadership, covenant, and anti-imperial resistance. Israel is not merely a religious community. The Bible portrays it as a political society working through perennial questions of authority, law, monarchy, factionalism, and centralized power.
Hazony contrasts the decentralized tribal-national order of Israel with the universal empires of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. The imperial state, in his account, attempts to impose uniformity on human diversity through coercive centralization. The biblical alternative is a limited national polity rooted in covenant, shared historical memory, and distributed authority.
The Hebrew Bible subjects the king to the same laws that govern ordinary Israelites. The king is not divine. He is neither absolute sovereign nor metaphysical embodiment of the state. Biblical political order rests on a precarious balance among different forms of leadership and social authority. Hazony’s discussion of the “house of Joseph” and the “house of Judah” makes the point concrete. Joseph stands for administrative competence, material organization, and statecraft. Judah stands for moral legitimacy, covenantal continuity, and political accountability. The health of the Israelite polity rests not on the triumph of one principle over the other, but on holding equilibrium between them.
Themes that come to define his political writing appear in embryonic form: skepticism toward universal empire, preference for national particularity, distrust of centralized administrative systems, emphasis on inherited tradition, suspicion of abstract rationalism, and preference for historically evolved institutions over universal ideological programs.
The Hebrew Bible repeatedly privileges the virtues of the shepherd over those of the settled agrarian empire.
The farmer stands for political centralization, administrative stability, hierarchy, and submission to the state. Egypt and Babylon become paradigmatic farmer civilizations. The shepherd stands for mobility, independence, initiative, adaptability, and resistance to domination. Abraham, Moses, and David are all shepherd figures. Their moral excellence lies not in passive obedience but in the willingness to challenge prevailing authority and seek better outcomes for human beings.
The distinction works at three levels at once: anthropology, political theory, and civilizational critique. Hazony identifies a moral orientation tied to social independence and covenantal responsibility. The shepherd ethic values initiative over bureaucratic conformity and moral courage over administrative stability. The contrast quietly shapes the book’s political imagination.
His treatment of epistemology carries equal weight. A central philosophical claim: the Hebrew Bible embodies a form of empiricism distinct from Greek rationalism. Greek philosophy, in its Platonic forms, seeks timeless truths through abstraction, deduction, and logical systematization. Biblical thought seeks wisdom through historical experience, observation, and practical consequences.
“Biblical empiricism” clarifies that Hazony proposes an alternative theory of knowledge. The biblical authors understood reason as a practical faculty for discovering what promotes human flourishing through lived experience and historical testing. History becomes the laboratory where moral and political truths get verified.
This helps explain why biblical literature takes narrative form. Stories are not ornamental containers for doctrine. They are the primary medium through which human beings learn political and ethical truths. Abraham’s failures, Moses’ frustrations, David’s sins, Solomon’s compromises, and Israel’s national catastrophes serve collectively as empirical evidence about human nature and political order.
Hazony’s interpretation of the Hebrew concept of emet (truth) deepens the framework further. Biblical truth differs from the Greek correspondence theory long dominant within Western philosophy. In Greek metaphysics, truth applies mainly to statements that accurately match reality. In the Hebrew Bible, truth is a quality of things.
A road, a covenant, a man, or a seed is “true” if it proves reliable, enduring, and faithful to its nature across changing circumstances. Truth has less to do with abstract propositional accuracy and more to do with trustworthiness, durability, and covenantal reliability. The shift carries large implications for Hazony’s broader project. It moves metaphysics from static abstraction into historical continuity and practical fidelity.
Hazony’s conception of truth critiques modern rationalism, technocracy, and ideological universalism. If truth means reliability demonstrated over time, then inherited traditions, historical experience, and social continuity carry epistemic authority unavailable within purely deductive systems. The influence of Burkean conservatism and common-law reasoning shows here. Wisdom emerges not from constructing perfect systems from scratch but from preserving and refining practices that have proved reliable across generations.
The emphasis on historical verification also explains his suspicion of revolutionary politics and universal ideological projects. Political systems detached from inherited historical experience are epistemologically fragile because they have not yet proved themselves under real human conditions. Biblical thought, in his reading, is anti-utopian.
Whether or not one accepts his conclusions, the book reopens questions much of the modern academy had prematurely closed. Why should Plato and Parmenides count as philosophers while Isaiah and Jeremiah count merely as prophets? Why do Greek invocations of divine inspiration get read charitably while biblical invocations get read dismissively? Why has the Hebrew Bible, despite its enormous influence on Western civilization, remained largely excluded from philosophy departments and histories of political thought?

‘Newtonian Explanatory Reduction and Hume’s System of the Sciences’ (2014)

This is a revisionist contribution to Hume scholarship that seeks to overturn a dominant assumption about David Hume’s (1711-1776) philosophical project. Rather than treating Hume as a skeptic who dismantled the pretensions of metaphysics and systematic philosophy, Hazony argues that Hume understood himself to construct a comprehensive empirical system modeled on Newtonian science.

‘Imagined Causes: Hume’s Conception of Objects’ (2014)

Hazony reviews Stefanie Rocknak’s book with the generosity philosophers reserve for books that shift their field. The review runs only a few pages, but it carries the weight of a programmatic statement. He treats Rocknak’s volume as the most important book on David Hume (1711-1776) published in over a decade, placing it alongside Don Garrett’s Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy and David Owen’s Hume’s Reason as a third pillar in the ongoing reconstruction of Hume’s cognitive psychology.
Scholars have struggled to give a unified account of how Hume’s Treatise treats the construction of objects, time, identity, and the self. Hazony argues that Rocknak offers a single answer to all four problems. The same imaginative operation that explains the persistence of physical things also explains the continuity of the self, the structure of temporal experience, and the formation of abstract ideas. Rocknak tracks it through four passages of the Treatise where Hume describes, in slightly different language, the same cognitive process.

‘God and Politics in Esther’ (2015)

Hazony reads Esther as a work of political philosophy, exile theology, and national realism rather than a liturgical artifact or folkloric account of Jewish survival.
His principal claim holds that Esther is the Hebrew Bible’s definitive meditation on politics under exile. Earlier biblical narratives revolve around sovereignty, prophecy, covenantal law, and territorial nationhood. Esther departs from this pattern. It depicts a Jewish people dispersed within a foreign imperial system, stripped of sovereign institutions, and compelled to secure survival through political intelligence, strategic influence, coalition-building, and calculated initiative rather than miraculous deliverance. The striking absence of God’s name from the text, long regarded as Esther’s theological puzzle, becomes for Hazony the organizing principle of the narrative. The book addresses a world where prophecy has ceased, miracles have receded, and divine providence operates indirectly through the courage and political action of men.
This thesis allows Hazony to reinterpret Esther as a sustained inquiry into the workings of power. The Persian Empire is a constructed political architecture. Hazony presents Persia as a vast imperial order at first marked by unstable pluralism, elite competition, and a chaotic multiplicity of advisors, courtiers, and rival factions. The system is corrupt, arbitrary, and often grotesque, yet it retains a measure of internal friction generated by competing interests within the court.
Haman’s elevation transforms this structure. By placing Haman “above all other princes,” Ahashverosh attempts to replace political plurality with centralized ideological enforcement. Hazony reads this as the transition from unstable imperial politics to something approaching totalitarianism. Haman’s rise suppresses competing perspectives in favor of a single absolutized worldview enforced through terror. The danger lies not in Haman’s personal hatred of Jews alone but in the elimination of institutional complexity.
Here Hazony introduces a central conceptual innovation: his political reading of idolatry as the absolutization of partial truth into total truth. Men grasp only fragments of reality, “one-seventieth” of the whole, yet idolatrous politics emerges when rulers mistake their limited perspective for universal certainty. Haman thus becomes the archetype not only of anti-Semitism but of ideological monism. He embodies the political temptation to eliminate ambiguity, disagreement, and rival centers of authority in pursuit of total control.
This reading lends the Persian court a modern resonance. Hazony links Hamanic politics to systems that seek to abolish institutional friction and intermediate powers in favor of centralized ideological uniformity. The book functions not only as biblical commentary but as a meditation on modern political pathologies, including totalitarianism, technocratic universalism, and ideological states that claim exhaustive knowledge of historical or moral truth.
Hazony’s analysis of Ahashverosh extends this political psychology. The king appears as a ruler driven by “appetite for rule.” Drawing on classical accounts of spirit, honor, domination, and humiliation, Hazony argues that political life follows emotional and psychological forces more than detached rational calculation. The six-month feast becomes not ornamental excess but a theatrical performance of imperial control designed to produce emotional submission and admiration among the king’s subjects.
The Vashti episode delivers the first major revelation of the regime’s true character. Ahashverosh’s humiliation at Vashti’s refusal exposes the fragility beneath imperial spectacle. His rage carries more than personal anger. It marks the crisis of a ruler whose emotional dependence on domination has met public challenge. Memuchan’s response converts a domestic embarrassment into an empire-wide political principle. The matter ceases to be marital conflict and becomes the preservation of hierarchical authority throughout the empire. The resulting decree, demanding that “every man should rule in his own house,” exposes the regime’s deeper logic: power persists by distributing subordinate domination downward through the social order.
At the center of the narrative stand Mordechai and Esther, whom Hazony refuses to sentimentalize as passive victims or uncomplicated moral exemplars. They emerge instead as sophisticated political actors operating within the perilous conditions of imperial exile. Hazony’s treatment of Mordechai is important because it overturns simple assumptions about Jewish passivity under foreign rule.
Mordechai appears compliant at first. He permits Esther to enter the royal court, instructs her to conceal her Jewish identity, and seems to accept Persian rule. Hazony argues that this surface submission conceals a far more strategic orientation. Mordechai immerses himself in the political world of the capital, “sitting in the king’s gate” and positioning himself within networks of information, influence, and elite rivalry. His exposure of the assassination plot against Ahashverosh follows not from naive loyalty to tyranny but from a calculated accumulation of political capital.
Here Hazony develops his theory of “political favor.” Exile communities lacking sovereign institutions can survive only by acquiring influence near the centers of power. Passive obedience accomplishes little because rulers can always replace submissive servants. What rulers value are men capable of advancing regime interests without direct supervision. Mordechai’s intervention thus demonstrates his usefulness as a political asset. He becomes someone the king can rely on even in moments of danger.
Hazony places this strategy within a larger biblical pattern by comparing Mordechai to Joseph and Daniel. Like Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon and Persia, Mordechai rises through mastery of imperial politics rather than open rebellion. Yet Hazony introduces a key distinction central to his political philosophy: the “Joseph-Moses” dichotomy.
Joseph represents the art of political favor perfected. He flourishes within Pharaoh’s system, acquires immense authority, and uses imperial power to protect his people during famine. Hazony argues that Joseph remains trapped within the “house of bondage.” He becomes indispensable to Pharaoh while never transcending dependence on imperial structures. He gains influence but not freedom.
Mordechai and Esther advance beyond the Joseph model by combining insider influence with eventual confrontation and disobedience. They first master the operations of political favor and only later turn that accumulated power against the system once Jewish survival demands it. Hazony synthesizes the Joseph archetype with the “road of Moses,” who confronts Pharaoh and leads a movement toward independent political agency.
Hazony rejects both quietistic assimilation and romantic revolutionary posturing. His ideal political actor neither withdraws from institutions nor performs futile gestures of purity. Mordechai and Esther embody a strategic realism. They understand timing, institutional vulnerability, and the necessity of building leverage before confrontation becomes possible.
Haman is not merely a bigot harboring irrational prejudice against Jews. He represents what Hazony calls the “Amalekite paradigm,” a recurring political type marked by predatory violence against the weak. Drawing on biblical depictions of Amalek attacking “the faltering behind,” Hazony argues that Amalekite politics seeks to crush communal spirit by targeting vulnerable populations and symbolic points of weakness.
The Amalekite-Pharaonic ruler rejects the “fear of God,” which for Hazony signifies recognition of transcendent moral limits on political power. Such rulers embrace the conviction that “crime pays,” that power alone determines legitimacy. This framework allows Hazony to read anti-Semitism as part of a broader political anthropology rather than ethnic hatred alone. Anti-Semitism emerges as one expression of predatory domination unconstrained by moral limits external to the state or ruler.
Hazony’s realism insists on the necessity of power, strategy, and deterrence, he argues that legitimate politics requires acknowledgment of transcendent limits beyond human will. The “fear of God” operates as the restraint that prevents political appetite from degenerating into pure predation.
This tension becomes pronounced in Hazony’s treatment of the Jews’ War near the close of the narrative. The slaughter of seventy-five thousand enemies has long troubled interpreters who wish to reconcile Esther with modern moral sensibilities. Hazony confronts the question without apology. He reads the violence not as revenge or bloodlust but as a calculated destruction of anti-Semitic political capacity designed to establish long-term deterrence.
Invoking Machiavellian logic, Hazony argues that restrained or symbolic retaliation might encourage future aggression by preserving enemy hopes of eventual revenge. Under conditions of existential vulnerability, overwhelming force becomes a political necessity. The Jews’ victory therefore marks not only physical survival but the restoration of political subjecthood. The Jews cease to be passive objects awaiting extermination and become agents capable of imposing consequences on their enemies.
Hazony refuses liberal sentimentalism about power, vulnerability, and deterrence. Jewish survival in hostile political environments has often depended on credible demonstrations of strength. Hazony insists that communities unable to defend themselves eventually become victims of those who can.

‘Newton and Hume’ (2016)

Hazony and Eric Schliesser’s chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Hume reframes a familiar story. David Hume has long been read either as the apostle who carried Isaac Newton (1642-1727) into the science of man or as the skeptic whose corrosive arguments threatened the new natural philosophy from outside. Hazony and Schliesser show that Hume inherits Newton’s method while undermining Newton’s metaphysics. The Treatise of Human Nature models its explanatory architecture on the Principia and turns that architecture against Newton’s most ambitious claims about space, time, geometry, universality, and force.

‘Three Replies: On Revelation, Natural Law and Jewish Autonomy in Theology’ (2016)

Hazony responds to four reviewers of The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture and uses the occasion to clarify the philosophical commitments running through his earlier book, and the document offers a compressed map of the positions that later shape his political and theological writings.
The essay proceeds in three sections, each centered on a question. The first asks how to read the Hebrew Bible if the analytic distinction between revelation and reason is alien to its authors. The second asks whether the Mosaic law qualifies as natural law and what such a claim might mean. The third asks what theological autonomy requires of Jewish thinkers writing in a Christian-saturated academic culture. The three questions belong together. Each one pushes against a habit of abstraction that, for Hazony, distorts what the biblical writers thought they were doing.
Christina Brinks asked why Hazony bothers to argue that the Bible can be read as a work of reason, when the cleaner move is to discard the reason-revelation distinction altogether. Hazony agrees with her in principle. His reply turns on a sociological observation: the distinction is too deeply embedded in Christian theology, and in Western thought after it, to be left untreated. He cites Aquinas (1225-1274), Calvin (1509-1564), and Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932) as figures who insist on the difference between knowledge given by revelation and knowledge generated by human reason. Plantinga’s formulation receives the most attention. On Plantinga’s account, the principal author of Scripture is God, and a passage’s meaning may exceed what Isaiah or Jeremiah had in mind. Hazony reads this as a hermeneutic that empties the prophets of their intellectual agency. Once the human author’s intent stops constraining interpretation, the prophet becomes a vessel, and his philosophy disappears.
This is a strong claim, and Hazony pushes it hard. He treats Isaiah and Jeremiah as thinkers with positions of their own, comparable to Plato or Parmenides. The aim is to recover what these men were trying to teach about politics, ethics, metaphysics, and God. That recovery cannot proceed if the interpreter assumes the human author was a placeholder for later doctrine.
Hazony then turns to Richard Swinburne (b. 1934), whose account of revelation he treats as representative of the standard view. Swinburne’s account has three parts: God communicates knowledge directly to a prophet; later hearers must accept the message on the prophet’s authority; and revealed knowledge differs in kind from knowledge available through ordinary experience. Hazony rejects all three.
The strongest counterexample is Deuteronomy 18. Moses tells the people that a prophet whose predictions fail has spoken on his own initiative, not for God. The test is empirical. The same point appears in 1 Kings 22 and Jeremiah 28. Hazony reads these passages as evidence that biblical prophecy is closer to science than to fideism. The prophet examines the moral and political consequences of human conduct and tries to anticipate what will follow.
Hazony proposes that revelation is not an exotic mode of cognition. It is the experience of insight at the limit of one’s own intellectual control. Poets and philosophers know the experience. A thinker wrestling with a problem may receive an answer that arrives from outside the calculating self. The ancients credited the Muses or the gods. Hazony argues that the prophets are doing something similar: they describe these moments as God’s word because God’s word is what such moments produce when the insight tracks reality.
Hazony handles the punitive provisions with care. The law’s preference for capital punishment and lashes belongs to a period when imprisonment was not economically feasible. Rabbinic tradition long ago suspended most of these punishments. He treats the law as flexible at the level of application and constant in its purposes.
Samuel Lebens accused Hazony of writing an anti-Christian book. Hazony’s reply is patient at the level of tone and unsparing at the level of substance.
He frames the issue through Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993). Soloveitchik argued in “Confrontation” that Jewish theology preserves its integrity only by refusing to translate its categories into Christian terms for the sake of friendly exchange. Hazony agrees. He cites the cases of Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) and Martin Buber (1878-1965) as warnings: both men adjusted Jewish thought to a Christian and post-Christian German environment, and neither secured the acceptance he sought. The accommodation, in Hazony’s reading, produced a Judaism that mirrored its surroundings rather than offering an alternative to them.
The substantive dispute with Lebens concerns the binding of Isaac. Lebens claimed that a Christological reading of the Akeida is “prominent” in rabbinic tradition, and that Hazony failed to appreciate this dimension of the text. Hazony pushes back on both halves of the claim. The Talmud and Midrash describe God looking upon “the ashes of Isaac” on the altar, but they present these ashes as eternal: still on the Temple Mount in the time of David, still there after the Babylonian destruction. They cannot be the physical remains of a body that Abraham burned and God then restored. They are closer to a permanent trace of what almost happened. Hazony reads the image as a sign of trauma and of what the patriarchs suffered for God’s sake. He concedes that medieval poems from the Crusade period do treat Isaac as killed and resurrected. He treats these as marginal, not as evidence of an underlying Jewish theology of substitutionary atonement.
Hazony enlists Shalom Spiegel (1899-1984) here. Spiegel’s The Last Trial argues that the Christian doctrine of atonement through the sacrifice of a son is a return to the pagan practices the Akeida set out to discredit.

‘The Bible and Leo Strauss’ (2016)

Hazony responds in Perspectives on Political Science 45 (Summer 2016) to symposium papers by Jeffrey Bernstein, Jules Gleicher, and David Schaefer on Hazony’s earlier book, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. The piece operates simultaneously as philosophical rejoinder, intellectual history, and curricular polemic. Its target is the historiographical settlement that places the origin of political philosophy in Athens and treats Jerusalem as a theological appendix or pre-philosophical foil. Its chief antagonist is Leo Strauss, whose authority within the academic study of political philosophy continues to support the exclusion Hazony seeks to overturn.
The argument moves on three planes. The first concerns the proper definition of philosophy. The second concerns the textual character of the Hebrew Bible. The third concerns the metaphysical conditions under which a work might qualify as philosophical. Hazony grants Strauss his framing of the question and then disputes Strauss on each plane.
Strauss’s position rests on a historiography where philosophy enters the world through the discovery of nature. Pre-philosophical societies, on this account, equate the good with the ancestral. The first philosophers distinguish between what holds by convention and what holds by nature. They appeal from inherited authority to a standard that obtains universally and necessarily. The Hebrew Bible, Strauss claims, never makes this transition. Biblical Hebrew lacks a word for nature. The Bible commands obedience to a covenantal law rather than an inquiry into intrinsic order. Its God is, in Strauss’s phrase, “absolutely free” and unpredictable, and thus has no place in the order of “necessary and therefore eternal” things that philosophy presupposes.
From these premises Strauss draws a curricular conclusion. The Bible may serve as background reading, but it does not belong in the history of political philosophy. The standard text Strauss coedited with Joseph Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy, opens with Plato (in the second edition) or with Thucydides (in the third). The Hebrew prophets do not appear.
Hazony argues that Strauss’s exclusion reproduces, in attenuated form, the de-Judaized historiography of Western thought constructed by the German Enlightenment, an inheritance from Luther’s polemic against the Hebrew Bible’s relevance to Christianity. Strauss, a proud Jew working against the anti-Jewish currents of German academia, restored Maimonides and medieval Jewish thought to philosophical respectability. Yet on the question of the Bible he conserved the judgment that animated the tradition he resisted. The position deserves reconsideration not because Strauss was insincere but because the inherited assumptions on which his exclusion rests have grown harder to defend.
If philosophy begins with the rejection of inherited convention in the name of a higher standard, then the Hebrew Bible contains figures who do that. Hazony develops a typological reading of the Biblical History from Genesis through Kings, dividing its leading characters into shepherds (Abel, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David) and farmers (Cain, Noah, Isaac, Joseph, Saul). The categories are not occupational descriptors but moral and political types. The farmer represents piety, stability, and submission to inherited authority. The shepherd represents independence, departure, and the willingness to challenge ancestral conviction.
Abraham leaves his father’s house and rejects Babylonian idolatry. Moses repudiates Pharaoh’s civilization and refuses to inherit Egyptian power. Jacob struggles with both men and God, and the name Israel commemorates that struggle. Most pointedly, Abraham challenges divine judgment at Sodom: “Will the judge of all the earth not do justice?” The interrogation of God on grounds of justice is decisive for Hazony’s argument. Abraham appeals beyond authority, even divine authority, to an independent standard of right. The Biblical hero, on this reading, exhibits a structural resemblance to the philosopher as Strauss describes him.
The typology has a second register. Hazony does not romanticize the shepherd. Civilization requires the farmer, who preserves and transmits what the shepherd discovers. Israel on its land is an agrarian polity. The Torah aims to inculcate the shepherd’s spirit within a society organized around the farmer’s virtues. Abraham digs the wells; Isaac digs them again under the same names. The Biblical teaching seeks a synthesis between inquiry and order. It rejects the proposition that intellectual independence and a society of piety must be at permanent war.
Strauss’s philological argument from the absence of a Hebrew term for nature does not carry the weight he places on it. Concepts often precede the specialized terminology that later organizes them. Biblical Hebrew also has no word equivalent to religion, yet the Bible addresses what subsequent thought calls religious questions. Hazony notes that the word yetzer, a cognate of the verb yatzar (“to form”), refers to the form or tendency of a thing, and might serve where Strauss looks for a missing term.
That idiom is the recurring contrast between what is right “in God’s eyes” and what is right “in the eyes of men.” Hazony assembles the relevant passages from Judges, Jeremiah, Proverbs, and the Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel. The phrase functions as the Biblical analogue to the Greek distinction between nature and convention. Human societies mistake local custom for justice. The view from above, named through the metaphor of divine sight, signifies an objective standard against which any society might be measured. This standard is not arbitrary, since Scripture portrays the one God as having ordered all creation, including human social arrangements, according to laws conducive to the flourishing of each kind of thing. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel address God’s law to the nations, not Israel alone. Hazony argues, with some scholarly support from Helmut Koester, that the Hebrew Bible may be the oldest extant source for what later thinkers call natural law. The Latin terminology lex naturalis enters Western discourse through Philo of Alexandria, whose project translates Mosaic law for a Greek audience.
The second prong of Hazony’s argument concerns the textual structure of the Hebrew Bible. Strauss reads Scripture as a unified communication demanding obedient love. Hazony replies that the central Biblical text is unprecedented in the ancient Near East because it embeds a legal code within a long narrative that repeatedly broaches questions of justice, authority, compromise, and interpretation. Why does the Mosaic teaching arrive in this form rather than as a freestanding code with a preamble, like the Code of Hammurabi or the laws of Eshnunna?
The answer Hazony proposes is that Moses and the prophetic-scholarly tradition behind the Torah did not consider obedience sufficient. The codes of Babylonia and Egypt commanded performance; the Torah commands performance and inquiry together. The narrative around the daughters of Zelophehad in Numbers shows orphaned women arguing successfully that the inheritance laws as given produce injustice. God accepts the argument and the law is amended. Aaron’s exchange with Moses in Leviticus 10 shows the high priest refusing to perform a sacrificial meal on the day his sons die, and Moses concedes that Aaron’s reasoning is right in God’s eyes. In both cases the plain meaning of a divine command yields to a reasoned appeal grounded in justice rather than ancestry or authority.
Hazony treats these passages as the textual seed of the later rabbinic concept of torah she-ba’al peh, the oral teaching, through which human reasoning clarifies the written law across generations. The written law remains the framework. The oral tradition makes it answerable to the standard the narrative invites readers to seek.
Hazony reads Exodus as a progressive disclosure of God’s nature rather than a single declaration of unbounded freedom. The famous ehyeh asher ehyeh is the second of four ascending responses Moses receives. The fourth, given in Exodus 34, describes God as merciful, gracious, longsuffering, faithful, and just, visiting iniquity on the third and fourth generation but storing the results of righteousness for thousands. This is the disclosure Moses carries back from Sinai after the sin of the golden calf. It supplies the ground on which the covenant becomes intelligible. If God were unbounded will, no promise might be trusted, and Strauss’s appeal to covenant as a check on divine arbitrariness collapses, since an arbitrary God might break a promise as easily as keep it. The covenant binds because God’s character binds him.

‘The Virtue of Nationalism’ (2018)

This book ranks among the ten most significant works of political theory from the post-Cold War conservative revival. Hazony published it in 2018, amid Brexit, populist insurgencies, growing skepticism toward globalization, and elite disillusionment with democratic nationalism. The book defends patriotic attachment and reconstructs a framework for political order. Hazony presents nationalism as a morally legitimate and historically productive alternative to liberal universalism and supranational governance. He challenges a central assumption of post-1945 Western political culture: that nationalism counts as inherently regressive, dangerous, and morally compromised.
The book reads as a sustained philosophical argument against the contemporary “imperial” project of liberal internationalism. Its ambition runs civilizational rather than electoral. Hazony seeks to overturn the dominant postwar narrative according to which the catastrophes of the twentieth century, especially fascism and the Holocaust, demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of nationalism and established the necessity of supranational political integration. Against this consensus, Hazony argues that nationalism historically served as a doctrine of anti-imperial self-government, while universalist political projects have repeatedly generated coercion, homogenization, and domination.
Hazony insists that modern “globalism” represents no historical novelty but a contemporary form of imperial universalism. Institutions such as the European Union, international courts, transnational governance regimes, humanitarian interventionism, and the post-Cold War “rules-based international order” succeed older imperial projects that sought to subordinate independent nations to supranational authority. The language of “global governance,” “international community,” “universal jurisdiction,” and “pooled sovereignty” functions, in his account, as euphemism for the re-emergence of imperial ambitions.
Hazony argues that the modern system of sovereign nation-states emerged from the political theology of the Protestant Reformation and, deeper still, from the political teachings of the Hebrew Bible. This argument gives the book a strikingly theological and civilizational character. The Hebrew Bible serves here not merely as a religious document but as a foundational political text articulating an anti-imperial vision of world order.
According to Hazony, the ancient Near East fell under the dominion of universal empires such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia, all of which justified conquest in the name of peace, prosperity, and civilizational unity. Against these imperial systems, biblical Israel introduced an alternative conception of political order centered on the independent nation. Mosaic law, in Hazony’s reading, established a bounded national community governed by leaders drawn “from among your brothers,” constrained by inherited law rather than arbitrary imperial authority. The Hebrew prophets envisioned not universal empire but a pluralistic world of independent nations pursuing self-government within limited borders.
Hazony makes a central claim that biblical nationhood remains cultural and covenantal rather than biological or racial. He rejects racial nationalism. Membership in a nation depends upon shared history, language, religion, and loyalty rather than blood descent. The incorporation of Ruth the Moabite into Israel and the “mixed multitude” joining the Israelites after the Exodus stand as central examples in his argument. This distinction carries weight because Hazony seeks to detach nationalism from the racial ideologies of twentieth-century fascism and root it instead in a pre-modern biblical conception of covenantal peoplehood.
The book’s historical narrative culminates in Hazony’s account of what he calls the “Protestant construction” of the West following the Reformation and the Peace of Westphalia. This section forms an intellectual center of the work. Hazony argues that the Westphalian order rested upon two interlocking principles derived from the Hebrew Bible. The first he calls the “moral minimum” required for legitimate government: governments held obligations to protect life, family, property, justice, and public morality. Legitimate rule depended upon substantive moral obligations rather than procedural neutrality alone. The second principle established the right of national self-determination. Cohesive nations possessed the right to govern themselves according to their own laws, traditions, and inherited institutions without foreign domination.
For Hazony, the creative tension between these two principles drove Western civilization. Universal moral standards constrained political power while national particularism allowed different societies to experiment with distinct constitutional, legal, economic, and religious arrangements. The resulting “national laboratories” fostered competition and innovation across Europe in science, philosophy, economics, law, and political institutions. England, the Netherlands, France, and other emerging nation-states became rival centers of civilizational experimentation rather than provinces within a universal empire.
Hazony’s discussion of the Protestant order also reveals his deeper hostility toward homogenizing universalism. He emphasizes that liberty emerged historically not from abstract universal rights detached from historical communities but from particular inherited national traditions. English common law, Dutch republicanism, and Protestant constitutionalism did not express universally self-evident rational principles. They grew from historically specific national inheritances.
This critique leads into Hazony’s sustained attack on Enlightenment liberalism, especially the Lockean tradition. He presents John Locke (1632-1704) as the architect of what he calls the “liberal construction” of the West. Locke’s political theory, according to Hazony, abstracts away the social and historical conditions of political life. Human beings reduce to isolated individuals pursuing life, liberty, and property through consensual transactions. Obligations arising from inherited loyalties, family ties, religious inheritances, tribal affiliations, and national traditions disappear from view.
Hazony regards this abstraction not merely as philosophically inadequate but as politically corrosive. Human beings do not enter the world as autonomous contractors. They are born into networks of inherited obligation and loyalty that shape identity long before conscious consent becomes possible. Families, tribes, and nations precede the individual’s rational choice. The Lockean framework therefore produces what Hazony regards as a utopian and psychologically implausible conception of politics.
Hazony’s critique of the “neutral state” and of what contemporary theorists often call “constitutional patriotism” rejects the idea that modern societies can sustain cohesion through loyalty to abstract principles or constitutional documents detached from pre-political cultural inheritance. According to Hazony, reverence for constitutions depends upon prior tribal and national formation. Citizens do not venerate founding documents because abstract reason commands it. They do so because they have been socialized within a particular historical nation that treats those documents as sacred inheritances.
The United States serves as a central example. Hazony contends that America does not cohere merely through adherence to universal propositions about equality and liberty. It emerged historically from an English-speaking Protestant people shaped by common law traditions, biblical morality, inherited customs, and shared historical memory. The “American creed” alone cannot explain national cohesion. This argument places Hazony in direct opposition to postwar civic nationalism and liberal creedalism.
Hazony attempts to replace social contract theory with a descriptive account of how political communities emerge historically. In place of abstract consent among autonomous individuals, he proposes a hierarchical model of human collectivities. The family serves as the fundamental unit of political order. Families aggregate into clans bound by mutual loyalty. Clans form tribes, and tribes consolidate into nations possessing shared language, religion, memory, and histories of common defense. A free state, in Hazony’s account, emerges when tribal groupings voluntarily unite under a shared government to preserve collective independence. Political order grows organically from nested structures of loyalty rather than from hypothetical contracts among isolated individuals.
This account underlies Hazony’s concept of “collective self-determination,” among the philosophically important elements of the book. Human beings, he argues, experience the triumphs and sufferings of their nation as extensions of themselves. The self extends outward into family, tribe, and nation rather than remaining radically individual. Freedom therefore cannot be understood purely in individual legal terms. A man cannot enjoy full freedom if the collective to which he belongs falls subject to subordination or conquest. Collective freedom becomes an existential as well as a political reality.
In many respects, this constitutes Hazony’s deepest break with liberal individualism. Liberalism treats political order as existing primarily to protect autonomous individuals from coercion. Hazony instead insists that human beings seek participation in enduring collective inheritances larger than themselves. National self-government fulfills psychological and civilizational needs that universal liberal frameworks cannot adequately satisfy.

‘The Current Crisis in Israel’s Constitution’ (2018)

The piece advances a theory of constitutional legitimacy grounded in national particularity, a sociology of Israeli juridical transformation, and a regional prescription for the post-imperial Middle East.
Hazony opens with a reconstruction of the phrase “Jewish State” across Zionist, British, and United Nations documents. The aim: to establish Israel’s character as a Jewish polity as a constitutive founding principle. The reconstruction succeeds at the level of textual fidelity. Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) coined the phrase. The Peel Commission report of 1937 used it. The United Nations partition resolution of 1947 employed it. Israel’s Declaration of Independence invoked Herzl by name. The Law of Return enacted Herzl’s premise that Jews everywhere held a claim to refuge in the territory.
The argument has a gap. Hazony moves from textual continuity to constitutive principle as though the second follows from the first. A phrase may persist across documents while the political theory animating it shifts beneath the words. The “Jewish State” Herzl envisioned in 1896, the “Jewish State” proposed under partition in 1937, the “Jewish State” David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) proclaimed in 1948, and the “Jewish State” Aharon Barak discussed in the 1990s might share a phrase while differing in substance. The historical record demonstrates lexical continuity. The constitutive case requires more.
Hazony enlists Mill’s argument in Chapter XVI of Considerations on Representative Government for the proposition that representative government depends on substantial cultural homogeneity. Mill argued that strong sentiments of nationality among the people make representative government workable. Mill also placed significant qualifications on the claim. He distinguished higher and lower civilizations. He defended the absorption of Welsh and Bretons into larger English and French polities. He treated nationality as a precondition for liberal institutions rather than an end in its own right. Hazony enlists Mill as a champion of national distinctness while passing over Mill’s assimilationist preferences. A scholar working in Mill’s tradition might reach conclusions about Israeli Arab citizens at variance with those Hazony favors. The deeper question Mill raises but Hazony does not address concerns thickness: how thick must cultural cohesion be for democracy to function, and what costs attend the project of producing such cohesion in populations that contain substantial minorities?
The contrast between Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) furnishes the conceptual spine of the essay. On one side stands the empirical, historical, traditionalist account of legitimacy. On the other stands the rationalist, universalist account. Hazony places David Hume (1711-1776), Edmund Burke, G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), and Mill in the first column. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) joins Rousseau in the second.
Burke and Hegel sit uneasily with Hume’s skeptical empiricism. Constant’s defense of modern commercial liberty differs sharply from Burke’s defense of inherited hierarchy. Hegel’s theory of the state has structural features the others would have rejected, including the speculative metaphysics that Hume and Constant had no use for. The lineage Hazony assembles serves rhetorical purposes more than historical ones. It places liberal nationalists, conservative traditionalists, and idealist philosophers into a single line of descent that does not survive close examination.
Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein have argued in Israel and the Family of Nations that Israel’s combination of Jewish character and democratic citizenship has parallels in European nation-states that maintain established churches, preferred-immigration arrangements for diaspora populations, and other particularist features without abandoning liberal-democratic legitimacy. Yael Tamir’s (b. 1954) Liberal Nationalism offers a philosophical defense of the compatibility Hazony seeks to vindicate, but on grounds Hazony does not consider. Hazony’s regional argument extends the Zionist model to Kurds, Druze, Alawites, Assyrian Christians, Sunni Arabs, and Shia Arabs. Each people, on his account, deserves a state with a Law of Return analogue. The proposal has internal consistency. It also raises questions the essay treats too quickly. What defines a people for these purposes? Hazony lists categories that mix religious confession (Druze, Alawite, Christian, Sunni, Shia), linguistic-ethnic identity (Kurd, Arab), and combinations of the two. Are Iraqi Sunni Arabs and Syrian Sunni Arabs one people or two? Are Lebanese Maronites separate from Assyrian Christians? Hazony’s proposal presupposes resolutions to questions of identity that the populations involved have not resolved among themselves.
The model also obscures how states come into being. Israel emerged through a combination of organized immigration over decades, institutional construction by the Yishuv, military success in 1948, and substantial Palestinian displacement. The Zionist achievement rested on demographic, military, and diplomatic conditions that may not transfer. Hazony’s regional vision does not address the preconditions that the Herzlian project required. The comparison between Israel and Syria-Iraq slights confounding variables. Syria and Iraq inherited different colonial structures, different rentier economies dependent on oil, different Cold War alignments, and different relationships with revolutionary Arab nationalism. The contrast Hazony draws attributes their failures to multinational composition while holding other variables constant. A serious comparative analysis must address oil rents, the Ba’athist ideological project, French and British administrative inheritances, and the role of Pan-Arabism as a competing transnational identity.
The closing claim, that Jewish political tradition demands equality before the law for non-Jewish citizens, marks the most philosophically interesting move in the essay. Hazony argues that the internal moral resources of a particular tradition can generate obligations to outsiders. The biblical and rabbinic injunctions concerning the ger and the non-Jewish resident provide textual support. The argument deserves more development than the essay gives it. The trouble is institutional rather than textual. Jewish law contains resources for equality before civil law. Jewish law also contains other resources, including categories that distinguish among classes of non-Jews, and provisions that grant particular standing to the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Which strand of the tradition becomes operative in a given political moment depends on the carriers of authority within that tradition. The Chief Rabbinate, the religious courts, the religious-Zionist establishment, the haredi communities, and the secular state each draw on different parts of the inheritance. Hazony’s confidence that the equality-oriented strand prevails rests on judgments about religious authority and political coalition he does not defend at length.
The sociology Hazony offers, an account of how Israeli juridical elites absorbed postwar Western universalism, reads more as assertion than analysis. The actors stand identified by office and stated position. The processes by which the absorption occurred, the institutional channels through which the new doctrines entered Israeli legal culture, and the conditions that made the absorption successful go largely unexamined. A fuller account needs to address Israeli legal education in the 1970s and 1980s, the influence of American constitutional theory on Israeli scholars who took degrees abroad, the role of the New Israel Fund and similar organizations in supporting public-interest litigation, and the responses of competing intellectual circles within Israel.

‘The Question of God’s Perfection: Jewish and Christian Essays on the God of the Bible and Talmud’ (2018)

This essay challenges the metaphysical grammar through which Jewish, Christian, and philosophical theology has spoken about God for almost two millennia. Hazony asks his reader to consider whether the apparatus of omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, impassibility, simplicity, and necessary existence belongs to the Hebrew Bible at all, or whether it migrated into rabbinic and patristic thought from the metaphysics of Xenophanes (c. 570–c. 478 BCE), Parmenides (c. 515–c. 460 BCE), Plato (c. 428–c. 348 BCE), and Aristotle (384–322 BCE).
The volume frames the question as a debate. Its four parts present challenges to divine perfection, defenses of divine perfection, treatments of divine morality, and reflections on particular attributes. Eleonore Stump (b. 1947) defends Thomistic simplicity and immutability while arguing that the God of classical theism can be personally present and responsive. Brian Leftow (b. 1956) reconciles divine perfection with friendship and relationality. Lenn E. Goodman (b. 1944) contends that the Hebrew Bible carries strong implications of divine perfection on its own terms. This architecture prevents Hazony’s argument from being misread as a simple rejection of transcendence or a reduction of God to a magnified man. The contest is methodological: how may divine reality be legitimately conceptualized?
Hazony opens by pressing the biblical evidence. God regrets having made man before the flood (Gen 6:6). God regrets having made Saul king (1 Sam 15:11). God responds to the arguments of Moses, alters plans in response to human conduct, expresses anger, jealousy, compassion, and disappointment, and reacts to human innovations the text presents as unforeseen, among them Phinehas, the midwives of Egypt, and Abel as the first shepherd. Hazony’s central move is to deny that these depictions are decorative anthropomorphisms concealing a metaphysically simple essence beneath the text. They are constitutive of biblical theology. The covenantal drama depends on a God who enters history and whose relation to His people unfolds in time and in response to what His people do. The God of the Hebrew Bible strives, reacts, negotiates, remembers, relents, punishes, forgives, and grieves.

‘Conservative Democracy’ (2019)

Hazony attempts to delegitimize the intellectual foundations of postwar liberal democracy and recover an older Anglo-American constitutional tradition rooted in biblical religion, inherited national loyalty, and historical empiricism. Hazony argues that what contemporary elites call “liberal democracy” is neither historically continuous with the Anglo-American political order nor capable of sustaining the institutions on which that order depended. Liberalism is a substantive ideology that dissolves religion, family, nationhood, and inherited obligation while presenting itself as the sole morally legitimate form of politics.
The essay marks a broader post-liberal turn in Western political thought. Across the United States and Europe, confidence in liberal internationalism, technocratic governance, and universalist political theory has weakened under social fragmentation, declining religious participation, collapsing institutional trust, demographic anxiety, and failed nation-building projects abroad. Hazony gives this political mood an intellectual architecture. His project is restorative rather than revolutionary. He insists that conservative democracy stands closer to the traditional Anglo-American constitutional order than modern liberalism does.
At the center of Hazony’s argument sits an epistemological claim. Liberalism, he holds, is rationalist at its core. It derives political order from abstract universal premises about reason, equality, and consent. Hazony describes liberalism as an “axiom system” modeled on mathematics. Like a geometric proof, liberal theory begins with supposedly self-evident propositions and deduces a complete political order from them. Men are by nature free and equal. Reason is universally available. Political obligation arises only from consent. These premises generate the liberal state.
Against this rationalist approach Hazony sets what he calls “historical empiricism.” Political institutions, on this view, are not deduced from universal truths but discovered through centuries of trial and error. Traditions survive because they have demonstrated functional durability across generations. Institutional authority therefore emerges from accumulated historical experience rather than abstract deduction.
This distinction forms the conceptual backbone of the essay. Hazony’s argument echoes older conservative critiques associated with Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, and Friedrich Hayek. Yet his account is more theological and nationalist than theirs. His claim is not simply that traditions serve as useful social cement. It is that biblical religion and inherited national culture are indispensable preconditions for political freedom.
Liberalism often presents itself as a procedural framework that protects individual liberty while remaining neutral on substantive moral questions. Hazony rejects this entirely. Liberalism, he argues, carries its own substantive anthropology and moral vision. It understands man primarily as an autonomous chooser whose obligations gain legitimacy only through consent. Inherited authority, religious obligation, and national loyalty lose independent standing.
Hazony’s deeper claim is that liberalism delegitimizes all institutions whose authority cannot be reduced to individual choice. The family weakens because inherited obligation yields to personal fulfillment. Religion weakens because public reason displaces revelation and communal authority. National cohesion weakens because universalism corrodes particular loyalty. Liberalism therefore survives by consuming moral and institutional capital generated by pre-liberal traditions that it simultaneously erodes.
This parasitic logic anchors Hazony’s civilizational diagnosis. Liberal societies appear stable because they continue to draw on social trust, moral discipline, family cohesion, and civic loyalty inherited from older biblical and national traditions. Liberal theory cannot reproduce these conditions. Hazony’s argument here resembles Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim in After Virtue that modern liberal culture retains fragments of older moral traditions after abandoning the metaphysical structures that once gave them coherence. It parallels the concerns of Christopher Lasch and Robert Nisbet about the dissolution of intermediary institutions under modern individualism.
Hazony argues that the shift from the older American vocabulary of “republican government” to the newer language of “liberal democracy” reflects a transformation in political consciousness rather than mere semantic evolution. The older American republic could openly acknowledge its dependence on biblical religion, Protestant moral culture, and inherited national traditions. The rise of “liberal democracy” as the dominant political term severed constitutional forms from the cultural and religious foundations that historically sustained them.
This linguistic shift functions as a form of epistemic closure. Once democracy becomes conceptually fused with liberal universalism, any defense of biblical religion, national cohesion, or inherited public morality can be characterized as anti-democratic by definition. Hazony’s point is not merely historical. It is institutional and conceptual. Political language defines the boundaries of legitimate political imagination. Once liberalism becomes synonymous with democracy, alternatives grow difficult to conceptualize within elite discourse.
Hazony suggests that contemporary elites are trapped within what he calls a liberal “axiom system.” Because liberalism treats its principles as universally rational, failures appear not as evidence against the theory but as implementation problems. This explains Hazony’s emphasis on failed liberal nation-building projects in Iraq and elsewhere. Liberal constitutional models collapse when exported because they ignore the historical and cultural conditions necessary for institutional stability. Liberals read these failures as technical errors. Conservatives read them as evidence that universalist political theory misunderstands how societies hold together.
Hazony therefore treats liberal internationalism as a form of ideological empire. The attempt to spread liberal democracy globally resembles what he describes as Napoleonic universalism. Liberal elites mistake historically contingent Anglo-American constitutional arrangements for universally valid truths and impose them internationally. The result is often political collapse, institutional vacuum, and social fragmentation rather than stable constitutional order.
Hazony distinguishes nationalism from race-based identity. Nations, on his account, are historically inherited communities held together by mutual loyalty, shared law, language, religion, and collective memory. He rejects racial nationalism and invokes the biblical story of Ruth to describe a form of civic-cultural incorporation grounded in shared loyalty and inherited tradition.
Hazony defends tradition on practical grounds, not sentimental ones. He treats intergenerational continuity as a necessary condition for political order. Traditions transmit tacit knowledge accumulated through centuries of social experience. Once these traditions weaken, societies lose the institutional memory necessary for stable self-government.
Liberal neutrality might be unstable or incomplete, but public endorsement of a particular religious and national tradition also raises questions about exclusion, dissent, and unequal citizenship. Hazony gestures toward civic nationalism and toleration.

‘Locke’s Rationalism and the Future of Political Theory’ (2019)

Hazony presents a compact but ambitious challenge to the epistemological foundations of modern liberal political thought. His essay indicts Enlightenment rationalism as a governing framework for political life. Hazony argues that modern political theory committed a serious intellectual error when it embraced Cartesian deduction rather than Newtonian induction. In his account, the modern West still organizes its institutions, jurisprudence, and foreign policy around abstract premises detached from observable human behavior and historical experience. He claims the result has been permanent destabilization at home and ideological overreach abroad.
Hazony writes at once as philosopher, sociologist, historian, and critic of contemporary elite governance. His ambition is civilizational. He wants to replace a liberal politics grounded in universal reason and individual autonomy with one grounded in historical inheritance, collective loyalty, and empirically constrained judgment.
Hazony organizes his argument around a comparison between Enlightenment political theory and Cartesian physics. He argues that René Descartes (1596-1650) tried to derive universal truths about the physical world from self-evident premises through deductive reasoning. The project once held enormous prestige. It collapsed under the pressure of Newtonian empiricism. Physics abandoned the dream of infallible deduction and embraced induction from observable phenomena. Political theory experienced no comparable correction. Locke, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) kept constructing political systems from abstract premises about human nature, consent, equality, and freedom.
Hazony invokes Isaac Newton (1642-1727) to recommend a political theory built from recurring patterns in history, the way Newtonian science builds from observable phenomena. Political theory should not start with hypothetical states of nature or imagined autonomous individuals. It should start with the durable forms of human association across time.
Hazony identifies one such pattern as the foundational force of political life: mutual loyalty within cohesive groups. Men consistently bind themselves into families, tribes, clans, nations, and religious communities. Hazony describes this loyalty using the metaphor of gravity. Collective attachment pulls individuals together the way gravitational force pulls matter into stars and galaxies. The image presents social cohesion not as an ideological choice but as a natural force embedded in human existence.
Locke begins with the individual as the primary unit of analysis. Hazony begins with the collective. Locke treats political obligation as derivative of consent. Hazony treats loyalty and inherited attachment as prior to consent. Locke imagines individuals entering political society through voluntary agreement. Hazony argues that men are born into networks of obligation and historical inheritance that shape identity before rational choice becomes possible.
Hazony relocates legitimacy from procedural neutrality toward civilizational continuity. Political order earns judgment by its capacity to preserve internal cohesion, cultural inheritance, and intergenerational stability, not chiefly by its protection of abstract rights.
This shift explains Hazony’s hostility to the Lockean conception of universal rights. He identifies three core Lockean axioms as empirically false: the existence of universal reason equally accessible to all individuals, the condition of “perfect freedom and perfect equality,” and the idea that political obligation arises solely from consent. His language here is aggressive. He does not call these assumptions incomplete or idealized. He calls them fictions and fantasies.
Political ideals must remain bounded by empirical human limitations. Liberal rationalism becomes dangerous because it treats institutions and identities as infinitely malleable. Hazony insists that competent political theory must begin with an understanding of what men are rather than what abstract morality imagines they should become.
The force of this critique clarifies once Hazony connects Enlightenment rationalism to contemporary institutional life. He links Lockean political philosophy to the costly Western wars of recent decades aimed at exporting Enlightenment political models. The Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa appear in the essay not as isolated policy failures but as symptoms of a deeper epistemological disorder. Liberal elites, Hazony argues, could not imagine that non-Western societies might resist being reconstructed according to abstract universal principles. Rationalist political theory generated a form of liberal imperialism grounded in false assumptions about the universality of Enlightenment anthropology.
Hazony accuses American judges and legal elites of trying to uproot centuries-old religious and national traditions through deductions from abstract autonomy principles. His reference to the “right to define one’s own concept of existence” from Planned Parenthood v. Casey is telling. It identifies expressive individualism as the juridical culmination of Lockean anthropology.
Here lies an important insight. Hazony recognizes that modern constitutional jurisprudence rests upon an expansive conception of personal autonomy detached from inherited communal norms. He reads this development not as a natural extension of constitutional democracy but as the institutional triumph of Enlightenment rationalism within the judiciary.
The concept of “perpetual revolution” emerges from this analysis. No society can ever fully embody Lockean ideals because men remain embedded within inherited loyalties, traditions, and collective identities. Liberal rationalism therefore generates endless institutional pressure to dissolve existing forms of social cohesion in pursuit of unattainable abstractions.
Hazony stands within a long anti-rationalist tradition extending from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott. He intensifies the critique by portraying liberalism not merely as socially corrosive but as structurally unable to terminate its own revolutionary logic. If legitimacy depends entirely upon autonomous consent and universal equality, inherited institutions always appear morally suspect because they embody historical contingency rather than rational design.
The critique intersects with broader post-liberal anxieties about institutional legitimacy, elite authority, and civilizational fragmentation. Modern liberal societies, Hazony implies, depend upon inherited moral and national traditions they cannot reproduce. Liberalism survives only by consuming reservoirs of trust, loyalty, and cultural inheritance generated by pre-liberal institutions such as religion, family, and nation.
This emphasis explains the weight Hazony places on intergenerational transmission. Political order, in his account, depends not chiefly upon procedural fairness but upon the successful preservation of cultural inheritance across time. The health of a political community is measured by continuity and cohesion rather than by neutrality or procedural abstraction.

‘Conservative Rationalism Has Failed’ Part One Part Two (2019)

Hazony attempts to reconstruct the epistemic ground of political order after what he treats as the exhaustion of Enlightenment rationalism. The essay works at once as political theory, sociology of institutions, and civilizational diagnosis. Read carefully, it makes a single integrated claim: political knowledge derives from historical experience rather than detached reason, and any conservatism that accepts the rationalist starting point has already conceded the war it pretends to fight.
The argument begins with a sharp accusation. Conservative intellectuals who defend inherited custom through the universalist logic of the Enlightenment have surrendered at the level of first principles. Once politics turns on universally accessible reason rather than inherited religion, nation, and common law, no stable moral order survives. Rationalism becomes a solvent. The authority of tradition can no longer justify obedience because every inherited claim must answer to free critique. Each generation acquires the right and the duty to reconstruct the social order from scratch.
Hazony aims at fellow conservatives. Straussians, natural law theorists, libertarians, and Lockean constitutionalists draw his fire because they conserve the wrong things. They defend conservative conclusions while accepting rationalist premises about universal reason, neutral procedure, and abstract individual rights. Hazony argues this guarantees defeat. Any political order grounded in reason alone remains permanently open to further rational revision, and revision arrives faster than restoration.
Hazony rejects the picture of political knowledge as deduction from self-evident axioms. Societies do not derive working civilizations from Cartesian first principles. They acquire wisdom through long stretches of trial and error, institutional adaptation, and collective memory. Traditions hold what generations have learned. Customs that endure pass through filtering across many circumstances. A tradition is therefore closer to data than to prejudice.
Critics treat Hazony as a relativist who substitutes ancestral preference for argument. He answers that traditions are testable in something like the way scientific generalizations are testable. Endurance under varying conditions counts as evidence. Catastrophe under stress counts against. Not everything inherited deserves protection. Inheritance carries information that abstract reason cannot replicate, because the alternative to inheritance is a poorer set of guesses dressed up as first principles.
John Selden (1584-1654) anchors the case. Selden observed in 1640 that free reasoning produces no consensus because no procedure adjudicates among rival rational systems. Hazony reads Selden as describing what we still see. Reason untethered from tradition does not converge on liberal moderation. It proliferates competing ideologies and discards each in turn. Marxism, libertarianism, racial nationalism, technocratic managerialism, and expressive individualism all spring from the same emancipatory impulse once inherited authority dissolves. The Enlightenment promise that open inquiry stabilizes political life inverts itself. Free inquiry destabilizes because no internal principle stops the process. Once inherited norms lose standing, no institution remains immune to permanent reconstruction.
The historical narrative centers on a transformation in American self-understanding after the Second World War. Hazony contrasts Franklin Roosevelt’s (1882-1945) 1939 State of the Union, which described America as a “God-fearing democracy” with religion as the source of democratic life, against the postwar emergence of “liberal democracy” as the dominant frame. Roosevelt treated religion not as private preference but as the ground of free institutions. Within a generation, courts and elite opinion came to treat religion as a threat from which the state must protect citizens.
The pivot point in Hazony’s account is Justice Hugo Black’s (1886-1971) opinion in Everson v. Board of Education (1947). Hazony reads Black as a chronicler of a shift in elite self-conception. Black retells the American founding as an escape from the cruelty of established religion rather than as a Protestant covenantal achievement. America becomes a project of procedural neutrality rather than a biblical civilization shaped by Reformation theology and common law. The Fourteenth Amendment, on the books since 1868, suddenly required a wall of separation that no one had previously read into it. The letter of the law had not changed. The story Americans told about themselves had changed.
The Anglo-American order, in his telling, never grew from Lockean rationalism. It grew from biblical political thought, English common law, Protestant covenantalism, and slow institutional adaptation. His reading of the Hebrew Bible is therefore political as much as religious. He sees it as a model of limited government rooted in covenantal obligation, national particularity, decentralized authority, and shared moral inheritance. Israel becomes a constitutional template, not only a sacred text. Removing biblical instruction from the schools represents on this view a severance from the texts that taught generations the political grammar of self-government.
Public schools and elite universities, Hazony argues, set the moral horizon of the next generation of elites. What schools honor becomes legitimate in public life a generation later. What schools dishonor falls from legitimacy. Hazony’s claim concerns prestige, not indoctrination. Institutions teach what counts as serious by what they treat as serious. The texts a curriculum dignifies acquire dignity. The texts it omits lose standing because no one reads them.
States always honor something. Every institutional order privileges certain moral commitments and marginalizes others. Liberalism does not abolish substantive morality. It conceals its substantive commitments behind the language of procedure. When states stop honoring religious observance, marriage, military service, and inherited national tradition, they start honoring the autonomous individual freed from inherited obligation. The neutral state becomes an engine for the production of a new moral order built on expressive individualism, therapeutic self-realization, and personal autonomy. Liberal institutions present themselves as arbiters among competing goods and function as carriers of an orthodoxy that denies it has one.
Hazony’s positive case turns on constraint. Modern liberal societies prize freedom and neglect self-limitation. Every durable human achievement rests on discipline. Marriage requires fidelity. Military service requires submission to danger. Raising children requires steady self-denial. Religious practice requires ritual. Artistic and intellectual mastery require long submission to training. Hazony therefore treats self-constraint, not autonomy, as the ground of civilization. Free societies survive only when citizens carry the internalized discipline that allows them to govern themselves without external coercion. As self-restraint weakens, bureaucratic administration grows to fill the gap.
Traditional societies sustained voluntary discipline through honor. Citizens accepted burdensome duties because fulfilling them produced status. Marriage, military service, religious observance, care for aging parents, and civic duty carried public regard. Liberal egalitarianism dissolves honor because honor implies hierarchy. To honor some lives more than others is to say that some choices are more admirable. Liberal neutrality therefore flattens moral distinctions among ways of life. The result erodes the prestige that once produced voluntary discipline. A society that refuses to publicly honor self-restraint must eventually compel it. Soft despotism replaces internal authority. Tocqueville (1805-1859) saw the structure. Philip Rieff (1922-2006) and Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) traced its therapeutic and consumer forms. Hazony stitches the concerns into a single account of civilizational demoralization.
Hazony links private discipline to public order. Liberty depends less on constitutional procedure than on inherited habits of self-government. A people that cannot regulate itself eventually chooses between fragmentation and authoritarian management. Freedom survives only where citizens accept difficult duties sustained through honor, religion, family, and inherited expectation.

‘Realism in Political Theory’ (2020)

Hazony provides a a comprehensive critique of Enlightenment liberalism and proposes an empiricist alternative grounded in inherited tradition, mutual loyalty, and the historical experience of nations. The essay serves both as a philosophical argument and as a civilizational diagnosis. Hazony contends that the modern liberal order enters a period of disintegration because it rests upon a defective conception of reason, political obligation, and human social existence. Against the rationalist tradition associated with Hobbes (1588-1679), Locke (1632-1704), Rousseau (1712-1778), and Kant (1724-1804), he constructs a realist paradigm rooted in historical experience, biblical anthropology, and the inherited structures of family, tribe, and nation.
Hazony opens with a historical narrative about the decline of liberal confidence. During the decades after the Second World War, many intellectuals in Europe and North America came to believe that Enlightenment liberalism represented the final and universal form of political order. Liberal democracy appeared to have defeated fascism and communism. The spread of markets, rights discourse, constitutionalism, and international institutions encouraged the belief that ideological conflict approached exhaustion. Hazony argues that this confidence collapses during the twenty-first century. Brexit, the rise of nationalist governments, the election of Donald Trump (b. 1946), and the spread of anti-liberal populism demonstrate that liberal hegemony lacks permanence. He also points to the rise of what he calls “new Marxism” within universities, media institutions, bureaucracies, and corporations. He treats this ideological transformation not as an accidental deviation from liberalism but as evidence of liberalism’s internal instability. Liberalism proves incapable of defending itself against radical egalitarian doctrines because liberalism dissolves the traditional institutions necessary for social cohesion and political continuity.
Hazony advances five premises of realist political theory. Men are born into families, tribes, and nations bound by ties of mutual loyalty. Individuals and groups compete for resources and honor until external threats restore solidarity. Institutions such as religion, law, language, and government arise historically to strengthen particular groups. Political obligation emerges from membership within these loyalty groups. And political principles derive from experience, open to revision through further experience.
These premises establish a different image of political order from the liberal social contract tradition. Hazony rejects the notion of the atomic individual who exists prior to social attachment. Men enter the world already embedded within structures of hierarchy and obligation. Hierarchy organizes Hazony’s system. The individual belongs first to the family. Families combine into clans or congregations. Clans form tribes. Tribes form nations. Political order therefore develops organically through nested layers of mutual loyalty. The nation-state does not arise through contract but through the expansion and coordination of preexisting structures of allegiance. Hazony treats these hierarchies as natural rather than artificial. Men possess obligations before they exercise choice. The argument places Hazony in direct conflict with the liberal conception of freedom as autonomy from inherited obligation. For Hazony, the liberal image of the sovereign individual falsifies the structure of human social existence.
Mutual loyalty serves as the emotional and psychological foundation of the framework. Hazony argues that the self naturally extends beyond the isolated individual. A man experiences his parents, his wife, his children, and his fellow nationals as part of himself. Loyalty therefore permits him to transcend what Hazony calls “the prison of my self.” This notion of the extended self reveals the biblical and anthropological dimensions of Hazony’s realism. Political communities persist not because individuals calculate utility but because men experience collective attachments as constitutive of identity. Injury to family or nation becomes injury to oneself. Obligation emerges from gratitude, loyalty, memory, and inheritance rather than abstract consent. Hazony does not deny the existence of consent. Marriage, adoption, immigration, and conversion permit consensual incorporation into loyalty groups. Yet consent remains secondary. The underlying structures of family and nation precede individual choice. Mutual loyalty sustains political order across generations.
The essay also advances an agonistic conception of politics. Men and political groups compete continuously for honor, strength, and recognition. Competition does not disappear within peaceful societies. Families compete internally. Tribes compete with neighboring tribes. Nations compete with rival nations. Yet external threats restore solidarity by recalling members to mutual loyalty. Hazony’s emphasis on honor distinguishes his realism from purely economic or material accounts of politics. Men seek prestige, dignity, collective status, and symbolic recognition. Nationalism persists not only because states provide security but because nations satisfy psychological and moral desires for belonging and honor.
Institutions emerge historically within this competitive environment. Religion, language, law, and forms of government develop through historical experimentation. Hazony therefore rejects universal political blueprints. Different societies inherit different traditions suited to different historical circumstances. Political principles emerge through trial and error across centuries. The emphasis on historical experimentation places Hazony within the broader tradition of Burkean empiricism. Traditions function as repositories of accumulated knowledge. They preserve solutions to political and social problems that no individual intellect can reconstruct from first principles. Political wisdom therefore resides in inherited customs, habits, institutions, and practices rather than in abstract philosophical systems.
Hazony argues that rationalists who reject inherited traditions do not escape tribal loyalty. They merely transfer allegiance from one tribe to another. The rationalist belongs to the tribe of Enlightenment universalism just as the observant Jew belongs to the Jewish people. Spinoza (1632-1677) and Moses Hess (1812-1875) appear in Hazony’s account as exemplary converts between these two tribes. This point is among the essay’s penetrating insights. Hazony seeks to expose rationalism as a concealed tradition that pretends to stand above tradition. Enlightenment philosophers present themselves as emancipated from inherited authority, yet they inherit their own intellectual rituals, orthodoxies, heroes, and moral assumptions. Rationalism therefore functions as a rival tribe rather than a neutral standpoint outside history.
Hazony’s treatment of political obligation follows from this anthropology of loyalty. Obligation arises through gratitude and inherited attachment. Children owe duties to parents because parents sacrificed for them. Citizens owe duties to nations because nations provide inherited customs, security, language, and forms of life. These obligations do not arise through explicit consent. Hazony uses the biblical commandment to honor one’s father and mother as a model for political obligation more broadly. Loyalty to family extends outward into loyalty to tribe and nation. The individual inherits responsibilities toward the communities that sustain him. Adopted members of nations acquire obligations through incorporation into these traditions as well. Yet Hazony insists that obligations possess limits. Loyalty does not justify criminality or moral corruption. A parent cannot demand evil acts from a child, and a nation cannot demand criminal behavior from its citizens. The presumption of loyalty remains central to political life. Stable societies depend upon inherited obligations that precede autonomous choice.
The essay returns at its close to empiricism and historical testing. Political traditions survive because centuries of experience reveal which institutions contribute to flourishing and which lead to collapse. No universal rational formula guarantees political success. Men discover sound political principles through historical continuity, experimentation, and adaptation.

Part Two