Jerry Z. Muller spent his career at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., never moving to an Ivy League department, never trading independence for the prestige circuits that shape most historians of his generation. He retired in 2020 as Professor Emeritus and continues to write, lecture, and edit. His readers come from history departments, business schools, policy shops, and the broader public who pick up his books expecting clarity.
He was born June 7, 1954, in Niagara Falls, Ontario. His father Henry ran a family meat business and later opened the Houdini Magical Hall of Fame, a tourist attraction that captures something of the family temperament, practical, mercantile, willing to bet on an idea. His mother Bella worked as a homemaker and bookkeeper. The household was Jewish, and Muller’s identification with Jewish history and thought has shaped his scholarship throughout.
He took his B.A. in history at Brandeis University in 1977, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He spent a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studying modern Jewish thought, then went to Columbia University for graduate work. He earned his M.A. in 1978, M.Phil. in 1980, and Ph.D. in history in 1984. The dissertation became his first book, on the German conservative intellectual Hans Freyer.
He joined Catholic University in fall 1984 as an assistant professor. He chaired the history department from 2009 to 2015. His fellowships include the American Council of Learned Societies, the John M. Olin Foundation (twice), the Bradley Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Fulbright Commission, and the American Academy in Berlin. Catholic University awarded him its Distinguished Research Award in 2017. Since 2020 he has held a position as Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
The unifying problem in Muller’s work is the relation of judgment to system. His books return to the question of how modern societies handle expertise, tradition, and decision-making when ideologies and quantification press in to replace them. He approaches the question as a historian rather than a theorist, building his arguments from cases and texts rather than from first principles.
His first book, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism, appeared from Princeton University Press in 1987. Freyer was a German sociologist and philosopher who flirted with the radical right in the Weimar period, served the Nazi regime in modest capacities, and then in the postwar period reconstructed himself as a moderate conservative critic of industrial society. Muller treats this trajectory neither as redemption nor as exposure. He shows how a serious thinker came to support an evil regime, what he saw in it, and how he later distanced himself from those commitments. The book argues that German conservatism contained possibilities other than the path Freyer initially took, and that the relation between conservative thought and authoritarian politics is contingent.
That habit of taking conservative thinkers seriously runs through his next major project. In Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society (1993, later reissued by Princeton), Muller recovers Adam Smith from both his libertarian admirers and his progressive critics. He shows that Smith was not a celebrant of greed but a moral philosopher who saw commercial society as one possible answer to questions about how strangers might cooperate without producing tyranny. The Wealth of Nations cannot be read apart from The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith’s market depends on prudence, sympathy, and the institutions that train them.
In 1997 he edited Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present, a Princeton volume now widely assigned in college courses. The anthology presents conservatism as a plural tradition rather than a single doctrine. David Hume, Edmund Burke, Justus Möser, Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Disraeli, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, and others appear together because they share a temperament. They distrust grand designs. They watch for unintended consequences. They respect the inheritance of practices that no individual designed. Muller’s introduction and commentary supply the connective tissue. The book has become for many students their first serious exposure to conservative thought treated as something other than an embarrassment or a curiosity.
The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) co-won the Historical Society’s Donald Kagan Best Book in European History Prize. The book traces how European thinkers from Voltaire and Smith through Karl Marx, Werner Sombart, Joseph Schumpeter, Hayek, and Herbert Marcuse worked out the moral implications of commercial society. Muller does not impose a single verdict. He shows the persistence of ambivalence. Capitalism produces wealth and fractures custom. It dissolves traditional hierarchies and produces new ones. It liberates individuals and atomizes communities. Each thinker in the book wrestles with that tension. Muller’s contribution is to refuse the temptation to settle the matter. He treats the persistence of the question as evidence about the thing under question.
Capitalism and the Jews appeared from Princeton in 2010. The book collects four extended essays on the relation between Jewish history and the development of capitalist economies. Muller argues that the long Jewish role in commerce, finance, and intermediary trades had structural sources rather than accidental ones. Jewish minorities under various regimes faced restrictions on land ownership and access to guilds, and these restrictions pushed them into mobile, contractual, urban occupations that fit the emerging market economy. The same skills that made for economic success made for political vulnerability. Antisemitism in the modern period frequently took the form of resentment against commerce, finance, and abstraction, and Jews carried the symbolic weight of those forces for many of their neighbors. Muller does not reduce antisemitism to economics, and he does not reduce Jewish economic life to antisemitic projection. He insists on holding both ends of the chain. The book unsettles readers who want a purer story in either direction.
The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton, 2018) reached the largest audience of any of his books and has appeared in eleven languages. The argument is concise. Modern institutions across medicine, education, policing, business, government, and the military increasingly demand that practitioners capture their work in numbers and tie those numbers to incentives. The intuition behind the practice sounds reasonable. Numbers seem objective. Targets seem fair. Accountability seems democratic. But the practice produces predictable distortions. Practitioners game the metrics. Effort migrates from what counts toward what gets counted. Forms of knowledge that resist measurement, the judgment of an experienced surgeon, the feel of a teacher for a struggling class, the discretion of an officer on the street, lose status and eventually atrophy. Organizations measure themselves into mediocrity. Muller draws on Michael Polanyi, who argued that much expertise is tacit and cannot be reduced to explicit rules, and on Friedrich Hayek, who emphasized the dispersed character of practical knowledge. He shows the costs of forgetting these insights. Hospital administrators, school superintendents, and corporate executives have read the book, and some have written to him to say it described their experience.
Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (Princeton, 2022) is a biographical study of one of the strangest figures in twentieth-century Jewish thought. Jacob Taubes was a rabbi, philosopher, and provocateur who moved between Zurich, Jerusalem, New York, Princeton, Berlin, and Paris, charming and exasperating Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Herbert Marcuse, and many others along the way. He wrote little, lived theatrically, and exerted enormous influence through conversation and seduction. Muller spent more than a decade on the book, working through archives in multiple languages. The biography is patient with Taubes’s brilliance and unsparing about his deceptions. It is also a study of how charisma operates in intellectual circles, how reputations form and persist, and how the boundary between scholarship and performance can blur in academic life. The book extends Muller’s interest in the embodiment of ideas in particular lives, an interest visible from his Freyer book onward.
His current project, Passing It On: Thinking Across Generations about Money, Time, and Purpose, takes up transgenerational questions. Drafts have appeared on his Substack. The book examines how families, firms, and institutions hand down wealth, knowledge, and meaning across generations, and how modern markets and ideologies disrupt that transmission. The themes connect to his earlier work on tacit knowledge and on the limits of formalization. What gets passed on cannot always be written down or measured, and yet it shapes the texture of economic and moral life.
His method has remained consistent across the decades. He starts from texts and contexts. He reconstructs the arguments of figures whose conclusions he may not share. He resists the present-day temptation to score the past. He then turns the recovered argument toward present debates without flattening it into a slogan. The product reads as historical work but functions as policy argument and cultural criticism.
His positioning helps explain his independence. Catholic University is a serious university, but it sits outside the Ivy League and outside the prestige circuits of major research universities. Muller stayed there for thirty-six years. He did not move to chase status. He published with Princeton, Knopf, and the Free Press. He wrote for Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, and The New York Times. He produced a thirty-six-lecture series for The Great Courses in 2009 titled Thinking about Capitalism. He reaches both scholarly and lay readers because his prose is clear and his arguments take account of complications without drowning in them.
His Jewish identification informs the work without dominating it. The year at Hebrew University in the mid-1970s shaped his sense of Jewish intellectual history, and his current affiliation with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs reflects continued engagement with Israeli policy thought. Capitalism and the Jews and the Taubes biography draw most directly on those sources, but the broader habits of careful textual reading and respect for tradition show up everywhere in his oeuvre.
He married Sharon Sachs, an archivist, on August 8, 1976. They have three children, Elisha, Sara, and Joseph, and live in Silver Spring, Maryland. He listens to jazz piano. The biographical details are ordinary by intellectual standards, and Muller has not built his career on personal mystique.
What unifies the books is not a slogan but a sensibility. He treats modern societies as places of moral conflict, where wealth and tradition, freedom and belonging, measurement and judgment cannot be reconciled by clever institutional design. He thinks the temptation to imagine such reconciliation produces damage. He insists that the historian’s job is to recover the complexity that policy debate keeps trying to flatten. He writes for readers who can tolerate ambivalence and who suspect that their preferred ideological camp has not yet thought carefully enough about the costs of its commitments.
He is conservative in the methodological sense rather than the partisan one. He doubts grand designs, respects inherited practices, and watches for unintended consequences. He is also a realist about Jewish history, willing to describe structural patterns that more sentimental historians prefer to soften. He defends tacit knowledge against the metric impulse and judgment against the system. None of these positions translates cleanly into present-day political alignment, which is part of why his work travels well across audiences that disagree on most other questions.
Forty years of writing have produced a body of work that resists easy summary, which is, on Muller’s own account, a feature rather than a bug. The historian’s task is to slow down the argument so the question can come into focus. Muller has done that across capitalism, conservatism, Jewish economic life, intellectual biography, and the politics of measurement. The books reward rereading because the questions they address have not closed and probably never close.
‘Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism’ (2008)
Jerry Z. Muller writes in Foreign Affairs:
Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. After all, in the United States people of varying ethnic origins live cheek by jowl in relative peace. Within two or three generations of immigration, their ethnic identities are attenuated by cultural assimilation and intermarriage. Surely, things cannot be so different elsewhere.
Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, often deliberately
constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.
This is a great essay. It is a shame it starts so poorly. Watch what Muller reaches for when he says Americans belittle ethnonationalism. Social scientists go to great lengths. Ethicists scorn narrow group identity. Those are not Americans. Those are the credentialed Americans, the ones who write and who set the terms other people are supposed to argue inside. The man at the counter in Youngstown does not think ethnic attachment is a cultural artifact deliberately constructed by ideologists. He feels its pull and assumes everyone else feels theirs. He may lack the vocabulary. He does not lack the intuition.
So Muller smuggles a class into a nation. He writes “Americans” and means the professional stratum that reads Foreign Affairs and once read Tony Judt without flinching. The irony runs deep, because the opening sentence accuses Americans of projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, and the sentence itself projects the experience of one American class onto two hundred million people. He commits the error he names, in the act of naming it.
The gap between elite and mass opinion on immigration and national identity is one of the widest and most durable splits in American life. The mass public sits far closer to the restrictionist, identity-first position than the people who staff the universities, the foundations, and the editorial pages. If anything most Americans find ethnonationalism abroad perfectly legible, because they carry a softened version of it themselves.
A defense of Muller is that he is arguing against a specific audience, the cosmopolitan reader who calls the Jewish state an anachronism, and “Americans” might be loose shorthand for “the Americans whose opinions get printed.” That is the room he is talking to. Still sloppy. He universalizes a parochial consensus and then spends the essay scolding others for parochialism.
His assimilation claim is also selective. Ethnic identity attenuating in two or three generations through intermarriage describes the white European melting pot, the Italians and Irish and Poles whose ethnicity had mostly faded to a Saturday flavor by the time he wrote. It holds far less across the Black and White line, and the post-1965 arrivals are a story still being written. So even the cheerful American picture he sketches is the picture from one window.
The class that scorns narrow group identity has a group identity. Credentialed, mobile, married late and across old ethnic lines, at home in airports. Cosmopolitanism is not the absence of a tribe. It is the self-understanding of a particular tribe, the one that floats above the others and mistakes its altitude for objectivity. When that tribe belittles ethnonationalism, it is not rising above the game. It is playing its own and calling the move neutrality.
Muller writes: “The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation.”
Central, eastern, and southeastern Europe did reach their nation-state order through expulsion and slaughter, and the calm that followed rested on cleared ground.
Now look at Latin America. After independence the hemisphere settled into a regional order of nation-states with borders that have mostly held for a century and a half and few wars between them. Paraguay’s catastrophe, the War of the Pacific, the Chaco. Set against Europe that is a quiet record. And that order did not come from states expelling each other’s peoples to purify themselves. The homogenizing happened earlier and inside each country, through conquest and mixing, and what emerged were states defined more by territory and language and church than by blood. Mestizo Mexico is not an ethnonational polity in his sense. Neither is Brazil. The internal violence against indigenous peoples was real and terrible, but the peace among the states does not sit on ethnic separation between their populations. A whole continent runs his engine in reverse and stays calm.
Muller grants that England, France, Spain, and Sweden homogenized over a long slow history rather than by modern expulsion. Fine. But slow is not gentle. Eugen Weber (1925-2007) called it Peasants into Frenchmen, the state grinding Breton and Occitan and Basque into a single tongue. Spain ran the Reconquista, then expelled its Jews in 1492 and its Moriscos in 1609. England conquered Wales and broke Ireland. So either the Atlantic states are peaceful counterexamples to his rule, or the violence was simply spread thin across five centuries so no single event carries the name. Either reading breaks his line between the gentle west and the bloody east.
Sometimes the separation happens and the peace does not come. India and Pakistan partitioned in 1947 with hundreds of thousands dead, then fought in 1947, 1965, and 1971, and still aim missiles over Kashmir. The Levant unmixed and the war never ended. The engine he credits with delivering order runs in these cases and delivers nothing. So even where his process occurs, his outcome may not follow, and a “usually” that fails on its most famous modern instances is carrying more weight than the evidence gives it.
In modernizing, mixed, late-forming Europe the road to a stable order often ran through unmixing. As a regional report that stands. As a law of how peace gets built it overreaches, and the man who opens by warning Americans against projecting their own experience onto the world has projected one corner of Europe onto the species.
Muller writes: “A familiar and influential narrative of twentieth-century European history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually abandoned it.”
Among the people who push the postnational story, much of it is worn rather than held. It works as a credential. Saying the nation-state is obsolete marks you as the kind of person who reads the right journals and crosses borders without friction, the cosmopolitan tribe again, performing its altitude. The same figures who recite postnationalism guard their own institutions with sharp national and class interest and reach for the national lever the moment money or security is at stake. The creed is a password more than a conviction.
Muller writes: “In the postwar decades, western Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of transnational institutions, culminating in the European Union (eu).”
The word carrying the freight is “themselves.” Europeans did not enmesh themselves. Their elites enmeshed them, and the blueprint was to lift certain choices clear of any future vote.
The intent shows up early and on the record. Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) argued in 1939 that a federation among states would choke off economic intervention, because no federal people would exist to demand it. Structure built as a brake on what electorates might want. The ordoliberals who shaped the West German order and then the European one worked in that grain. Rules above politics. A central bank no minister could lean on. Competition policy run from a commission rather than a parliament. The aim was partly to protect the market from the crowd, and the crowd was the demos.
Then look at what happened when the crowd finally got asked. It kept saying no, and the project kept moving. Denmark rejected Maastricht in 1992 and was sent back to vote again. Ireland rejected Nice and later Lisbon and was sent back each time. France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution in 2005, so the same content returned as the Lisbon Treaty, ratified this time through parliaments with almost no referendums. The rule revealed itself. Ask until the answer comes back right, or do not ask.
The euro turned the screw hardest. Monetary policy left the national parliament for a bank in Frankfurt that no electorate touches. The crisis of the 2010s then showed the cost. Italy and Greece watched elected leaders give way to technocrats, Monti and Papademos, under market and Brussels pressure in 2011. In the summer of 2015 the Greeks voted no to the creditors’ terms in a national referendum, and the terms landed on them within the week. Wolfgang Streeck (b. 1946) reads the structure as a way to discipline democratic states on behalf of creditors, and the Greek summer is hard to read any other way.
Particular domains were carried out of electoral reach and handed to insulated bodies. Money first, then trade and competition, later the fiscal rules. That removal was real. It was deliberate in good part. And it ran over popular votes once the votes came.
Muller’s “themselves” hides the hand. The Europeans did not weave the web around their own wrists. Their governments did, and the men above their governments, and the whole time they called it peace.
Muller writes: “After the fall of the Soviet empire, that transnational framework spread eastward to encompass most of the continent. Europeans entered a postnational era, which was not only a good thing in itself but also a model for other regions. Nationalism, in this view, had been a tragic detour on the road to a peaceful liberal democratic order.”
The post-national era is like a putative post-sex era. It makes no evolutionary sense.
Muller writes that social scientists labor to show ethnonationalism is a product of culture and not nature, often deliberately constructed. That is the sex-construct argument, word for word, pointed at the nation. Same class of people, same move. Deny the natural floor, assert pure construction, conclude that what was built can therefore be unbuilt and is already on its way out.
The “post-” prefix is the tell, and it comes in a genre. Postnational Europe. Post-historical man, which Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) announced in 1989 just before history came back swinging. Post-racial America, declared around 2008 and dead within a few years. The secularization thesis, the confident postwar forecast of a post-religious world, which the global surge of Islam and Pentecostalism buried. Each declaration says the same thing. A deep and ancient human attachment has been finished off by the arrival of enlightened people, and the rest of you should catch up. Each was filed early. The graveyard of “post-” claims is large and the headstones all read the same.
The reason they keep failing? The thinkers who make them confuse the suppressibility of an expression with the removal of the drive underneath. You can suppress the expression. France and Germany stopped wanting to kill each other, and that change was real and good. But the pull toward your own, toward people who share your tongue and your dead, stayed loaded, and when the lid lifted it came out somewhere else. Brexit. The AfD and the Rassemblement National. The hardening of Europe’s own external border that Muller notes while the priests of openness kept preaching. The drive is conserved. Only its surface bends. Declare the volcano extinct because it is quiet and you have learned nothing about volcanoes.
Now a caution. Nationhood is more built than sex. The borders of a nation move. Who counts as French has shifted across centuries, and Muller grants that ethnonational identity is never as fixed as nationalists claim. Sex sits closer to the bone.
The missionary clause gives the whole thing away. Muller’s elite does not merely think Europe went postnational. It thinks this was good in itself and a model for other regions. That second half is the signature of a class that has mistaken its own local arrangement for the destination of mankind. The same voice that called the Jewish state an anachronism. The cosmopolitan tribe again, certain its altitude is the future and everyone below is simply behind.
Muller writes:
There are two major ways of thinking about national identity. One is that all people who live within a country’s borders are part of the nation, regardless of their ethnic, racial, or religious origins. This liberal or civic nationalism is the conception with which contemporary Americans are most likely to identify. But the liberal view has competed with and often lost out to a different view, that of ethnonationalism. The core of the ethnonationalist idea is that nations are defined by a shared heritage, which usually includes a common language, a common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry.
I can’t think of any nationalism that has not contained a linguistic, racial, ethnic, geographic, cultural, religious and civic component. Some are more polite to say publicly than others, but all nationalists contain these drivers and more.
The two-story setup is the oldest heuristic in the field and the most battered. Hans Kohn (1891-1971) drew it after the war. Civic, voluntary, political nationalism in the West. Organic, cultural, ethnic nationalism in the East. It became the standard first cut, and it has taken fire ever since, because almost no real nation sits at either pole. France calls itself the civic nation, then bans the veil, crushes Breton and Occitan over a century, teaches every schoolchild that his ancestors were Gauls, and runs laïcité as a cultural creed with the weight of an established church. Thick ethnic and cultural content wearing a civic name.
A nation is a chord, not a single note. Descent, race, language, faith, shared memory, homeland, manners, and loyalty to the laws all sound together, weighted one way here and another way there, and the weighting shifts across generations. Pick any nation and you can hear which note leads. The German and Italian unifications led with language. The early American self-understanding led with descent and creed, English and Protestant. Pakistan led with faith, one religion stretched across Punjabi and Bengali and Sindhi and Pashtun, and it split along language within twenty-five years, which Muller reports. So even inside his essay the markers come apart and turn on each other. The two-box opening is scaffolding he quietly drops once the history starts moving.
And the lead note changes with the enemy. Against a Catholic, the English marker was Protestant. Against a foreigner who could not be understood, the marker was the tongue. Against the man of another color, race. The nation does not hold one identity. It reaches for whichever marker the present threat makes salient. Muller’s own population transfers sorted people by language and religion more than by race. The Czechs and Poles and Ukrainians he tracks were marked by speech. The chord stays, the loud note moves.
The components of nationalism are not equally speakable. Civic talk is sayable. Values talk is sayable. Culture is half-sayable. Religion is touchy. Ethnicity is barely sayable in a respectable room. Race is not sayable there at all. So the public menu of nationalisms is a censored menu. “Civic” survives as the permitted name, and “ethnic” becomes the bin for everything the censor frowns at, which collapses race and descent and faith and memory into one disreputable lump. The strongest marker in many real nations, common blood, is the one least allowed into print, so it shows up thin in the very theories built to explain nationalism. The map is drawn by people forbidden to name half the territory.
This is why the civic line is less a border than a setting on a dial, a measure of how much ethnic content a nation will admit aloud. Civic nationalism is not empty. American civic nationalism carried a White Protestant Anglo core for most of its life. For long stretches only the English, or the Protestant, or the white counted as real Americans. The creed sat on an ethnic floor until about 1965. Rogers Brubaker (b. 1956) made roughly this case against Kohn. The civic and ethnic split works better as moral self-flattery than as analysis. We are civic, they are ethnic, and civic is the kinder word for the same chord played softer.
Anthony D. Smith (1939-2016) gave the fuller account. Nations grow from older ethnic cores that carry myths, memories, symbols, a felt homeland, a public culture, a body of shared law. That is several axes of belonging, not two. Keep Muller’s two stories as a doorway. Behind it stands the chord, the moving lead note, and the censor deciding which notes a respectable man may name.
If we had to choose a dichotomy here, friend-enemy might be more useful. Sometimes that is a matter of race or region or religion.
Civic versus ethnic asks what defines the friend-group. Schmitt (1888-1985) asks the question under that one. What makes any grouping political at all? His answer in The Concept of the Political is the enemy. The political owns no content of its own the way morality owns good and evil or the market owns profit and loss. Its criterion is the pitch of a bond, the point where a difference sorts men into friend and foe with the live possibility of killing. Any of your components can reach that pitch. Race, faith, language, class, even a written constitution. What turns one of them national is not its substance. It is the enemy it names.
The enemy picks the marker. Against the Turk the Greek felt Greek through his church. Against the Hapsburg the Czech felt Czech through his tongue. The “we” sharpens against the “they,” which is why shared heritage explains cohesion so poorly. The heritage lies quiet until an enemy gives men a reason to defend it. The nation feels itself most as a nation when something threatens it.
Friend-enemy also breaks the conceit at the heart of Muller’s first option. Civic nationalism presents itself as the form with no enemy. All who live inside the borders, no one cast out. Schmitt’s blade goes straight through that. The civic nation has enemies. It calls them criminals, extremists, the far right, fascists, deplorables, and it moralizes them instead of facing them as political foes. He thought that the uglier road, because a political enemy is a man you fight by rules and later make peace with, while a moral enemy is a monster to be crushed or re-educated and never honored. Watch the postnational order Muller describes. It defines itself against the nationalist and the populist with real heat. It has an enemy. It will not say the word.
A caution. Schmitt did not offer this only as description. He made it a program, gave the sovereign the decision on the exception, and in 1933 he carried his Party card and drafted the law that dressed the new regime in legal cloth, which earned him the name crown jurist of the Reich. Held as a diagnosis of how the political works, his distinction lights up everything Muller catalogs. Held as a prescription, it blesses the slaughter in those same pages. The tool that lets you see the killing can also sanctify it.
Muller writes:
The ethnonationalist view has traditionally dominated through much of Europe and has held its own even in the United States until recently. For substantial stretches of U.S. history, it was believed that only the people of English origin, or those who were Protestant, or white, or hailed from northern Europe were real Americans. It was only in 1965 that the reform of U.S. immigration law abolished the system of national-origin quotas that had been in place for several decades. This system had excluded Asians entirely and radically restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe.
Dominated among whom, and as what? Muller calls ethnonationalism a “view” that “dominated.” A view is something a person holds, can state, can defend, can be argued out of. Ethnonationalism was none of that for most of the people living inside it. It was the water. Nobody had to teach a Hungarian peasant that the Magyar was the real Hungarian. He never formed the thought as a thought. The civic conception is the one that had to be written down and argued for, because it cut against the grain of the felt default. So Muller has the order backwards. Ethnonationalism was not a dominant doctrine beating a rival doctrine. It was the unspoken floor, and civic nationalism is the self-conscious construction laid over it. Calling the floor a “view” already imports the intellectual’s habit of treating everything as a position with adherents.
Which is why “believed” is the wrong verb. Belief lives in the part of a man he can put into sentences. The sense that the stranger is not quite one of us, not quite as real, lives below that.
Muller writes about a change in law as though it were a change in the gut. The 1965 act did three things. It changed who would arrive. It changed what an official could say and do. It changed the sayable. It did not and could not legislate the sense of who is fully one of us. Its sponsors swore it would not even alter the country’s makeup; Ted Kennedy (1932-2009) promised the cities would not be flooded and the ethnic mix would hold, and they were wrong about the demography and silent about the feeling. So the law did not end the ethnonationalist sense in America. It changed the inflow over the heads of the people whose feeling was never consulted, and that feeling has been pushing back at the ballot box ever since. Mistaking the legal surface for the felt depth is the same move as declaring a postnational era because the elite stopped saluting the flag. The form moved. The floor did not.
This paragraph fights Muller’s own conclusion. He closes the essay by calling ethnonationalism an enduring propensity of the human spirit that will outlast everyone alive. Yet here he needs America to have largely left it behind by 1965, so that the civic story has somewhere to stand. He cannot have both. Either the propensity endures and 1965 changed the rules over a feeling that did not move, or the law ended the thing, in which case the thing was never the deep human constant he says it is. The paragraph is not a mess of facts. It is a man changing floors mid-sentence and forgetting which one holds up his house.
The human norm is that only people like ourselves are fully real. If your primary identity is surgeon, then surgeons are your in-group. If your primary identity is a sporting allegiance, then only those who share that are fully real. If your primary identity is national or religious, then that is your in-group.
Muller writes:
Ethnonationalism draws much of its emotive power from the notion that the members of a nation are part of an extended family, ultimately united by ties of blood. It is the subjective belief in the reality of a common “we” that counts. The markers that distinguish the in-group vary from case to case and time to time, and the subjective nature of the communal boundaries has led some to discount their practical significance. But as Walker Connor, an astute student of nationalism, has noted, “It is not what is, but what people believe is that has behavioral consequences.” And the central tenets of ethnonationalist belief are that nations exist, that each nation ought to have its own state, and that each state should be made up of the members of a single nation.
There are no tenets inherent to the phenomenological experience of ethnonationalism just as there are no tenets inherent to the experience of family.
Look at the words Muller reaches for. Notion. Belief. Subjective. Tenets. Every one of them takes a thing that lives in the chest and files it in the head. He is describing the inside of a bond in the language a man uses when he has only ever seen it from outside.
The power does not come from a notion. The bond is felt before any notion arrives to name it. A man knows the sound of his mother’s tongue before he can spell nation. He knows the graves he visits, the food that tastes like home, the faces that read as kin. He loves his own first, in the body, and only later, if some professor asks him why, does he reach for the words about an extended family united by blood. The notion is the receipt, not the purchase. Muller has it running the wrong way, with the idea generating the feeling, when the feeling generated the idea and would survive the loss of it.
The line about tenets is where he changes subjects without admitting it. He says the central tenets of ethnonationalist belief are that nations exist, that each ought to have a state, that each state should hold one nation. Those are not the experience. Those are the political program, the modern doctrine of one nation and one state that Gellner dated to the age of mass literacy and the bureaucratic engine. The peasant who wept at his own dead held no tenets. The ideologue who wants the map redrawn to fit the tongue holds tenets. Muller pours the second into the first and serves it as one cup. The felt bond is old and mute. The doctrine is recent and loud. He has labeled the loud thing with the name of the quiet one.
The experience of ethnonationalism is centripetal. It is love of one’s own, and it points inward. A group does need a boundary, since there is no “us” without the category of “not-us,” but a boundary is not an enemy. The stranger sits on the far side of the line and draws no heat at all until he competes, threatens, or organizes against you.
In-group love is the boundary at rest. Schmitt’s friend and enemy is the boundary under fire. The enemy is not the source of the bond. He is what the bond becomes when something pushes on it. Students of group feeling have found the same thing in the lab, that loving your own and hating the other are separate switches, and the first throws long before the second.
This paragraph is the headwater of every error we have walked through. Render the felt bond as a held belief, the lived “we” as a subjective notion, the ancient love as a set of tenets, and you have made the thing sound like an opinion. Once it is an opinion, you can picture repealing it by statute in 1965, or outgrowing it in a postnational age, or sorting it into one of two tidy stories.
The Jewish thread runs the length of the piece. Jews appear as the recurring successful minority that gets resented and expelled, then the Kafka line about cultural loss, then the 1930s professional quotas, then Israel. He opens by quoting Tony Judt (1948-2010) calling the Jewish state a late-nineteenth-century anachronism, and the whole essay answers that charge. If ethnonationalism is the norm and not the detour, then Israel is normal and Judt is provincial. That is the polemic driving the scholarship.
On prediction the record runs more hit than miss in the West. He forecast a resurgent ethnonational identity and a European self-definition set partly against Islam. The 2015 migration crisis, Brexit, the rise of the AfD and the Rassemblement National and the Sweden Democrats: that part aged well. South Sudan, the Rohingya expulsion, the Sahel: the developing-world forecast landed too. What he underrated was the staying power of large mixed states and how much integration, not fragmentation, kept winning in much of the world.
Walker Connor (1926-2017) gave Muller the load-bearing epigram: what people feel is real has consequences. Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) gave him the foil, the imagined community. Lord Acton (1834-1902) gave him the warning that making nation and state coincide consigns every other group inside the border to a lesser place. Muller quotes Acton and then recommends accepting the reality of the impulse Acton feared.
David Pinsof’s “Strange Bedfellows” treats political belief as alliance support rather than principled commitment. The frame strips away the idea that political positions follow from abstract values like equality, authority, or freedom. It treats positions instead as outputs of a coalition structure that varies across nations and time periods. Apply the frame to Jerry Z. Muller and the question shifts. Stop asking what Muller believes about metrics, capitalism, conservatism, or Jewish history. Start asking whose interests his books advance, whose status they protect, and whose grievances they amplify.
The map first.
Muller’s allies cluster around three groups. The first group includes practitioners with tacit knowledge, doctors, teachers, surgeons, police officers, the experienced people who run institutions on judgment that resists reduction to numbers. The second group covers the conservative intellectual tradition broadly construed, the line that runs from Hume through Burke, Möser, Tocqueville, Disraeli, Oakeshott, and Hayek. The third group is Jewish intellectual life, especially the strand that takes Jewish economic history as a legitimate object of structural analysis rather than as a topic too sensitive for sober treatment.
Muller’s rivals cluster as well. The audit class is one. Regulators, accountants, university administrators, business school professors, consultants, the people who design metric regimes for institutions they did not build and do not run. Soviet and post-Soviet apologists are another, the intellectuals who downplayed communist atrocities and whom Muller treats with a cold eye. A third rival is the libertarian flattening of Adam Smith, which Muller regards as an embarrassment to the conservative tradition he wants to defend. A fourth is the romanticizing strand of Jewish history that prefers consolation to realism. None of these rivals is named as such. All are present as the coalition Muller writes against.
The propagandistic biases follow.
Muller’s victim biases attach to the practitioners. When metrics distort medical practice, teaching, or policing, his account places the harm at the door of the metric designers and dwells on the severity and duration of damage to professional life. When the same practitioners fall short under metrics, the failure traces to the regime rather than to the practitioner. The audit class gets the opposite treatment. Muller catalogs harms from metric regimes, the gaming, the displacement, the deskilling, and ties them to internal features of the metric impulse rather than to bad luck or hard cases. Practitioner success comes from training, judgment, and tacit feel. Practitioner failure comes from systems imposed on them. The match to what Alliance Theory predicts is close.
The conservative anthology operates by transitivity. Muller links Hume to Burke, Burke to Oakeshott, Oakeshott to Hayek. The reader who already respects one of these figures gets pushed toward respecting the others. Muller does not argue that they agree. He argues that they share a temperament. The argument is a coalition-building argument. It establishes common knowledge of the alliance and recruits the reader into it. Pinsof’s “the friend of my friend is my friend” appears in the volume’s structure even though Muller never names the principle.
Capitalism and the Jews works similarly. Muller defends a structural account of Jewish commercial history against two rival accounts. The first rival treats the Jewish commercial role as an embarrassment, evidence of opportunism or exploitation, the frame congenial to leftist anti-capitalist criticism and to traditional antisemitism alike. The second rival treats Jewish history as victim history alone, the frame congenial to certain strands of postwar Jewish writing. Muller’s account presents Jewish commercial success as the structurally produced result of legal restrictions and emerging markets. The account protects the status of the historical Jewish commercial class without flattering it. It also draws Jewish history into the broader project of defending market modernization. The book builds a coalition between Jewish historical scholarship and market-friendly economic history.
The Tyranny of Metrics is the clearest case. The book reaches business executives, hospital administrators, school superintendents, and policy intellectuals. Many of these readers occupy positions inside the audit class. Why do they read it? Pinsof’s frame supplies an answer. The audit class is internally divided. Some of its members feel their work is captured and degraded by metric regimes. They form a sub-alliance with the practitioners against the more dominant managerial faction. Muller writes for that sub-alliance. The book mobilizes a coalition that crosses the official hierarchy. It tells the harried hospital administrator and the disillusioned superintendent that they share interests with the surgeon and the teacher.
Adam Smith in His Time and Ours and The Mind and the Market protect the moral standing of commercial society against rivals on the left and on the libertarian right. Muller is no market triumphalist. He insists on Smith’s moral psychology, on the institutional preconditions of markets, on the persistent ambivalence of European thought about commerce. The argument lifts capitalism out of the libertarian camp, where it sits awkwardly with the conservative intellectual tradition Muller wants to defend, and places it inside a broader humanistic frame. The move recruits Hume-style conservatives, religious traditionalists, and policy-oriented intellectuals into a defense of market institutions that does not require them to embrace Ayn Rand. It is a coalition-broadening move. It also pushes Smith out of reach of the libertarian rival who would claim him for a thinner cause.
The Hans Freyer book and the Jacob Taubes book do something different. They take seriously two figures whose intellectual and political histories make most readers uncomfortable. Freyer flirted with the radical right and served the Nazi regime. Taubes was a brilliant fraud who manipulated nearly everyone he met. Muller does not redeem either man. He insists on the seriousness of the work and the contingency of the bad outcomes. The function inside Muller’s coalition is to keep difficult conservative and Jewish intellectual figures inside the conversation rather than letting them be exiled. It is alliance maintenance through historical patience. The conservative tradition keeps Freyer in view as a cautionary case rather than handing him to the rival camp as a trophy. Jewish intellectual history keeps Taubes as a strange member of the family rather than disowning him.
Now the position.
Muller spent his career at Catholic University of America. He did not move to the Ivy League. Pinsof’s frame, drawing on Brint, places the upper class of the contemporary American coalition in two camps. Intellectual elites, academics, journalists, foundation officials, sit on one side. Business elites, executives, financiers, family-office managers, sit on the other. The two factions compete for status and policy influence. Muller occupies a peripheral position inside the intellectual elite. He works at a serious university that lacks Ivy League prestige. He publishes with Princeton. He writes for The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs. He reaches business audiences through The Great Courses and through The Tyranny of Metrics.
The peripheral position has costs and benefits. The cost is exclusion from the most prestigious circuits. The benefit is a freer hand. Muller does not depend for his career on staying inside the prestige economy. He can write a book defending tacit professional knowledge that the dominant managerial faction of his sector finds embarrassing. He can edit an anthology that takes conservatism seriously when most of his peers treat it as a curiosity. He can write Capitalism and the Jews knowing the book will not sit comfortably in any of the dominant frames. The independence is structural rather than personal. The institutional position generates the freedom.
Alliance Theory predicts that intellectual figures who occupy peripheral positions inside their coalition develop sympathies with the practitioner faction against the managerial faction. This is what Muller has done. He defends doctors against hospital administrators, teachers against superintendents, surgeons against quality-control regimes. The defense reads as a moral and epistemic argument about the limits of measurement. It also functions as coalition support for the side of his sector that mirrors his own peripheral status.
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs affiliation extends the pattern. The center is a hawkish Israeli policy shop with a center-right orientation. Muller’s continued engagement with Israeli policy thought aligns him with a transnational conservative Jewish coalition that fuses Israel advocacy, market realism, and skepticism toward global governance institutions. The structure is transitive. The intellectual conservatives, the market realists, the Jewish historical realists, and the Israel hawks form a super-alliance. Muller’s affiliation is one strand inside that super-alliance. The strand makes more sense as coalition position than as a series of independent commitments.
None of Muller’s commitments was inevitable. In a different configuration, his defense of tacit knowledge might have attached to the British labor movement of the 1950s, to the German guild tradition, or to the American craft socialists of the early twentieth century. His Jewish historical realism might have attached to Bundism, to Yiddishist socialism, or to early Israeli labor Zionism. His defense of conservative intellectual tradition might have looked like Tory wetness or like One-Nation conservatism rather than American post-Reagan conservatism. The actual coalition Muller writes inside is the historically produced American coalition of the late twentieth century, and it has the contingency of any other coalition. The thinkers he revives are real. The connections among them are partly real and partly the coalitional achievement of his anthology. Pinsof’s stochasticity argument applies. Small differences in initial conditions snowball into seemingly arbitrary alliance structures, and Muller writes inside one of them.
Pinsof’s frame closes with a claim about politics and morality. Politics is about conflict and loyalty. Morality is about cooperation and impartiality. Political discourse uses moral language as propaganda. Apply the claim to Muller and a useful question arises. When he argues that metrics corrupt the activities they aim to improve, is the argument moral or political? The frame does not deny that the argument might be moral and true. The frame insists that the argument also does political work. It defends the autonomy, status, and discretion of a class of professionals whose interests align with Muller’s own. The political function does not erase the moral and epistemic content. It does shape what the argument is for.
The same observation applies to the Jewish historical realism. The argument that Jewish minorities had structural reasons for entering commerce, and that those reasons produced both economic success and political vulnerability, is plausible on the historical evidence. The argument also performs coalitional work. It legitimates the historical Jewish commercial class against rivals who would treat that class as an embarrassment. The political function does not erase the historical content. It does shape what the argument supports.
Symmetry applies. Muller’s rivals operate by the same alliance psychology he does. Hospital administrators who read Muller and bristle are not simply mistaken. They are mobilizing perpetrator biases on behalf of their own coalition, the management consulting faction, the regulatory class, the safety-and-quality movement. They emphasize the harms of unregulated practitioner judgment, the doctors who killed patients before metrics, the teachers who failed children before testing. Their biases match Muller’s in form and reverse him in content. Pinsof’s frame predicts both sides and explains both. Neither side is uniquely propagandistic. Both run on the same alliance psychology.
Alliance Theory does not refute Muller. The theory cannot refute him. His books may be true. His historical readings may be sound. His critique of metrics may identify real damage to real practitioners. None of this is in tension with the theory. The theory only claims that Muller’s positions are not fully explained by his abstract values. They are explained by the alliance structure he writes inside, the coalition he supports, and the rivals he writes against. The book that emerges from any author writing inside any coalition will look like coalition support whether the author intends that or not. The contribution of the frame is to make the coalition visible.
What Muller adds, beyond what the frame can predict, is the patience of his historical reconstructions and the precision of his prose. Many writers write inside coalitions. Few do it with this care. The care is itself a coalitional asset. It makes Muller’s books usable for serious readers who might discount cruder coalition support. The achievement is to write coalition argument that other coalitions can read without flinching. Pinsof might call that good propaganda. Muller’s own tradition might call it good history. Both descriptions can hold at once.
David Pinsof argues that intellectuals locate the world’s problems in confusion because the diagnosis flatters them. If problems come from misunderstanding, the people who understand things are the people who can save the world. Pinsof rejects the diagnosis. Stereotypes are savvy. Partisan hatred is rational competition over the coercive apparatus of the state. Bigotry is competition over status and power. Misinformation is moral panic. Most cognitive biases are strategies that work. Humans are well-designed for the environments they inhabit. The world does not need an intellectual rescue because it is not broken. It runs on motives the intellectual class finds embarrassing to name.
Apply this to Jerry Z. Muller and you find a partial fit and a partial failure. Both halves are useful.
Where Muller fits Pinsof’s frame.
Muller treats his historical subjects as rational actors responding to the incentives and pressures they faced. Hans Freyer is not a man who fell for Nazism out of confusion. He saw something in the regime that fit his prior commitments, and he served it. Jacob Taubes is not a brilliant man brought low by personal pathology. He played the games the intellectual world rewards, with skill and without scruple. Marx, Schumpeter, and Hayek do not appear as confused thinkers in The Mind and the Market. They appear as men who understood the moral problems of commercial society and gave different answers. Muller does not write the history of error. He writes the history of intelligent people responding to live questions.
The structural account of Jewish commercial history in Capitalism and the Jews sits closer to Pinsof’s “stereotypes are savvy” position than most readers notice. Muller does not deny that Jewish minorities concentrated in commerce, finance, and intermediary trades. He explains why. Restrictions on land ownership and access to guilds pushed Jews into mobile, contractual occupations. The emerging market economy rewarded those skills. Antisemites who saw Jews as commercial were not confused about the demographic pattern. They were strategic, or wrong, about its causes and meaning. Muller takes the empirical observation seriously and reframes its interpretation. He does not pretend the observation is the bigotry.
The conservative tradition Muller has spent decades anthologizing is, in Pinsof’s terms, a tradition that refuses the misunderstanding myth. Hume, Burke, Möser, Tocqueville, Oakeshott, and Hayek share a suspicion of grand designs imposed by people who think they have seen through to the truth. Conservatism in this sense is the body of thought that refuses to treat humans as confused animals waiting for enlightenment. It treats them as rational actors in webs of inheritance, custom, and constraint. Muller’s project keeps this tradition available against intellectual currents that want to treat all opposition as ignorance or malice. The project is Pinsof-adjacent.
So is Muller’s institutional position. He spent his career at Catholic University of America. He does not depend on the Ivy League prestige economy that produces much of the misunderstanding-myth literature. He sits outside the antiracism status circuit Pinsof describes. He writes for Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal and operates inside a center-right intellectual coalition that values historical patience and willingness to handle difficult material. The status game he plays does not pay him to flatter his own class as the rescuers of humanity. The coalition position frees him to write differently than the dominant academic register permits.
Where Muller breaks with Pinsof’s frame.
The Tyranny of Metrics is, at one level, a misunderstanding book. It tells the audit class that they have a flawed model of how knowledge works. It tells administrators that they do not see the costs of what they impose. It assumes that if hospital executives, school superintendents, and regulators grasped the limits of measurement, they might pull back. The book reads at times as Pinsof’s caricature, the intellectual saving the world by clearing up confusion.
Pinsof’s response is built into his frame. The audit class understands fine. Metrics serve their interests. Quantitative regimes give regulators leverage over practitioners. They give administrators control over doctors and teachers. They produce visible accountability for politicians. They generate billable hours for consultants. They concentrate authority in the hands of people who can read spreadsheets and away from people whose knowledge resists that format. The metric impulse is not a misunderstanding of tacit knowledge. It is a coalition’s tool for extracting value from a rival coalition. The audit class does exactly what its position rewards.
Muller’s libertarian-Smith critique runs into the same problem. He argues that libertarians flatten Smith, missing the moral psychology and the institutional preconditions of markets. On Pinsof’s reading, libertarians understand Smith well enough. They use a flattened Smith because the flattened Smith serves their political coalition. Restoring Smith’s complexity does not help them. It might slow their argument and complicate their alliances. The flattening is strategic, not careless.
The progressive treatment of conservatism as an embarrassment is the third case. Muller’s anthology presents conservatism as a serious tradition that progressives have failed to read carefully. On Pinsof’s reading, progressive intellectuals do not need to read conservatism carefully. Their coalition profits from treating it as a curiosity. Engaging it seriously would require them to take seriously rivals their position is built on dismissing. The neglect is functional, not negligent.
In each case, Muller writes as if the rival coalition has misunderstood and might be corrected. Pinsof writes as if the rival coalition has understood and is doing what serves it. Muller’s policy register sometimes falls inside the misunderstanding myth even when his historical practice does not.
The tension is productive.
Muller’s history works because he treats his subjects as rational. His interventions sometimes wobble because he treats his readers, and his rivals, as correctable. The gap between the two registers is where Pinsof’s frame bites.
The stated-motive question follows. Muller presents his work as recovering complexity, restoring serious treatment to undertreated subjects, defending judgment against systems that flatten it. Pinsof might press the question: what are these books for? Recovering complexity flatters historical readers and consolidates a particular coalition. The defense of practitioner judgment supports a class of professionals whose interests align with Muller’s institutional position. The conservative anthology recruits readers into an alliance that values exactly the dispositions Muller cultivates. The stated motives may be sincere. The actual functions operate regardless.
Pinsof’s “the world doesn’t want to be saved” applies cleanly here. The audit class does not want to be saved from metrics. Metrics work for them. Libertarians do not want Smith complicated. Their version works for them. Progressives do not want conservatism rehabilitated. The treating-as-embarrassment posture works for them. Muller’s books fail to convert these audiences and have always failed. What they succeed at is consolidating Muller’s own audience. They give center-right intellectuals, judgment-defending practitioners, and historically minded readers usable material for their own coalition work. The success of The Tyranny of Metrics among practitioners and the failure of the same book to slow the metric impulse are the same fact seen from two sides. The book is a coalition asset, not a policy intervention.
With the current Substack project, Passing It On, the stated motive is thinking about how meaning, money, and purpose pass across generations. Pinsof’s frame predicts another reading. The actual function is addressing the reproductive anxieties of the established Jewish and conservative bourgeoisie, families who have built something they want to transmit and who fear the transmission will fail. The book is service to a particular coalition’s worry about its own continuity. Whether the stated and actual motives can be cleanly separated is the question Pinsof’s frame insists on asking. Muller might believe the stated motive. The actual function operates whether he believes it or not.
Pinsof’s evolutionary realism rests on the claim that humans are well-designed animals operating in adaptive environments. Muller’s defense of tacit knowledge sits inside this picture. The surgeon who reads the patient, the teacher who reads the room, the police officer who reads the street operate with cognitive systems honed for exactly that work. The audit class that proposes to replace them with checklists is, in Pinsof’s terms, the class assuming humans are broken and need fixing. Muller is on Pinsof’s side here. The shared opponent is the technocratic class that thinks judgment can be replaced by systems because the people doing the judging are the problem.
Biological frameworks provide useful analogies for understanding the careers of intellectuals and the movement of texts. Applied to Jerry Z. Muller, American constitutional law, and John Rawls, these concepts illuminate how ideas migrate, mutate, and adapt across distinct cultural ecosystems.
Jerry Z. Muller employs horizontal gene transfer in Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present. He anthologizes conservative thought from David Hume to Friedrich Hayek, taking thinkers whose ideas grew in the regulatory context of Anglican parishes, Westphalian estates, French Catholic aristocracy, Viennese liberal salons, and Edinburgh debating societies. He strips that context away and presents the resulting selections as a coherent intellectual lineage available for use by American center-right readers. The transfer succeeds because the new host environment finds the borrowed genes useful. The donor environments are gone.
Exaptation occurs when a feature that originally evolved for one function is co-opted for a new use. Edmund Burke wrote against the French Revolution to defend particular English arrangements, an established church, an inherited aristocracy, a property regime. Muller borrows Burke for arguments about technocratic overreach in the contemporary American administrative state. The original function is gone. The new function is different. The structure of Burke’s argument survives because the structure happens to fit a problem Burke did not face.
Phenotypic plasticity describes how a single genotype produces different visible characteristics under varying environmental conditions. In the academic monograph, conservatism is a plural temperament. In The Wall Street Journal op-ed, conservatism is a critique of measurement regimes, a theme Muller developed in The Tyranny of Metrics. In Foreign Affairs, conservatism is a realist warning against grand strategic designs. The genotype remains consistent; the expression varies with the ecological niche.
Batesian mimicry applies less to Muller than to the broader American conservative movement that drapes itself in the prestige of Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Michael Oakeshott without paying any of the costs those thinkers demanded, such as established religion, hereditary deference, or slow institutional reform. Muller acts as a museum curator rather than a parasite. He preserves the originals; the parasitism happens downstream.
Endosymbiosis describes an organism that begins as a guest inside another organism and becomes essential to it, much like the origin of mitochondria. Conservative thought entered American academic life as a guest, an embarrassment, a curiosity. It is now a load-bearing component of certain institutions, the law schools where originalism thrives, the foundations that fund this work, the magazines that publish it. The host has changed shape to accommodate the guest, and the guest has lost the ability to live outside the host.
Niche construction describes how organisms modify their environment in ways that select for further modifications, like beavers building dams. Muller’s anthology constructed a niche where serious conservative scholarship became a recognized academic category. The niche selects for further work like his, more anthologies, more historians of conservatism, more graduate students. The category did not exist as a respectable academic specialty in 1960. Muller helped build it.
Founder effects describe what happens when a small population colonizes a new environment, limiting subsequent genetic diversity. The American conservative intellectual tradition was founded by a small set of postwar thinkers: Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Frank Meyer, Leo Strauss and his students, and Irving Kristol. The tradition that follows is constrained by the limited gene pool of its founders. Many positions available in European conservatism, the integralism of Charles Maurras, the radical traditionalism of Julius Evola, the One Nation paternalism of Benjamin Disraeli, are not naturally available in the American tradition because they were not in the founding stock. Muller has spent decades widening the pool by anthologizing thinkers the American founders neglected. The widening is partial; the founder effect persists.
Hybridization describes distinct lineages combining to form a new viable lineage. American fusionism, the marriage of free-market libertarianism, religious traditionalism, and Cold War hawkishness, is a hybridization that might have surprised any of the European thinkers Muller anthologizes in The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. Hayek and Russell Kirk should not naturally appear in the same coalition. They appear together because the historical moment of the 1950s American right needed a coalition broad enough to include both, and the hybrid has reproduced for several generations. Muller’s anthology serves in part as a record of the hybrid’s parentage.
Domestication involves wild organisms becoming dependent on humans for survival, losing their original reproductive traits. Burke’s writing as it lived in the political life of Anglo-Irish gentry reproduced by being argued at dinner tables, in pamphlets, in parliamentary speeches, and in the administration of estates. Burke’s writing as it lives in Muller’s anthology can reproduce only in seminar rooms, on syllabi, and in scholarly journals. The wild original is gone. What survives is the domesticated cultivar, dependent on academic caretakers and university funding for its continued existence. When a tradition’s primary exponents become outsiders, the traditions become museum objects. They cannot return to the wild.
Vertical and horizontal transmission distinguish paths for cultural inheritance. Vertical transmission moves a tradition from parents to children within a community, carrying text, tone, gesture, embodied practice, and communal accountability. Horizontal transmission moves the tradition between communities through written or institutional channels. Horizontal transmission is fast and far-reaching, but lossy. Whatever in the tradition could not be written down or institutionalized falls away. Muller’s anthology is pure horizontal transmission. The vertical chain that originally carried the texts, English country gentry, Edinburgh philosophical clubs, Viennese liberal Jewish households, is broken. What Muller transmits is what survived the loss.
Now apply these frames to American constitutional law.
The Constitution was produced by a particular people at a particular moment. The framers were predominantly English-descended, Protestant, literate, property-owning, male, schooled in common law, Scottish moral philosophy, Roman republican imagery, and Protestant theology. Their concerns were the concerns of their generation: standing armies, religious establishment, the relations between large and small states, slavery as compromise, paper money, debt, taxation. The text they produced is a frozen genotype. The exponents of constitutional tradition today are a vastly more diverse population, demographically, religiously, ideologically, and methodologically.
Horizontal gene transfer applies to every act of constitutional interpretation. The text moves between communities very different from the founding community. The Reconstruction generation read the document with concerns the founders did not share. The New Deal generation read it with concerns the Reconstruction generation did not share. Each new generation strips away or downweights regulatory contexts the prior generation took as given. Originalism is the school of constitutional thought that resists the loss. Originalists try to preserve the original regulatory context, the meaning the words had in the founders’ linguistic and political environment. Living constitutionalism is the school that embraces the new contexts. Both are responses to horizontal transfer. Neither escapes the underlying biological fact. The text has moved from its original ecology.
Phenotypic plasticity applies to the Commerce Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, the First Amendment, and the Second Amendment, all of which have produced wildly different phenotypes in different judicial environments. The Commerce Clause grew small in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. and grew vast in Wickard v. Filburn. The Second Amendment was a militia provision in most twentieth-century reading and is an individual right in District of Columbia v. Heller. The same genotype produces tall in shade and short in sun.
Exaptation applies clearly to the Reconstruction Amendments. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed to secure the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans against hostile southern state governments. It now grounds protections for corporate personhood, commercial speech, and a wide range of substantive due process claims. The original function is partly served and partly displaced. The new functions arose because the structure of the amendment turned out to fit problems the framers did not face. The Commerce Clause similarly was designed to prevent trade wars between states. It is now the constitutional foundation of the modern administrative state, regulating workplace safety, environmental protection, and civil rights in private accommodations. Feathers evolved for warmth; birds use them for flight.
Signal parasitism applies to almost every political movement that claims to be the true heir of the founders. Both major parties claim the Constitution as their patrimony. The same documents are quoted by people who hold opposing views about almost everything the founders cared about. The signal of constitutional fidelity carries prestige that is borrowed by those who can plausibly claim it. The Trump-era political right and the Warren Court political left both wrap their programs in founders’ language. Most of these claims are mimicry. Telling them apart requires asking what costs the claimant pays for the claim. If the claim costs the claimant nothing, the signal is parasitic.
Founder effects are constitutional law’s deepest constraint. The Senate gives Wyoming the same vote as California because the founders needed small-state assent to ratification. This was a contingent compromise; it now structures every modern American political conflict. The Electoral College, the difficulty of constitutional amendment, the lifetime tenure of federal judges, the rights enumerated and not enumerated, all reflect the limited gene pool of the founding generation. Subsequent diversity is constrained by what was settled then. Modern political life cannot adapt freely; it must adapt within the founder-imposed constraints.
Niche construction applies to the institutions the Constitution created. The Supreme Court constructed the niche of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison. Once the niche existed, it selected for further judicial review, more constitutional interpretation, the modern apparatus of clerks, law schools, and casebooks. The Constitution is now a self-reinforcing ecosystem. Abandoning it would require dismantling the entire ecological scaffolding of American legal life.
Domestication applies to constitutional originalism in particular. The original regulatory context, the lived political world of late-eighteenth-century Anglo-American Protestant elites, is gone and cannot be recovered. What originalism preserves is a domesticated cultivar, the textual meaning extracted from its ecological context. This domesticated meaning depends on academic and judicial caretakers for its survival. It cannot return to the wild. The originalists who claim to recover original meaning are tending a cultivar in a botanical garden. The garden has its own value; the wild ancestor is extinct.
Now apply these frames to John Rawls for a contrast to how they cut with Muller.
John Rawls produced A Theory of Justice in 1971, a Princeton-Harvard product of the postwar liberal Protestant academic establishment. He was a Baltimore-born Princeton man who served in the Pacific in World War II, lost his Christian faith, replaced it with a Kantian moral philosophy, and built his career at Harvard. His framework grew from particular concerns of his generation: civil rights, the Vietnam War, the welfare state, the moral standing of inherited inequality. The book presents itself as universal philosophy; it is also a tribal artifact.
The Horizontal gene transfer. Rawls’s framework has been adopted by constitutional courts in South Africa, Germany, Israel, India, and Latin America. It has shaped the language of human rights worldwide. The transfer succeeds because each new host finds the framework useful for local purposes. The original regulatory context, the postwar American liberal consensus that Rawls write inside, is gone in most of the new environments. What survives is the structural argument, the original position, the veil of ignorance, the difference principle. The argument lives in new ecosystems; it no longer lives in its native one, which has dissolved.
Phenotypic plasticity. Liberation theologians use Rawls. Libertarian critics use him as a foil. Cosmopolitan global-justice theorists extend him to international redistribution. Communitarians treat him as the symptom of liberalism’s pathology. The same Rawls produces very different intellectual phenotypes depending on the surrounding environment.
Exaptation. Rawls intended a moderate egalitarian liberalism appropriate to a generally well-ordered constitutional democracy. The framework has been exapted into arguments Rawls did not endorse: defenses of global wealth redistribution that Rawls explicitly rejected in The Law of Peoples, claims about intergenerational justice and the rights of future people that Rawls did not develop, and applications to non-human animals and artificial minds that Rawls might have found alien. The original purpose is partly served and partly displaced.
Signal parasitism. To call a position Rawlsian is to borrow the prestige of academic philosophical seriousness for a political program. The borrowing is sometimes earned. Often the program has little to do with anything Rawls argued, and the citation is mimicry. The signal of justice as fairness carries weight the program does not deserve.
Founder effects. The veil of ignorance thought experiment locks in a particular methodology, individualist, contractualist, broadly Kantian. Subsequent political philosophy in the Rawlsian lineage is constrained by these founder commitments. Critics have pointed out that the methodology excludes communitarian, Aristotelian, Hegelian, and Thomist alternatives by construction. The exclusions are not arguments; they are founder effects. The available diversity in the Rawlsian tradition is limited by what was settled in the original framework.
Niche construction occurred when Rawls single-handedly reconstructed the niche of normative political philosophy as a respectable academic specialty after its mid-twentieth-century decline. His students populate philosophy departments worldwide. The niche selects for Rawlsian-style work, the construction of thought experiments, the search for reflective equilibrium, and the analysis of original-position reasoning. Many philosophers spend their careers inside this niche without remembering that the niche was constructed within living memory.
Rawls’s framework is what happens when the moral and political concerns of mid-twentieth-century American liberal Protestantism are extracted from their religious, congregational, and civic context and rendered into pure philosophical argument. The original context contained Sunday schools, Social Gospel preaching, Niebuhrian theology, civil rights organizing, the New England town meeting, and the postwar university chapel. All of it is gone from Rawls’s framework. What survives is the domesticated cultivar, an argument structure that can be taught in seminars worldwide. The wild ancestor cannot be recovered. Rawls’s universalism is a tribal product, the universalism of a particular American Protestant academic generation that thought its values were universal because the tribe’s local conditions gave it no reason to doubt this. The framework’s worldwide success is the success of an exported cultivar that no longer needs the soil that grew it.
A tribe produces a story. The story serves the tribe. Outsiders carry the story away. The carriers strip context, repurpose function, and vary expression by environment. Sometimes they domesticate the story so thoroughly that it cannot return home. The story spreads worldwide; the original tribe loses control of its meaning. The exponents are no longer the producers, and the producers cannot fully recognize what their story has become. This is the situation of conservative thought in Muller’s hands, of the Constitution in the hands of contemporary lawyers, and of justice as fairness in the hands of global-justice theorists. In each case, an artifact of one community has become the cultural property of communities the original producers did not anticipate. The artifact lives. The community that made it does not. What survives is the domesticated cultivar, tended in the gardens of those who came after.
Muller Under Hugo Mercier and John M. Doris
Hugo Mercier argues that humans deploy open vigilance when evaluating communicated information. They assess sources, evaluate arguments against priors, and accept information that passes their checks while rejecting information that fails them. Successful communicators provide content that recipients’ vigilance approves rather than overcoming vigilance through manipulation.
Muller has built sustained readership across decades through producing work that consistently passes vigilance checks for specific audiences. His readers include conservative intellectuals, business school faculty, policy professionals, history graduate students, educated general readers interested in capitalism’s intellectual history, and Jewish intellectuals interested in modern Jewish economic and cultural experience. The audience is not enormous. It is institutionally significant because its members occupy positions where their evaluations affect how Muller’s work circulates further.
Muller’s readers find his work meets specific evaluative criteria they apply to historical scholarship. The criteria include: sustained engagement with primary sources rather than reliance on secondary scholarship that simplifies the original material, careful attention to historical context that prevents anachronistic readings, willingness to acknowledge complexity rather than forcing material into predetermined frameworks, refusal to perform either celebration or denunciation that simpler scholarship typically performs, and capacity to write clearly about complex material without sacrificing analytical depth.
Each criterion matters. Muller’s work consistently meets each one. Adam Smith in His Time and Ours engages Smith’s actual writings in depth rather than relying on the simplified Smith that economic textbooks transmit. Capitalism and the Jews maintains careful historical context that prevents the material from being weaponized for contemporary political purposes by either philosemites or antisemites. The Tyranny of Metrics acknowledges the limits of its own thesis rather than presenting metrics as universally bad. Conservatism presents conservative thought through its own internal commitments rather than through hostile or sympathetic external framings. Professor of Apocalypse engages Taubes’s contradictions as actual features of the man rather than smoothing them into coherent biographical narrative.
Mercier’s framework predicts specific audience response to such work. Readers whose priors match the criteria the work meets will find the work compelling. They will recommend it to others with similar priors. They will continue reading subsequent work because the established pattern produces continued vigilance approval. The cumulative effect produces sustained readership across decades that is built specifically through repeated successful passage of audience vigilance.
The same qualities that produce sustained readership within specific audiences limit reach beyond those audiences. Readers whose priors include strong commitments that Muller’s work does not affirm find his work less compelling. Specific examples illustrate this.
Progressive readers whose priors include strong commitment to capitalism as primarily exploitative system find Muller’s Mind and the Market less compelling than Marxist-influenced histories of economic thought. The work’s careful presentation of capitalism’s defenders does not match progressive priors that treat such defenses as primarily ideological cover for material exploitation. Progressive readers can read Muller’s book and acknowledge its scholarly competence while not finding its central arguments compelling because their priors do not align with the work’s implicit commitments.
Conservative readers whose priors include strong commitment to specific religious or traditional positions sometimes find Muller insufficient to their needs. His Conservatism presents conservative thought as varied tradition with internal tensions rather than as unified coherent worldview. Conservative readers seeking validation of specifically religious-conservative positions can find Muller’s pluralistic presentation unsatisfying because their priors prefer accounts that establish their specific position as authentically conservative against alternatives.
Jewish readers whose priors include strong commitment to specific positions on Jewish economic history find Capitalism and the Jews either too sympathetic or insufficiently sympathetic to Jewish economic distinctiveness depending on their specific priors. Readers committed to defending Jewish economic success against antisemitic framings sometimes find Muller’s acknowledgment of the historical realities of Jewish overrepresentation in specific economic activities uncomfortable. Readers committed to ethnic-essentialist celebration of Jewish achievement find Muller’s careful contextualization insufficient celebration. The work passes vigilance for readers whose priors fall between these positions and fails for readers whose priors align with either pole.
Mercier’s framework identifies this as standard feature of how vigilance operates. Different audiences with different priors evaluate the same work differently. The differences reflect their priors rather than failures of the work itself. Muller’s work cannot be redesigned to pass vigilance for audiences whose priors strongly oppose what the work argues. The redesign would require producing different work that would lose the audiences whose priors currently align with what Muller produces.
Muller’s methodology operates through specific commitments that themselves require examination through Mercier’s framework. The methodology privileges sustained engagement with primary sources, careful historical contextualization, acknowledgment of complexity, and resistance to predetermined frameworks. These commitments reflect specific scholarly tradition that has developed within historical scholarship across the modern period.
The tradition is not neutral. It reflects specific evaluative criteria that scholars within the tradition find compelling. Scholars operating from different traditions evaluate work differently. Marxist historians, intellectual historians from different schools, social historians focused on different questions, all operate through different methodological commitments that produce different evaluative outcomes when applied to the same material.
Muller’s methodology aligns with specific tradition that includes figures like Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and various other intellectual historians whose work shares specific commitments. The tradition treats ideas seriously, attends to historical context, resists ideological simplification, and produces work that crosses disciplinary boundaries while maintaining historical rigor. Muller’s audience includes substantial proportion of readers who have absorbed this tradition through their own academic formation. The shared formation produces specific alignment between Muller’s methodology and his readers’ evaluative priors.
Methodological traditions produce specific audience formations whose priors align with the tradition’s commitments. Work that operates through the tradition passes vigilance for those audiences. Work operating through different traditions fails vigilance for the same audiences while passing vigilance for different audiences. The alignment between methodology and audience formation is structural rather than accidental.
Doris argues that situational factors drive behavior more than stable character traits. The framework illuminates Muller’s specific institutional position at Catholic University of America in ways that character-based analysis would miss.
Muller spent his entire career at Catholic University rather than moving to elite institutions where his published work might have qualified him. The specific institutional choice has produced specific consequences. The choice is sometimes treated as character: Muller is the kind of scholar who values intellectual independence over institutional prestige, the kind of person who chose Catholic University for principled reasons. Doris’s framework suggests this character-based reading may overstate the role of stable character traits in producing the institutional choice.
The actual situational factors that produced the choice include specific features of academic hiring at the time Muller entered the profession, specific opportunities that opened at Catholic University when Muller was on the market, specific institutional features of Catholic University that made the position viable for Muller’s specific scholarly interests, and specific personal circumstances that affected the choice in ways no individual scholar fully controls. Different situational factors would have produced different institutional placement. Muller’s specific outcome reflects the specific factors that operated when he was making career decisions.
This is recognition that individual choice operates within situational constraints that substantially shape what choices are available. Muller chose Catholic University from among the options he actually had. Different options would have produced different choices. Other scholars with similar values and similar work might have ended up at different institutions because different situational factors operated for them.
Doris’s framework matters because it prevents romanticizing of the Catholic University position. Muller’s career has had specific costs and specific benefits that flowed from the institutional placement. The benefits include intellectual independence, freedom from specific institutional pressures that operate at elite universities, ability to write for general audiences without facing penalties from specialist colleagues, and capacity to develop wide-ranging scholarly interests rather than narrow specialization. The costs include reduced institutional support for sustained research, smaller graduate program limiting his role in training subsequent generations of historians, less access to specific funding networks, and reduced presence in specific scholarly conversations that occur primarily within elite institutional contexts.
Both the benefits and the costs are situational. They reflect what Catholic University specifically provided and specifically constrained rather than expressing some essential character of Muller’s scholarly identity. A different scholar at the same institution would have experienced different combination of benefits and costs based on the different situational factors operating for that scholar.
Doris on Muller’s sustained productivity. Muller has produced substantial body of work across decades despite operating without the institutional support that elite university positions typically provide. The productivity is sometimes explained through character: Muller has discipline, focus, intellectual curiosity, and commitment that produced sustained work. Doris’s framework suggests examining the situational factors that supported the productivity beyond character explanations.
Specific situational factors that supported Muller’s sustained productivity include: stable employment at Catholic University across decades that provided baseline economic security, family situation that supported the demanding work of book production, specific scholarly networks that provided intellectual community and feedback, specific publishing relationships that produced ongoing book opportunities, specific fellowships at various points that supported extended writing periods, and specific historical conjuncture that produced ongoing audience interest in Muller’s specific scholarly questions.
Each factor matters. Removing any one would have affected the sustained productivity. Without stable employment, Muller could not have committed to long-term book projects. Without family support, the demanding work could not have proceeded. Without scholarly networks, the work would have lacked feedback that improved it. Without publishing relationships, completed work might not have reached audiences. Without specific fellowships, certain books would have been delayed or never written. Without audience interest, continued production would have lacked motivation.
The combination of factors is specific to Muller’s career. Different combinations would have produced different productivity patterns. Other scholars with similar character but different situational support have produced different bodies of work. The situational factors are not interchangeable. Specific factors enabled specific work.
Doris’s framework identifies this as how human productivity operates. Sustained scholarly productivity requires sustained situational support. Character matters but operates within situational constraints. Romanticizing character at the expense of situational factors produces inaccurate accounts of what enables scholarly accomplishment.
The combined framework on Muller’s specific contributions. Mercier and Doris together illuminate features of Muller’s contributions that previous applications of Pinsof and Turner identified but did not fully explain.
Pinsof’s analysis identified Muller’s coalition position outside the dominant academic prestige circuits. Turner’s analysis identified Muller’s resistance to specific tacit knowledge transmissions that elite institutional formation produces. The combined Mercier and Doris analysis adds: Muller’s specific work passes vigilance for specific audiences whose priors align with his methodological tradition, his sustained productivity required specific situational support beyond his individual character, his institutional position produced specific benefits and costs that flowed from situational factors rather than expressing essential character, and his career trajectory follows specific pattern that other scholars with similar combinations of factors have followed.
The combined framework treats Muller’s accomplishments as genuine while clarifying the structural conditions that made them possible. The conditions include both his individual capacities and the specific situational support that allowed those capacities to produce sustained work. Different conditions would have produced different work or different individual scholar. Muller’s specific work reflects specific combination of capacities and conditions.
The specific case of Capitalism and the Jews. The book illustrates how Mercier and Doris together apply to specific Muller works. The book engages controversial material with sustained scholarly care. It documents specific historical patterns of Jewish economic activity and explains why these patterns developed. It addresses the antisemitic uses of similar material directly. It maintains careful historical context that prevents the material from supporting either antisemitic or philosemitic simplifications.
Mercier’s framework identifies why the book passes vigilance for specific audiences. Readers whose priors include commitment to careful historical scholarship find the book meets their evaluative criteria. Readers whose priors include awareness of antisemitic uses of similar material find the book’s careful contextualization addresses their concerns. Readers whose priors include interest in Jewish history find the substantive engagement with Jewish economic experience valuable. The combination of features lets the book reach audiences with different specific interests through shared methodological commitments.
The framework also identifies why the book reaches specific audiences rather than broader audiences. Readers whose priors strongly oppose any sustained engagement with Jewish economic distinctiveness find the book uncomfortable regardless of its careful contextualization. Readers whose priors require strong defenses of specific Jewish economic patterns find the acknowledgment of historical realities insufficient. Readers whose priors include indifference to historical scholarship generally find the work unappealing because they do not value the methodological tradition the work operates within.
Doris’s framework identifies the situational factors that allowed the book to be produced. Catholic University provided institutional context where the book could be written without facing the specific pressures that elite university positions sometimes generate. Muller’s specific scholarly networks provided feedback that improved the book. Specific publishers were willing to publish a book on this subject by an author with Muller’s track record. Specific reviewers engaged the book seriously when it appeared. Each situational factor mattered for the book’s actual production and reception.
Without the specific combination of factors, the book would not exist in its current form. A different scholar in different institutional context might have produced different book on similar material. A different scholar with similar abilities but different situational support might have produced no book at all. Muller’s specific book emerged from specific conditions that supported its production.
The combined framework on Muller’s mainstream invisibility. Muller is well-known within specific scholarly and intellectual communities. He is largely unknown to broader publics that consume mainstream cultural commentary. The asymmetry has specific features worth examining through the combined framework.
Mercier’s framework identifies why mainstream cultural commentary does not engage Muller. The commentary operates through specific evaluative criteria that include specific kinds of contemporary relevance, specific kinds of accessible argumentation, specific kinds of public engagement that Muller’s work does not pursue. Muller writes books that require sustained engagement with complex material. Mainstream cultural commentary requires shorter engagement with simpler material. The mismatch is methodological rather than evaluative. Mainstream commentators could engage Muller’s work but would need to translate it into formats that lose specific features that make the work valuable to its actual audience.
Doris’s framework identifies why Muller’s career did not include sustained pursuit of mainstream visibility. Specific situational factors did not push Muller toward mainstream venues that other scholars pursue. Catholic University did not pressure faculty toward public visibility the way some institutions pressure faculty. Muller’s specific publishers did not require mainstream marketing campaigns. Muller’s specific scholarly networks did not include mainstream cultural commentators who would have brought his work into broader visibility. The absence of pushing combined with Muller’s specific scholarly inclinations produced career trajectory that maintained specific scholarly visibility without pursuing broader cultural visibility.
This produces specific value for the populations that engage Muller’s work. Readers find a scholar whose work has not been simplified for mainstream consumption. The unsimplified work provides resources that simplified versions cannot provide. The resources are valuable specifically because they have not been transformed by mainstream cultural visibility.
The arrangement has costs. Muller’s specific contributions to thinking about capitalism, Jewish history, conservatism, and quantification have not entered mainstream cultural discussion at the levels they might warrant. Mainstream discussion of these topics often proceeds through simpler frameworks that Muller’s work would complicate productively. The cost is borne by mainstream discussion rather than by Muller. He continues writing for his actual audience. The audience continues finding his work valuable. Mainstream discussion continues operating without Muller’s contributions in ways that leave the discussion poorer than it could be.
The specific case of The Tyranny of Metrics. This book reached broader audiences than Muller’s other work. The success illustrates specific features of how the combined framework applies to Muller’s career.
Mercier’s framework identifies why this book reached broader audiences. The book addresses specific contemporary phenomenon (the proliferation of metrics across institutional life) that affects substantial populations directly. Readers across various institutional positions experience the metrics phenomenon and seek frameworks for understanding it. The book provides such framework in accessible prose that does not require specialized background. The specific topic and accessible presentation produced wider audience than Muller’s other work typically reaches.
Doris’s framework identifies the situational factors that produced the book’s broader reach. Princeton University Press positioned the book for general audience marketing in ways some of Muller’s other books had not been positioned. Specific reviewers engaged the book in mainstream venues that had not engaged Muller’s other books. The contemporary moment when the book appeared (2018) included specific institutional concerns about metrics that produced increased interest in critical analysis of the phenomenon. The combination of situational factors produced broader reach than Muller’s other works achieved.
The book’s broader success did not transform Muller into mainstream cultural figure. He continued writing for his actual audience. The book reached broader audience for specific reasons connected to its specific topic and publishing situation. Subsequent work on different topics did not reach equivalent broader audience because the specific factors that produced Tyranny of Metrics’s reach did not operate for the subsequent work.
Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (2022) addresses a specific Jewish intellectual whose career operated through specific charismatic relationships within twentieth-century intellectual life. Muller’s engagement with Taubes provides specific opportunity for the combined framework to identify features of Muller’s broader scholarly project.
Taubes’s career operated through specific charismatic relationships with major figures including Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and various others. The relationships involved specific kinds of intellectual seduction that bypassed the methodological vigilance Mercier’s framework would predict. Taubes generated specific kinds of intellectual excitement in his interlocutors that produced collaborative work and sustained engagement despite his specific personal difficulties and his unreliable scholarly methodology.
Muller’s biography engages this charismatic dimension carefully. The book documents both the substantive intellectual contributions Taubes made and the specific personal pathologies that affected his work and relationships. The combination requires specific scholarly delicacy that Muller’s methodological tradition is well-positioned to provide. The book treats Taubes seriously as intellectual figure while not romanticizing the personal pathologies that affected his work.
Mercier’s framework identifies that Taubes operated as charismatic communicator who generated intellectual excitement that bypassed standard vigilance operations. Doris’s framework identifies that Taubes’s career involved specific situational opportunities (intellectual networks, institutional positions, historical moments) that enabled the charismatic operation. Muller’s biography traces both dimensions carefully without simplifying either. The careful tracing produces work that serves specific audiences interested in twentieth-century Jewish intellectual life while not pretending to provide simple lessons that more accessible biographical work might pretend to provide.
Becker’s framework identifies hero systems as the cultural structures through which individuals achieve symbolic immortality. The systems specify what counts as heroic achievement and what activities qualify the individual for the system’s promised significance. Muller operates within specific hero system that organizes his choices and produces his particular scholarly career.
Muller’s central hero system provides significance through sustained defense of judgment against the various systems that threaten to displace it. The systems include ideological systems that subordinate individual cases to predetermined conclusions, quantitative systems that subordinate qualitative assessment to measurable proxies, professional systems that reward narrow specialization at the expense of broader synthetic understanding, and political systems that demand allegiance over careful analysis.
The hero in this system is the historian whose work consistently demonstrates that complex historical phenomena resist the simplifications systems impose. The historian’s significance derives from sustained capacity to engage material with care that systems do not permit. The system rewards specific qualities: patience with complexity, refusal to force conclusions, attention to context, willingness to acknowledge tension within positions the historian sympathizes with, and capacity to maintain critical distance from material that lesser scholars would either celebrate or denounce.
Muller’s body of work consistently embodies this hero system. The Other God That Failed engages Hans Freyer’s intellectual trajectory without either rehabilitating him or reducing him to his Nazi associations. Adam Smith in His Time and Ours presents Smith as more complex than the libertarian and progressive simplifications that contemporary debates produce. Conservatism presents conservative thought as varied tradition with internal tensions rather than as coherent worldview that could be straightforwardly endorsed or rejected. Capitalism and the Jews engages the specific historical relationship without reducing it to either antisemitic or philosemitic framings. The Tyranny of Metrics critiques metrics while acknowledging where they produce genuine value. Professor of Apocalypse presents Taubes’s specific contradictions without smoothing them into coherent narrative.
Each book operates within Muller’s hero system. The books refuse the simplifications that would make them more accessible to broader audiences. The refusal is not strategic positioning. It is genuine commitment to the kind of historical work the hero system identifies as significant. Muller’s audience recognizes the commitment and rewards it through sustained readership across decades.
The specific intellectual lineage. Muller’s hero system includes specific exemplars whose work provides templates for what the system rewards. The exemplars include Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, Karl Mannheim, J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and various other intellectual historians whose work shares specific commitments. Muller’s work positions itself within this lineage rather than within alternative scholarly traditions that operate through different hero systems.
The lineage matters specifically. Berlin produced sustained work on liberty and pluralism that resisted the systematic philosophy his contemporaries pursued. Hirschman wrote about economic and political phenomena through perspectives that crossed disciplinary boundaries while maintaining careful attention to historical specificity. Mannheim engaged the sociology of knowledge through methodology that resisted the totalizing claims of various ideological traditions. The figures share specific commitment to engaging complex material through careful analysis rather than through ideological systems.
Muller absorbs this lineage and continues it. His specific topics differ from his predecessors’ specific topics. His specific methodology differs in specific ways from each predecessor’s specific methodology. The shared commitment to judgment-against-system unites the work despite the specific differences. Muller’s hero system makes him heir to the lineage rather than merely scholar working in adjacent territory.
Muller’s career at Catholic University of America operates within specific aspect of his hero system. The placement is sometimes treated as costly choice that demonstrates Muller’s principled refusal of prestige. The hero system framework permits more accurate description.
Muller’s hero system requires specific institutional position that supports the kind of work the system identifies as significant. Elite universities operate through specific institutional pressures that often discourage the synthetic broad work Muller’s hero system rewards. Specialization pressures, publication requirements that favor narrow articles over major books, departmental politics that punish work crossing disciplinary boundaries, and various other specific institutional features create conditions where Muller’s specific scholarly project would face sustained obstacles.
Catholic University provided different institutional context. The university’s specific institutional features supported Muller’s work in specific ways. The Catholic intellectual tradition has historic commitment to engaging broad questions across disciplines that contemporary secular universities have largely abandoned. The university’s lower prestige meant fewer pressures to perform specific kinds of careerist activities that elite institutions demand. The specific position permitted Muller to develop his work according to his own evaluative criteria rather than according to external pressures.
This is not exactly heroic sacrifice. It is specific institutional alignment between Muller’s hero system and Catholic University’s institutional features. Muller’s hero system required specific institutional support that elite universities would not have provided. Catholic University provided the support. The match permitted the specific career that Muller has produced. Without the match, the career would have looked different or would not have happened.
Muller did not sacrifice prestige for principle in some general moral sense. He found institutional position that supported the specific hero system he operated within. The position had specific costs (reduced visibility, smaller graduate program, less access to specific funding networks). The position also had specific benefits (intellectual independence, freedom to pursue synthetic work, ability to write for general audiences). The benefits and costs reflected specific institutional features rather than expressing some general moral choice.
Muller’s hero system includes specific Jewish dimension that operates alongside but distinct from his historical methodology. He grew up in observant Jewish family, studied at Hebrew University, and has maintained sustained engagement with modern Jewish history and thought throughout his career. Capitalism and the Jews represents specifically the Jewish dimension of his work most directly.
Modern Jewish intellectual life has produced specific tradition of judgment-against-system thinking that emerged from the specific historical circumstances of Jewish modernity. The tradition includes figures like Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Isaiah Berlin himself, and various others whose work engaged the systematic ideologies that produced specific catastrophes for Jewish populations in the twentieth century. The tradition treats systems with specific suspicion that flows from historical experience rather than from abstract methodological commitment.
Muller operates within this specifically Jewish version of the broader hero system. His work engages systems with specific awareness of what systems have produced for Jewish populations. The awareness shapes the specific quality of his judgment-against-system work. He is not generically suspicious of systems. He is specifically suspicious of systems in ways that reflect Jewish historical experience with the consequences of systems pursued without sufficient attention to what they actually produce for the populations subjected to them.
The Jewish dimension also produces specific obligations within the hero system. Muller’s hero system includes commitment to engaging Jewish intellectual life with specific care that the broader hero system would not require by itself. Capitalism and the Jews exists because Muller’s hero system required engagement with this specific material. Professor of Apocalypse similarly emerged from his hero system’s commitment to engaging specific Jewish intellectual figures whose work and lives illuminate broader questions about modern Jewish experience.
His conservatism is not the populist conservatism that dominates contemporary American conservative politics. It is intellectual conservatism that draws on Burke, Tocqueville, Hayek, and various other figures whose work emphasizes the specific value of historically developed institutions and traditions against the simplifying ambitions of progressive ideology. The intellectual tradition has specific resources that align with Muller’s broader hero system. Both share commitment to complexity, to historical specificity, and to resistance against systems that promise comprehensive solutions.
The conservatism permits Muller to engage capitalism with sympathy that progressive scholarship typically does not provide. Adam Smith in His Time and Ours and The Mind and the Market engage capitalism’s defenders seriously rather than treating them as ideological cover for material exploitation. The engagement is not ideological. It reflects Muller’s hero system’s commitment to engaging positions through their internal logic rather than through hostile external framings.
The conservatism also produces specific limits on Muller’s work. Some readers expect conservative scholarship to defend specific contemporary conservative positions. Muller’s hero system does not permit this kind of work. His conservatism is intellectual rather than political in the contemporary sense. Readers seeking validation of contemporary Republican positions or contemporary conservative cultural commitments find Muller insufficiently aligned with their priorities. The insufficiency is not failure. It reflects what Muller’s hero system permits him to produce.
Muller’s hero system produces work for specific audience whose priors align with the system’s commitments. The audience includes intellectual historians who work within the lineage Muller continues, conservative intellectuals who value careful engagement over partisan advocacy, Jewish intellectuals interested in modern Jewish experience, business school faculty interested in capitalism’s intellectual history, and educated general readers who want sustained engagement with complex material.
The audience is small relative to American population generally. The audience is institutionally significant because its members occupy positions where their evaluations affect how Muller’s work circulates further. Members of the audience teach courses where they assign Muller’s books. They write reviews and commentary that bring Muller’s work to other readers. They occupy editorial positions where they can solicit further work from Muller. The audience’s institutional positions amplify Muller’s reach beyond what direct readership numbers would suggest.
The hero system requires this specific audience to function. Without readers who value what the hero system rewards, the system would not provide the significance it promises. Muller’s continued productivity depends on continued audience response. The response sustains both his motivation and the practical conditions (publishing opportunities, fellowship support, professional networks) that permit continued work.
Muller’s hero system provides specific psychological economy that organizes his career. The economy operates through specific exchanges. He exchanges mainstream cultural visibility for specific scholarly recognition. He exchanges narrow specialization for synthetic engagement across multiple topics. He exchanges contemporary partisan engagement for sustained historical perspective. He exchanges immediate institutional rewards for long-term contribution to specific scholarly tradition.
The exchanges are not sacrifices in any straightforward sense. They produce the specific significance the hero system promises. Mainstream cultural visibility would have required producing different work that the hero system would not recognize as significant. Narrow specialization would have produced work that satisfied specific institutional criteria but failed the hero system’s broader commitments. Contemporary partisan engagement would have compromised the analytical distance the hero system requires. The exchanges produce specific career that the hero system makes meaningful.
The psychological economy works specifically because Muller actually inhabits the hero system rather than performing it strategically. His work would not have its specific quality if he were merely positioning for specific audience effects. The work emerges from actual commitment to the values the hero system represents. The actual commitment produces work that meets the system’s standards in ways that strategic positioning could not produce.
Several specific resources sustain Muller’s hero system. The intellectual lineage provides templates and exemplars. The scholarly audience provides recognition that confirms the system’s significance. Catholic University provided institutional support that permitted the work. Specific publishers (Princeton University Press, Knopf, Oxford University Press, and others) provided ongoing book opportunities. The fellowship infrastructure (Olin Foundation, Bradley Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, American Academy in Berlin, American Council of Learned Societies) provided extended writing time. Each resource matters for sustaining the system across the career.
The system depends on continued audience for the kind of work Muller produces. The audience faces specific demographic and institutional pressures. Younger generations within the audience’s traditional populations may not reproduce the specific scholarly priors that align with Muller’s methodology. The publishing industry that has supported sustained book-length scholarship faces specific pressures that may reduce future opportunities for work in Muller’s mode. The fellowship infrastructure that has supported extended writing periods faces specific pressures that may reduce future support.
The system depends on continued institutional support for intellectual conservatism that operates in Muller’s mode. Contemporary conservative politics has moved substantially toward populist commitments that have specific tensions with the intellectual tradition Muller represents. Conservative funding networks may increasingly support different kinds of work than the work Muller’s hero system produces. Conservative institutions may increasingly emphasize different kinds of intellectual production than the kinds Muller has produced.
Increasing specialization within academic fields produces specific pressures against the kind of broad synthetic work Muller’s hero system rewards. Younger scholars hoping to follow Muller’s pattern face institutional pressures that may not permit equivalent work even with equivalent individual capacities.
Muller retired from Catholic University in 2020. He continues writing and lecturing but no longer holds institutional position equivalent to what he held during his active career. The retirement matters for the hero system in specific ways.
Retirement removes some of this support while permitting continued operation through other resources. Muller’s specific retirement has been productive. He continues producing work, lecturing, and engaging audiences through various venues. His position as Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs since 2020 provides specific institutional context for continued work on Jewish intellectual topics. The Taubes biography appeared after his retirement. Subsequent work continues to emerge.
Muller is moving from active practitioner toward elder figure within the lineage. The transition has specific features within Becker’s framework. Elder figures provide templates for younger scholars. Their continued work serves specific function in transmitting the hero system across generations. Their reduced institutional involvement permits specific kinds of work that active institutional position would not permit.
How successful the transmission proves depends on whether younger scholars within the hero system find institutional positions that permit equivalent work. The institutional conditions that supported Muller’s career may not support equivalent careers for subsequent generations. The hero system may continue producing specific work through specific individuals while losing institutional capacity to reproduce itself at scale.
Muller writes intellectual history through methods that maintain analytical distance from the figures and movements he studies. He documents what they thought, places their thought in historical context, examines tensions within their positions, and traces influences across periods. The methodology resembles what Charles Taylor would identify as thoroughly buffered scholarly approach. The historian operates as detached observer who can examine various phenomena without being personally implicated in them.
The methodology has specific virtues that account for Muller’s audience. Readers find his treatment of capitalism, conservatism, Jewish economic history, metrics, and various other topics more reliable than treatments that operate through stronger commitments. His work on Hans Freyer engages a figure whose ideas connected to Nazi catastrophe without either rehabilitating Freyer or reducing him to his political failures. His work on conservatism presents the tradition through internal resources rather than through external celebration or condemnation. His work on capitalism engages the tradition’s defenders seriously without becoming polemicist for capitalism. The buffered methodology permits this kind of engagement.
The methodology also has specific costs that the framework can identify. Buffered methodology systematically brackets the porous dimensions of what it studies. Religious traditions operating through porous engagement with what believers experience as actual divine presence become objects of historical analysis rather than living realities. Political traditions operating through porous attachment to specific peoples and places become subjects of intellectual history rather than substantive commitments that organize political community. Economic activities operating through porous engagement with vocation, calling, and meaning become topics of analytical study rather than features of human life that exceed economic theory.
The bracketing is not denial. Muller presumably knows that the phenomena have porous dimensions. The methodology requires bracketing them to focus on what buffered analysis can capture. The bracketing produces specific kind of intellectual history that has specific value while excluding specific dimensions that other methodologies could engage.
The Smith engagement made specific. Muller’s Adam Smith in His Time and Ours illustrates how the buffered methodology operates on specific subject matter. Smith wrote within specifically porous Scottish Enlightenment context that combined moral philosophy with active engagement in the substantive moral and political life of his community. Smith was not merely producing analytical economics. He was thinking about how human beings should live within communities that operated through specific moral and religious commitments. The substantive commitments were not optional context for his economic thought. They were constitutive of what his economic thought was for.
Muller’s treatment engages Smith’s actual writings carefully. The treatment attends to Smith’s moral philosophy alongside his economics. The treatment acknowledges that Smith’s economic analysis emerged from broader thinking about virtue, sympathy, and the conditions for human flourishing. The treatment is more careful than treatments that reduce Smith to free-market economist or to communitarian critic of commercial society.
The treatment nonetheless operates through buffered methodology. Smith’s specific religious commitments, his actual relationship to his Presbyterian formation, his lived engagement with the substantive moral life of his community all appear as biographical context rather than as substantive features that the analysis must engage on their own terms. Muller’s Smith is intellectually serious figure whose work deserves careful analysis. Smith’s lived participation in porous moral and religious community that gave his work its specific shape receives less attention than the analytical content of his published writings.
This is what buffered intellectual history typically does. The methodology engages texts as objects of analysis rather than as products of substantive lives that have their own integrity beyond what texts capture. The engagement produces specific analytical insights while bracketing specific dimensions that more porous methodology could engage.
The Capitalism and the Jews case. Muller’s Capitalism and the Jews engages specifically Jewish economic history. The subject matter involves substantially porous dimensions that the buffered methodology brackets in specific ways.
Jewish economic activity across the modern period operated within communities that maintained specifically porous engagement with their tradition. Jewish merchants in early modern Europe operated within communities organized around halakhic practice, communal institutions, religious commitments, and substantive engagement with what believers experienced as actual covenant with God. The economic activity emerged within these communities and was shaped by them in specific ways. The communities were not optional context for the economic activity. They were constitutive of what made specific kinds of activity possible and meaningful for the people engaged in them.
Muller’s treatment documents specific historical patterns of Jewish economic activity. The treatment examines why specific patterns developed in specific times and places. The treatment addresses antisemitic uses of similar material directly and provides careful contextualization that prevents the material from supporting either antisemitic or philosemitic simplification. The treatment is scholarly accomplishment within buffered methodology.
The treatment systematically brackets the porous dimensions of Jewish economic life. The communities within which the economic activity occurred receive treatment as historical context rather than as substantive realities that the analysis must engage on their own terms. The religious commitments that shaped what specific economic activities meant to participants receive treatment as background rather than as constitutive features. The specifically Jewish character of the economic activity emerges as historical phenomenon to be explained rather than as living reality that continues to operate in contemporary Jewish communities.
This is not failure on Muller’s part. The buffered methodology accomplishes specific things that more porous methodology would not accomplish. The methodology produces work that mainstream academic readers can engage productively. The methodology produces work that does not require readers to share Jewish religious commitments to find the work valuable. The methodology produces work that contributes to general historical scholarship rather than only to specifically Jewish scholarship.
The methodology also produces specific limits. Readers who want engagement with Jewish economic life as substantive feature of ongoing Jewish community find Muller’s work less useful than work operating through different methodology. Orthodox Jewish readers seeking to understand their own economic tradition through methodology that takes the tradition’s substantive commitments seriously find Muller insufficient to that purpose. The work serves specific audience that wants buffered historical analysis. It does not serve audiences that want more porous engagement with the same material.
The Catholic University placement reconsidered. Muller’s career at Catholic University of America operates within specific institutional context that has its own buffered-porous dynamics. Catholic University maintains formal Catholic identity while operating substantially through buffered methodology in most academic departments. The combination produces specific institutional culture that differs from both fully buffered secular universities and fully porous religious institutions.
The placement matters for understanding what buffered methodology Muller’s work permits him to do. Catholic University as institution maintains formal connection to substantively porous tradition. Faculty operate within institution that does not require them to adopt the porous tradition’s commitments but does provide context that differs from thoroughly buffered secular universities. The institutional context permitted Muller specific kinds of work that fully buffered institutions might have constrained.
The institutional context did not require Muller to operate through porous methodology. He could maintain buffered methodology while teaching at Catholic University. The institution supported his work through providing employment, sabbaticals, and other practical conditions for sustained scholarship. The support did not depend on Muller adopting the institution’s substantive religious commitments.
This is specific feature of Catholic University as institution that the framework can identify. The institution operates as specifically buffered Catholic university rather than as either fully buffered secular university or fully porous religious institution. The buffered Catholic identity provides specific institutional space that maintains some connection to porous tradition while permitting buffered scholarly methodology to operate within the connection.
Muller benefited from this institutional space. His specific career required institutional context that supported buffered methodology while not pressuring faculty toward the various ideological commitments that contemporary thoroughly secular universities sometimes pressure faculty toward. Catholic University provided the specific combination. Different institutional context would have produced different career.
The Jewish identity dimension. Muller is observant Jewish scholar who has maintained substantial engagement with Jewish tradition throughout his career. The Jewish identity operates alongside his buffered methodology in specific ways that the framework can clarify.
His personal Jewish life presumably operates through substantially porous engagement with the tradition. Synagogue attendance, observance of Jewish holidays, engagement with Jewish texts within communal context, marriage and family life within Jewish framework all involve substantive porous engagement with what observant Jews experience as actual covenant with God and as actual participation in continuing Jewish people. The personal life is not buffered analytical engagement with Jewish tradition. It is substantive participation in the tradition’s continuing operation.
His scholarly work on Jewish topics operates through buffered methodology that brackets the porous dimensions of his personal Jewish life. The work treats Jewish history, Jewish economic experience, and Jewish intellectual figures through analytical methods that do not require either the writer or readers to share Jewish religious commitments. The methodology lets the work reach audiences that thoroughly porous Jewish scholarship would not reach.
The combination of personal porous engagement and scholarly buffered methodology operates within specific historical pattern of modern Jewish intellectual life. Many modern Jewish scholars have maintained both dimensions. The combination has produced substantial body of scholarly work that engages Jewish topics through methodology that mainstream academic audiences can engage productively. Figures like Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Gershom Scholem, and various others operated through similar combinations in specific ways.
The combination has specific costs that the framework can identify. Muller’s scholarly engagement with Jewish topics cannot fully convey the substantive features of Jewish life that his personal engagement with the tradition involves. Readers who want to understand what observant Jewish life is for those who live it must look elsewhere. Muller’s work provides specific scholarly resources that operate alongside but do not substitute for engagement with the substantive tradition itself.
The Taubes biography revisited. Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes engages specifically a figure whose career operated through specific kind of porous intensity that produced specific intellectual effects. Taubes generated charismatic relationships with major intellectual figures through engagement that bypassed standard buffered scholarly evaluation.
Muller’s biography engages Taubes through buffered methodology. The biography documents the specific facts of Taubes’s career, examines the specific relationships, and analyzes the specific intellectual contributions. The methodology produces careful biographical work that the standard biography genre rewards.
The methodology cannot quite capture what Taubes was doing for the people whose lives he affected. Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and various other figures who engaged Taubes substantially experienced something that Muller’s buffered analysis cannot fully convey. The experience involved specifically porous engagement with what Taubes seemed to provide. The seeming was real for those who experienced it. The substantive content of what Taubes provided is harder to specify than buffered biographical methodology can capture.
Muller acknowledges this limitation in specific ways throughout the biography. He documents the testimony of people who knew Taubes about what their engagement with him involved. The testimony itself operates through more porous register than Muller’s analytical framing of the testimony permits. Readers who want to understand what Taubes actually did for the people his work affected must read between the lines of Muller’s careful analytical presentation.
The combination produces work that has specific value while operating within specific limits. The work documents what can be documented through buffered methodology. The work identifies that something else was happening that the methodology cannot fully capture. Different methodology could have produced different biography that engaged the porous dimensions more directly. Muller’s specific biography produces what his methodology permits and acknowledges where the methodology cannot reach.
The Conservatism case. Muller’s Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present presents conservative tradition through internal resources rather than through external celebration or condemnation. The work contains substantial selections from major conservative thinkers along with Muller’s analytical framing.
The presentation operates through buffered methodology. Muller treats conservative tradition as object of scholarly analysis rather than as living tradition that operates through substantive commitments. The treatment lets readers from various political positions engage the material productively. Progressive readers can read the volume and understand what conservative thinkers actually argued without having to share the conservative commitments. Conservative readers can find substantive engagement with their tradition that is more careful than partisan presentations typically provide.
The methodology systematically brackets specific features of how conservative tradition actually operates for committed conservatives. Burke’s substantive engagement with the specific historical English political community that he saw threatened by French revolutionary ideology becomes analytical category rather than substantive commitment. Tocqueville’s substantive engagement with the specific question of what American democracy might become as it developed receives treatment as historical analysis rather than as engaged participation in shaping that development. The substantive commitments that motivated specific conservative thinkers receive treatment as historical context rather than as living commitments that continue to operate for contemporary conservatives.
This is what buffered methodology produces when applied to porous traditions. The methodology preserves the texts while bracketing the substantive commitments that gave the texts their original force. The preserved texts can be analyzed productively. The substantive commitments require engagement that buffered methodology cannot quite provide.
Conservatives who want substantive engagement with their tradition often supplement Muller’s volume with other resources that operate through more porous methodology. Russell Kirk’s earlier work on conservative tradition operated through substantively conservative methodology that engaged the tradition as living commitment rather than as object of analysis. Subsequent conservative writers like Yuval Levin operate through methodology that combines buffered analytical care with substantive conservative commitment in ways that Muller’s purely buffered methodology does not pursue. The combination of resources lets contemporary conservatives engage their tradition through multiple methodologies that complement each other.
What Muller’s specific buffered methodology produces. The methodology produces work that crosses ideological boundaries in ways that more partisan work cannot cross. Progressive readers, conservative readers, libertarian readers, religious readers can engage Muller’s work productively because the buffered methodology does not require shared substantive commitments. The work serves bridge function within American intellectual life that more committed work cannot serve.
The methodology produces work that withstands sustained scrutiny. The careful methodology that brackets substantive commitments produces analysis that does not collapse when readers from various positions probe its arguments. Less careful methodology that smuggled substantive commitments would face specific objections from readers whose commitments differed. Muller’s methodology mostly avoids these objections because the methodology systematically refuses to make the substantive commitments other methodologies make implicitly.
The methodology produces specific kind of cultural resource that buffered American intellectual life requires to continue operating. The intellectual life depends on works that various populations can engage despite their substantive disagreements. Muller’s body of work provides such resources for several specific topics. The provision matters for what American intellectual life can continue accomplishing despite increasing polarization.
The methodology cannot generate the substantive commitments that the topics it studies require for full engagement. Muller’s work on capitalism does not produce the substantive commitments that would let readers actually engage capitalism through the porous registers that capitalism’s defenders and critics actually inhabit. The work analyzes the registers from outside without entering them.
The methodology cannot serve audiences that want substantive engagement on substantive terms. Catholic readers wanting to understand their tradition through Catholic methodology must look elsewhere. Orthodox Jewish readers wanting to understand their tradition through Orthodox methodology must look elsewhere. Conservatives wanting substantive engagement with their tradition through conservative methodology must look elsewhere. Each population finds Muller’s work valuable as supplement to their substantive engagement but not as substitute for it.
Stephen Turner’s work on tacit knowledge and expertise is the most sustained critique available of the Polanyi tradition Muller draws on. Apply it to The Tyranny of Metrics and the book holds up at one level and breaks down at another. The political diagnosis stays. The epistemological foundation does not.
Muller’s argument runs as follows. Modern institutions try to capture professional performance in numbers. The numbers miss what the professional does. Surgeons, teachers, and police officers possess tacit knowledge that resists articulation. Apprenticeship transmits this knowledge across generations. Metrics distort the practices they measure because they cannot reach what makes the practices work. Polanyi and Hayek supply the theoretical grounding. The damage to medicine, education, and policing supplies the empirical evidence.
Turner’s challenge starts with the category. Tacit knowledge is unfalsifiable by construction. The defining feature of the category, knowledge that resists articulation, is the same feature that makes it impossible to verify whether anyone has the knowledge or merely claims to have it. The surgeon who claims tacit feel for the patient might have it. The surgeon might also be confabulating. Inside the Polanyi frame, there is no procedure for telling these cases apart. Turner has spent decades pointing this out. The category permits anyone to claim epistemic authority by gesturing at what cannot be checked.
This bites hardest where Muller wants the argument to do the most work. When Muller says metric regimes destroy something real, he depends on the realness of what they destroy. If the tacit knowledge is genuine, the damage is genuine. If the tacit knowledge is the practitioner’s self-flattering account of what they do, the damage is to the practitioner’s status rather than to anything the public should care about. The book treats the first interpretation as obvious. Turner might press the second.
Turner’s second move is to ask what shared practice means. Muller writes as if the medical profession has shared tacit knowledge that apprenticeship transmits. Turner asks: what is the evidence for sharing? Practitioners vary enormously. Some surgeons are excellent and some are dangerous. Some teachers reach struggling students and some do not. Some officers de-escalate and some escalate. The variation is the central fact of professional life. The shared-practice abstraction covers it over. When Muller says metrics threaten what professionals know in common, he invokes a commonality the variation refutes. Whatever is being defended cannot be the shared knowledge of the profession because the profession does not share much. It might be the ceiling of best practice within the profession. It might be the self-image of the profession. It might be the discretion that the most skilled practitioners need and the least skilled abuse. These are different things and they call for different responses.
Turner’s third move is political. Tacit-knowledge claims do work in the world. They extract autonomy from external review. They legitimate professional self-regulation. They resist accountability arrangements the wider society has good reason to want. Turner is interested in how liberal democracies handle expert authority, and he notes the recurring pattern: experts claim knowledge that lay citizens cannot evaluate, citizens grant authority on the basis of the claim, the experts then govern themselves. The claim of tacit knowledge is structurally similar to claims of charismatic authority. The expert has access to something the critic does not. This is the rhetorical engine of professional autonomy. Muller imports the engine without examining how it runs.
The metric movement Muller opposes has its own bad features. Numbers do distort. Gaming does happen. Audit regimes do degrade some forms of skilled practice. Turner can grant all of this. The grant does not require accepting Muller’s epistemology. Metrics may be bad accountability without tacit knowledge being a coherent alternative. The choice is not between metric tyranny and the restoration of practitioner judgment. The choice is among several flawed accountability arrangements, each with costs the others highlight. Muller writes as if returning judgment to the professional offers a clear improvement. Turner asks what might justify the return.
Here Turner’s question takes sharper form. If the surgeon’s tacit knowledge cannot be articulated, how does the hospital know which surgeons to hire? How does the medical school know which residents to graduate? How do patients choose? Some answers must be available, and the answers all use some kind of articulable evidence. Outcome data. Peer review. Reputation. Apprenticeship hierarchy. None of these is pure tacit knowledge. Each is a partial articulation. The position that says metrics fail because the underlying knowledge is tacit cannot also say experienced practitioners can identify good surgeons. If the second is right, the underlying knowledge is articulable enough to be transmitted through evaluation. If only the first is right, no one can identify good surgeons, including other surgeons. Muller wants both at once.
This is the deepest tension in The Tyranny of Metrics. The book wants tacit knowledge to be inarticulable when defending professionals from external review and articulable when professionals review one another. Turner’s critique forces the choice. Either the knowledge can be evaluated by someone or it cannot. If it can be evaluated, the evaluation might also be done by metric designers, clumsily perhaps, but not in principle differently from the evaluation done by senior surgeons. If it cannot be evaluated by anyone, the profession has no internal quality control either, and the whole defense collapses.
The Turner reading does not destroy Muller’s book. The political diagnosis still holds. Metric regimes do extract value from practitioner work. Audit classes do gain at the expense of the audited. The damage is real. What the Turner reading destroys is the epistemological claim that practitioners have a kind of knowledge that ought to be insulated from review. That claim, Turner argues, is rhetoric. The case has to be made on different grounds.
The grounds are available. Muller might rest his case on the empirical pattern of damage without invoking Polanyi. Metric regimes harm certain practices in measurable ways. The harm is the harm. No theory of tacit knowledge is needed to record it. The argument becomes pragmatic rather than epistemological. The metric impulse fails on its own terms because the metrics produce gaming, displacement, and deskilling. The audit class wants accountability and gets evasion. The case can be made without Polanyi at all. Muller might say it is more powerful with Polanyi. Turner might say it is more honest without him.
There is a deeper Turner point Muller could absorb. Turner has written about how the historical accident of professional autonomy in the United States, Britain, and similar liberal democracies depended on cultural and institutional preconditions that no longer hold. Doctors, teachers, and lawyers ran themselves because the public trusted them to. The trust came from shared social class with the educated public, religious affiliation with the denominational establishment, kinship with the political elite, and broad cultural assumptions about deference. These preconditions have eroded. Professional autonomy now looks like an unaccountable elite refusing scrutiny because it has no public-facing case for itself. Metric regimes are partly the public’s response to the loss of trust. The metrics are crude. The crudeness reflects the absence of better tools. If the public cannot trust professionals to police themselves, and the professionals cannot articulate what they do, the public will impose dumb metrics. This is a political fact about late-modern liberal democracy. Muller treats the metrics as the disease. Turner suggests they are a symptom of a deeper political shift the professionals have not addressed.
This connects to Turner’s interest in the cognitive limits of liberal democracy. Citizens cannot evaluate experts directly. They must use proxies. Metrics are one proxy. Reputation is another. Lawsuits are another. None of these is a good substitute for direct evaluation of expertise, but direct evaluation is unavailable. Muller’s book argues against metrics. It does not propose what the public should use instead. Turner might push hard on this absence. Without an alternative, the metric critique amounts to telling the public it should trust professionals more. Why should the public do that? The professionals have not earned it. Muller’s silence on this question is the largest gap in the book.
The conservative tradition Muller anthologizes contains resources for thinking about this problem. Burke, Tocqueville, and Oakeshott all addressed the relation between expertise and democratic legitimacy. None of them thought professionals might assert their authority by claim alone. Each thought the authority had to be cultivated through institutional practice, religious affiliation, and shared culture with the wider public. The American conservative tradition Muller writes inside often skips this step. It claims professional authority on tacit-knowledge grounds without addressing the cultural preconditions Burke or Tocqueville might have demanded. Turner’s critique reveals the gap. Muller’s tradition has more to say about the problem than his book brings forward.
What does the Turner reading leave standing in The Tyranny of Metrics? The historical narrative. The case studies. The pattern of metric failure across domains. The general suspicion of technocratic overreach. The argument from unintended consequences. All of this survives. What does not survive is the foundational appeal to tacit knowledge as the thing being protected. That appeal is rhetoric. The book is stronger read for the historical evidence and weaker read for the philosophical foundation.
Turner and Muller share more than the critique might suggest. Both are suspicious of grand designs. Both attend to the historical contingency of intellectual and institutional arrangements. Both write as historians of ideas with a sociological eye. Where they part is at the moment Muller invokes Polanyi as a source of authority. Turner thinks Polanyi’s frame, at the work it has been asked to do, is not authority but an authority claim. The difference between authority and an authority claim is the whole question.
Muller’s later projects might benefit from absorbing the Turner critique. Passing It On will deal with transgenerational transmission, which raises the same questions about tacit knowledge in a sharper form. What gets transmitted from one generation to the next, and how, and how do we know? If the answer is that some things can only be passed through embodied practice and personal apprenticeship, the Turner challenge applies again. If the answer is that we can describe what gets transmitted, the practice is not tacit. The choice will repeat. Muller has not yet faced it.
Where Muller writes history, the Turner reading lets him alone. Where Muller leans on Polanyi to ground a political claim, Turner pulls the ground out. The political claim has other grounds available. Muller has not yet stood on them.
Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma
Muller’s career has been spent in systematic resistance to the trauma constructions that surround his subjects. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought refuses both the leftist trauma narrative about capitalism’s evils and the libertarian celebration narrative about capitalism’s virtues. The book does not answer the four questions in the trauma form. It changes the questions. What was the historical situation that produced the moral arguments about commerce. What were the intellectual resources different thinkers brought to the situation. How did the arguments evolve as conditions changed. Where did they end up by the late twentieth century. These are not trauma questions. They are historical questions. The trauma frame the audience might bring is gently displaced by structural inquiry.
Capitalism and the Jews is the cleanest example. The book sits at the convergence of two trauma constructions. The antisemitic trauma frame names Jewish commercial activity as the pain, gentile populations as the victims, anti-Christian or anti-national exploitation as the responsibility. The leftist anti-capitalist frame names capitalism itself as the pain, workers and colonized peoples as the victims, the commercial class as among the bearers of responsibility. Both are trauma constructions answering Alexander’s four questions in different sacred-profane registers. Muller refuses both. His account treats the Jewish commercial role as structurally produced by legal restrictions on Jewish landholding combined with the emerging market opportunities of medieval and early modern Europe. Jews ended up in commerce because other paths were blocked and commerce paid. The arrangement was not virtuous and not vicious. It was historical. The frame dissolves both trauma constructions by changing what kind of questions can be asked of the material.
The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism performs the same operation on a target with much higher symbolic charge. Freyer was a Weimar conservative who initially welcomed National Socialism, gradually distanced himself, and after 1945 produced chastened conservative work that influenced the postwar German right. The carrier-group apparatus around Nazism produces obvious trauma constructions. Freyer can be classified as polluting figure whose intellectual output retroactively contaminates anyone who engages with it sympathetically. He can be classified as misunderstood figure whose later work redeems his earlier errors. Both are trauma constructions, one demonizing and one rehabilitating. Muller refuses both. His Freyer is neither hero nor villain but a specific intellectual moving through specific historical conditions whose work has specific consequences worth tracing in detail. The de-ritualization is so thorough that the book reads, to readers expecting trauma construction, as oddly neutral. The neutrality is the method. The method serves the coalition of scholars who want German intellectual history available for study without ritual gatekeeping.
This is what Alexander helps us name. Muller is in the cooling-out business. His prose performs the technical-rational mode that Watergate’s prosecutors had to break through. Where carrier-group figures want to elevate events from political goals through institutional norms to deepest values, Muller wants to keep events at the level of historical conditions and structural forces. He rarely allows his subjects to generalize upward. The careful prose, the patient contextualization, the refusal of strong moral language, all operate to lower the symbolic temperature of whatever he writes about. In Alexander’s vocabulary, Muller is the anti-priest. He is doing the work the priestly figures must overcome to perform their ritual.
Now the question becomes what coalition this serves.
Cooling-out work serves specific interests. The men most invested in keeping civic life cool, in preventing trauma generalization, in maintaining the technical-rational frame against ritual heat, are men whose institutional positions and intellectual commitments require it. They include academic conservatives whose tradition would fare badly under the hot ritual of the cultural left. They include Jewish intellectuals who do not want either the antisemitic trauma frame or the progressive anti-capitalist frame to capture discussion of Jewish economic history. They include centrists and pragmatists who suspect that hot ritual produces worse outcomes than cool deliberation. They include the older liberal humanist tradition whose mode of life depends on the maintenance of normal academic time against ritual disruption.
Muller’s coalition is identifiable through what his books do for whom. The conservative anthology builds, by transitive logic, a coalition that runs from Hume to Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek. The reader who already respects one figure gets pushed toward respecting the others. This is straightforward coalition-construction work, of a kind Alexander would recognize even if Muller does not name it. The capitalism books make commercial society defensible without endorsing market triumphalism, which serves a coalition of moderate defenders against both libertarian and socialist trauma narratives. The Jewish book defends the dignity of historical Jewish commercial life against frames that would either embarrass it or pathologize it. The Freyer book defends the possibility of serious engagement with conservative thinkers whose biographies include damaging political associations.
Each of these is coalition work. The work succeeds at a slow temperature because the temperature itself is part of what the coalition needs. A coalition organized around the maintenance of cool civic life cannot be defended through hot polemic. The defense must perform the cool register the coalition values. Muller’s prose is the right tool for the coalition’s needs. The match between style and coalition is not coincidence. It is what allows the work to function.
Now bring in the Watergate essay.
Alexander’s argument is that successful civic ritual requires five conditions to align: consensus that an event polluted, perception of threat to the civic center, activation of institutional social controls, mobilization of differentiated elite countercenters, and ritual purification through liminal moments where ordinary politics suspends. Most of Muller’s career operates against the alignment of these conditions. He resists consensus that polluting events have occurred. He resists framing his subjects as threats to civic centers. He resists institutional social controls that would target his figures. He resists the mobilization of differentiated elite countercenters around the targets he writes about. He resists ritual purification through scholarly polemic. His mode is to work below the threshold where any of these conditions might activate.
This is unusual work for an intellectual. Most academic figures contribute, willingly or not, to the trauma constructions that organize their disciplines. The literary studies professor contributes to the trauma narrative about formalism. The sociologist contributes to the trauma narrative about structural inequality. The historian contributes to whichever trauma narrative organizes the period he studies. Muller’s commitment is to the work that operates beneath the trauma-construction layer. He treats the subject with the historical seriousness the carrier groups around it would prefer he abandon. The result is books that fit awkwardly with the dominant ritual structures of his fields and that nonetheless command audience because they meet a need the ritual structures do not meet.
The need is the need for cooled-out engagement with material the trauma constructions have heated up. Some readers want this. They are the coalition Muller serves. The coalition is not large enough to dominate the academy. It is large enough to sustain a career.
Then comes the exception, and the exception is what makes Muller’s pattern legible.
The Tyranny of Metrics is the book where Muller does carrier-group work in the obvious sense. The book constructs a trauma narrative. Pain: the degradation of professional practice through the imposition of metric regimes, with consequent gaming, deskilling, and damage to the underlying activities the metrics were supposed to measure. Victims: practitioners across many fields, the patients and students and citizens those practitioners serve, professional judgment as a craft tradition. Connection to wider audience: anyone who has experienced or witnessed the corruption of skilled practice by counting. Responsibility: the audit class, metric designers, managerial logic, compliance regimes that have spread across institutions over the past several decades. The book answers Alexander’s four questions in trauma form. It identifies a polluting force, names its victims, extends the connection to a broad audience, and attributes responsibility.
The pollution-transfer logic Alexander identifies operates throughout. The pollution starts with specific bad metric programs, the things hospital administrators and school superintendents impose on their respective populations. It transfers outward to the broader audit class, the consultants and accreditors and ratings agencies that produce the metric machinery. It transfers further to the managerial logic itself, the assumption that what cannot be measured cannot be managed and that what can be measured ought to be managed. By the end of the book, the pollution has reached the broader cultural assumption that quantification is the proper basis for accountability. The transfer is complete. A specific irritation has been generalized into a systemic critique that the audience can use against many opponents.
What makes this carrier-group work distinctive is the temperature. Muller does not write The Tyranny of Metrics in the hot register of polemic. He writes it in the same cool register he uses for his historical work. The argument accumulates through cases. The cases are documented carefully. The structural account is preserved alongside the moral one. The trauma construction is performed at low temperature, which makes it more durable than high-temperature trauma constructions and harder to dismiss as advocacy. A reader who would resist a polemic against audit culture finds himself absorbing the same material through prose that does not feel like polemic. The cooled-out style serves the trauma construction the book is making.
This is the pattern Alexander’s frame surfaces. Muller’s cooled-out method is generally deployed against trauma constructions that would damage his coalition. It is occasionally deployed to perform trauma construction in a register the coalition needs. The two operations look opposite. They are both coalition work. The coalition is served by de-ritualization in some places and by quiet ritualization in others. Muller deploys whichever operation serves the coalition’s interests in the specific case. The consistency is not at the level of method, where the books look like they are doing different things. The consistency is at the level of coalition function, where the books are all doing the same thing for the same constituency.
Why audit culture and not Hans Freyer. The question almost answers itself. Freyer is a historical figure whose ritualization would damage Muller’s coalition by making conservative thought broadly suspect through guilt by association. The de-ritualizing approach protects the coalition’s intellectual access to figures the broader culture wants to gatekeep. Audit culture is a contemporary force whose victims include men in Muller’s coalition: practitioners, professionals, traditional authorities whose tacit knowledge the metric regimes erode. Trauma construction against audit culture serves the coalition by giving it ammunition against a structural opponent. The two operations are mirror images. Both protect the coalition. The targets differ because the coalition’s interests in each target differ.
Alexander’s frame produces a sharper reading of The Tyranny of Metrics than the book’s own framing offers. The book presents itself as a scholarly diagnosis of a real problem. It is also, simultaneously, a piece of carrier-group work building a coalition between practitioners, certain managers, and intellectuals who feel that audit culture has gone too far. The coalition crosses the official hierarchy. It includes hospital administrators who feel captured along with surgeons, school superintendents who feel captured along with teachers, business executives who feel that compliance has eaten the work of management. These are the differentiated elite countercenters Alexander describes for Watergate. They are mobilizing, slowly, around the trauma construction Muller has provided them.
The construction has not generalized to civic-religious authority across the broader culture. Many institutions remain captured by audit logic. Many policy actors continue to expand metric regimes. Trump-era administrative reforms have used audit-culture critique selectively while themselves expanding loyalty-based metrics that operate by different logic. The trauma construction Muller offers has bounded influence. It serves a coalition. It does not reorganize the civic body. This is the standard outcome for carrier-group work in fragmented orders, and Muller’s work fits the pattern.
What makes Muller’s case distinctive in the comparison with Scheuer, Cofnas, and Marantz is the relationship between method and coalition. Scheuer’s method became the obstacle to his coalition’s success because his analytic equipment, severed from institutional friction, generated readings the broader culture could not absorb. Cofnas’s method, the analytic philosophy register, fits his coalition’s needs reasonably well, and the institutional countercurrents around him have grown stronger. Marantz’s method, the literary-ethnographic register, supports his coalition’s bounded success without enabling generalization. Muller’s method, the cooled-out historical register, serves his coalition almost perfectly. The coalition needs cooled-out scholarship that resists trauma construction generally and performs it only in carefully selected cases. Muller produces exactly this. The match is unusual in its precision.
The match is also institutional. Muller’s position at Catholic University of America, outside the Ivy League, places him in a structural location where the cooled-out register is available without competitive pressure to perform the hot rituals of more prestigious institutions. An Ivy League historian writing about Hans Freyer would face institutional pressure to participate in the trauma construction the carrier groups around Nazism produce. A Catholic University historian faces less of this pressure. The institutional position permits the method. The method serves the coalition. The coalition rewards the method by sustaining the books’ audience and citing the work in the venues where coalition discourse occurs. Each piece of the arrangement reinforces the others.
Alexander’s frame holds the question open about whether this arrangement is admirable or limited. The cool register has virtues. It preserves complexity. It allows engagement with difficult material that hot trauma construction would foreclose. It models a kind of intellectual practice that civic life arguably needs more of than it has. It also has costs. The cool register can serve as cover for coalition work that the heat-resistance disguises. Readers who absorb Muller’s books may take themselves to be reading neutral scholarship when they are reading something more interested. The cooling-out itself does work the reader does not always notice.
Both readings are accurate. The frame holds them simultaneously. Muller is a more sophisticated symbolic actor than the casual reader of his books takes him to be. The sophistication does not make him dishonest. It makes him competent at the kind of work the coalition he serves requires. Most academic intellectuals are doing some version of carrier-group work whether they know it or not. Muller is doing it more consciously than most and at a temperature lower than most. The combination produces work that is both scholarly and partisan, both careful and committed, both above the trauma constructions and within the symbolic apparatus that produces them.
The deepest insight Alexander’s frame produces about Muller is that the refusal to ritualize is itself a kind of ritual position. It is the priestly mode of the cooled-out scholar, performing the de-sacralization of subjects the dominant culture would prefer to sacralize. The mode has its own congregation. The congregation values the cool register because the cool register protects the things the congregation wants protected. Muller’s career is a long performance for this congregation. The performance is not cynical. He plausibly believes the cool register is the right approach to most of his subjects. The belief is what makes the performance effective. The same belief is what makes him eligible for the priestly role he occupies in his particular sphere.
Compared to Watergate’s hot ritual, Muller’s work looks anti-ritual. Compared to the silence of total scholarly neutrality, Muller’s work looks like coalition mobilization in restrained form. Both descriptions are accurate. The frame helps us hold them together. It also helps us see that successful long-form intellectual work in fragmented civic orders often takes this shape. The hot rituals fail to generalize. The cool work accumulates audience and influence. Muller has built a career that exemplifies the second pattern. The career has been more successful than careers built around hot ritual in his generation. The success is not despite the cool register. The success is because of it. The coalition he serves was looking for someone who could do this work. He has been doing it for forty years. The coalition has rewarded the work with the kinds of recognition the coalition can provide: serious reviews, citations, invitations, the long sustained attention of readers who value what he provides.
Interaction Ritual Chains by Randall Collins
Muller has been at the Catholic University of America since 1984. He earned tenure there, became chair of history, became Ordinary Professor, and has never moved. Collins’s framework treats long institutional residence as the high-success outcome for a ritual chain seeker. The participant who finds a habitat where the daily rituals consistently charge emotional energy and circulate valued symbols accumulates more of both than the participant who has to keep starting new chains. Muller’s CUA residence has functioned as exactly this habitat.
The Catholic University setting matters in several Collins-relevant ways. The university is small enough that bodily co-presence with colleagues across departments is sustained. The Catholic identity provides a barrier to outsiders that marks the institution and its members as distinct from the secular university mainstream. The mutual focus on questions where Catholic intellectual tradition has serious resources, including questions about capitalism, nationalism, the meaning of work, and the Jewish-Christian relation, gives the daily life of the institution a focused texture that more diffuse universities lack. The shared mood is the seriousness of an institution that takes its tradition’s intellectual heritage as the standard against which contemporary work is measured.
Collins predicts that participants in this kind of habitat generate steady emotional energy across years rather than the spikes-and-crashes pattern produced by less stable chains. Muller’s prose shows the steady-energy signature. The books arrive at intervals consistent with sustained scholarly work. The Mind and the Market in 2002. Capitalism and the Jews in 2010. The Tyranny of Metrics in 2018. The biography of Jacob Taubes. The major scholarly work on Adam Smith, on conservative thought, on the history of capitalist thought. The output is even, the quality is consistent, the prose is recognizable across volumes. This is what Collins’s framework expects from a writer whose ritual chain is supplying steady fuel.
The Catholic University also avoids the failure mode that has crushed many of the other figures in the wider gallery. CUA does not select for the charged ideological symbols the secular elite university pipeline charges. A Jewish historian working on capitalism and on the history of conservative thought can produce work there that would face higher friction at Yale or Columbia or NYU. The institution’s ideological preferences do not match the secular mainstream’s. The mismatch is exactly what protects the prose from drifting into the registers the secular pipeline rewards. Muller’s work reads as the product of a man who never had to flatter the dominant audience because the dominant audience was not the audience his institution served. The Catholic University audience served different purposes. The work could go wherever the work needed to go.
The Conservative Thought Tradition as Ritual Inheritance
Muller’s early work, including the 1987 book on the Adam Müller of late-eighteenth-century Germany and the 1997 anthology Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present, joined a particular ritual chain. The chain runs through the conservative intellectual tradition itself. Hume, Burke, Adam Smith, Tocqueville, Hegel, Hayek, Schumpeter, Kirk, Oakeshott. The thinkers in this chain charged certain symbols with collective meaning across generations. The market as a moral institution. The family as a load-bearing structure. The slow accretion of inherited practice as a source of practical wisdom. The skepticism toward grand projects of social rationalization. The seriousness of religion as a social fact regardless of one’s personal beliefs.
Collins’s framework treats long intellectual traditions as ritual chains operating across centuries. The participants do not need bodily co-presence with each other. They have textual co-presence. The reader who works seriously with the texts enters into a kind of ritual with the dead authors. The mutual focus is the texts. The barrier to outsiders is the disciplinary formation required to read the texts well. The shared mood is the recognition that one is participating in a tradition whose questions outlast individual contributors. The energy generated by serious engagement with such a tradition is real and durable.
Muller entered this chain in his graduate work at Columbia under Fritz Stern. He has stayed inside it for forty years. The Conservatism anthology was an act of ritual maintenance. Muller selected the texts, contextualized them, and offered the volume as a reader’s introduction to a tradition the editor took seriously. The volume served the tradition. The tradition served the editor. The exchange is what Collins predicts ritual chains produce. Each side gives. Each side receives. The chain extends.
The work this chain has produced for Muller includes more than the books. The chain produces a particular kind of ear. He hears the resonances that connect a passage in Smith to a passage in Burke to a passage in Hayek. He hears the moves that contemporary writers make when they are using inherited conservative resources without acknowledging them, and the moves liberal writers make when they are misreading conservative figures because they did not do the disciplinary work. The ear is the residue of the chain. The chain has charged certain symbols, certain phrasings, certain conceptual moves with collective meaning that the participant can deploy in new prose. The deployment is the work the chain enables.
The Capitalism Books as Symbol-Building
The Mind and the Market in 2002 is, in Collins’s terms, an act of symbol-building inside the conservative intellectual chain. The book traces how various thinkers have understood the moral status of the market across three centuries. Voltaire, Smith, Burke, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Hayek, Marcuse, Schumpeter. The book does not argue for a particular position. The book lays out the field. The reader who works through the book gets a tour of the symbols the tradition has charged with meaning when it has thought about commercial society.
Collins’s framework treats works of this kind as ritual products that circulate symbols. The symbols Muller circulates have been charged by long ritual chains running through the tradition. He gives the reader an organized encounter with them. The reader who completes the encounter has, in Collins’s terms, participated in the ritual the book performs. The reader’s own subsequent prose can deploy the symbols with a slightly fuller charge than before. The book has done its ritual work. The chain has extended through the book to new participants.
Capitalism and the Jews in 2010 does the same work on a more focused topic. The book treats the question of why Jews have flourished commercially in modern conditions. Muller gives the question its history. He locates it inside the wider question of how various traditions have related to commercial life. He produces a serious treatment that neither dismisses the question as antisemitic nor sensationalizes it. The book has been criticized from both directions. Collins’s framework predicts that work which pulls symbols out of dispute and into careful examination will draw fire from groups that depend on the disputed status of the symbols. The work is doing its ritual work anyway. The reader who completes the book has a more articulated relation to the symbols than the reader who only encountered them in their disputed form.
The Tyranny of Metrics as Ritual Critique
The 2018 book on metrics is, in Collins’s framework, a critique of the substitute rituals modern institutions have constructed to replace older ritual forms. Muller’s argument runs that quantitative measurement has spread across institutions in domains where it does not work well, and that the effort to substitute measurement for judgment has produced perverse outcomes. The argument is not new in its bones. It is in the conservative tradition’s long suspicion of rationalist projects of administrative simplification.
Collins’s framework adds a register the book does not deploy explicitly but that aligns with the argument. Metrics are themselves a kind of ritual. They produce mutual focus on numbers. They generate barriers between those who can read the numbers and those who cannot. They establish shared moods of accountability or anxiety depending on the metric’s direction. They circulate symbols of success and failure. The metric ritual is a thin ritual compared to the older institutional rituals it has replaced. The thinness is what generates the dysfunction Muller documents. Doctors who used to participate in dense clinical ritual now participate in the thin ritual of charting. Teachers who used to participate in dense classroom ritual now participate in the thin ritual of testing. The substitution looks like rationalization. The substitution is actually the replacement of high-density rituals with low-density rituals that cannot generate the energy or the symbols the participants need.
Muller’s book is a defense of the older ritual forms against the metric substitutes. The book has been widely read because the audience for the defense is large. Many participants in the metric-saturated institutions feel the depletion the substitution has produced. Muller named the depletion. The book has the wide reach Collins’s framework predicts for prose that articulates a real depletion the audience has been feeling without being able to name.
The Taubes Biography as Ritual Transmission
The 2022 biography of Jacob Taubes, Professor of Apocalypse, is the most ritual-dense of Muller’s projects. Taubes was a Jewish philosopher and rabbi whose career ran across several mid-twentieth-century European and American intellectual scenes. He was a charismatic figure in Collins’s strict sense. He generated rituals around himself. He attracted students. He charged symbols. He produced no major book. The work he did was the work of the charismatic ritual leader rather than the work of the ordinary scholar. The biography reconstructs the rituals Taubes ran and the symbols he charged.
Muller’s reconstruction is itself a ritual operation. The biographer enters into a kind of textual co-presence with the subject by reading every available trace, interviewing every available witness, and assembling the picture of a life. The reader of the biography enters into a thin co-presence with both the biographer and the subject. The subject’s charged symbols, including his readings of Paul, his interventions in German theological debates, his relations with Schmitt and Strauss, get circulated to the reader through the biographer’s organization. The chain extends through the book to the reader. Collins’s framework predicts that biographies of charismatic figures function this way. The reader who works through such a biography acquires a thin participation in the ritual the subject originally led. The acquisition is what the biography sells. Muller delivered the acquisition. The reception of the book has been strong because the audience for serious biography of intellectual figures is exactly the audience the chain was always going to find.
The Stable Marriage Ritual
Collins’s framework treats marriage as a ritual chain, and Muller’s marriage to Sharon Muller has been long and stable. The Acknowledgments in his books regularly thank her in the conventional academic register that, read closely, signals a sustained partnership rather than a perfunctory dedication. The marriage chain has been generating emotional energy alongside the institutional and intellectual chains. The three chains reinforce each other. The institutional habitat is hospitable to the marriage. The intellectual chain is one the spouse can engage. The marriage is one the institution accepts. The reinforcement produces what Collins predicts when chains align: stable emotional energy across years, the freedom to do work that does not depend on the spike-and-crash pattern, the avoidance of the substitute-ritual desperation that produces the late-career drift visible in other figures.
Compare this to the Scheuer-Bikowsky configuration. The Scheuer marriage runs alongside an agency-symbols ritual chain that the marriage cannot fully accommodate. The result is the silence in the prose, the compartmentalization, the management of the contradiction. The Muller marriage runs alongside chains it can accommodate. The result is prose without the corresponding silence. He can write about everything that interests him because nothing in his marriage is in operational conflict with his writing. The freedom shows. The prose moves. The work accumulates.
The Jewish Identity as Stabilizing Frame
Muller writes openly about being Jewish, about the history of Jews in modern Europe, about the relation of Jews to commercial life, about Jewish responses to modernity. The Jewish identity functions in Collins’s terms as another ritual chain. The traditional Jewish ritual life involves Sabbath observance, holiday cycles, lifecycle events, prayer practice, and study. The modern Jewish identity Muller occupies is a less ritualized version of this older form. He maintains some elements. He omits others. The exact configuration is his own.
What matters for Collins’s framework is that the Jewish chain provides another source of charged symbols the writer can deploy. The book on Capitalism and the Jews could be written by him because the symbols it discusses are symbols the chain has been charging in his life since childhood. He did not have to manufacture standing on the topic. The standing came from participation. The reader can sense the difference between a writer who treats Jewish material as research material and a writer who treats it as inheritance. Muller treats it as inheritance. The prose reflects the difference.
Collins’s framework also predicts that the Catholic University setting and the Jewish identity could have been a source of friction but instead have become a source of energy. Both traditions take religious questions seriously. Both produce dense ritual life. Both have long intellectual traditions a serious thinker can engage. The Jewish historian at Catholic University is in a habitat that does not require him to suppress his Jewish identity to fit a secular norm, and that does not require him to perform a Catholic identity to fit the institution. The institution accepts his identity as it is. The acceptance is the freedom. The freedom is what the prose has been spending across decades.
The Comparison With the Decline Cases
Collins’s framework gets sharper when Muller is placed next to the figures we have been tracing. Scheuer left the agency in 2004 and has spent twenty-two years running substitute rituals at increasingly thin venues to extend a chain whose original site closed. Muller has stayed at his original site since 1984 and has been running the same chains across forty years.
Lind worked at the Free Congress Foundation under Paul Weyrich until 2009, then moved to The American Conservative, then to LewRockwell, then to Castalia House. Each move was a downshift in venue density. Muller has not moved. The chair, the courses, the colleagues, the library, the press relationship, all have stayed in place.
Giraldi was fired from The American Conservative in 2017 and moved to Unz Review and Strategic Culture Foundation, the second of which is a Russian state-aligned operation hosting writers the mainstream has rejected. Muller has not been fired from anywhere. His venues have remained reputable. His Princeton University Press books continue to appear at PUP.
Macgregor’s military career ended without the brigade command he sought, and the resulting grievance has organized his media career. Muller’s career has not been organized by grievance. The institutional path he wanted he received. The chair, the recognition, the books, the readers all came in the expected sequence. There is no wound around which his prose has had to organize itself.
Unz withdrew from any institutional setting and built his own funding apparatus around himself, producing the constructed niche we discussed. Muller has stayed inside an institution that has provided what the constructed niche provides for Unz, but with the discipline that comes from being one professor among others. The institutional check that Unz removed Muller has retained. The prose shows the difference. Muller’s footnotes mean what footnotes mean. Unz’s footnotes mean what Unz wants them to mean.
The composite picture Collins’s framework yields is that Muller is the case where the chains run as designed. Institution, tradition, marriage, identity, all operate as ritual sites that supply emotional energy and charge symbols across decades without the breakdowns the other figures have suffered. The prose is the visible record of the chains running well. The career is the chain history.
The Set
Jerry Z. Muller taught the history of ideas at the Catholic University of America, and the set he belongs to gathers around one conviction: thought moves history, and a man who reads deeply enough earns the right to judge it. They call themselves historians of ideas, intellectual historians, men of letters. They write long essays for serious magazines and thick biographies for university presses. Many hold academic posts while holding the academy at arm’s length, and a few sit close to political movements that they refuse to serve as foot soldiers.
The names cluster by generation. The elders set the founding tone: Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), Raymond Aron (1905-1983), Daniel Bell (1919-2011), and the émigré teachers Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). The neoconservative founders stand beside them, Irving Kristol (1920-2009), Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922-2019), and Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930). Muller’s own cohort and the men he reads with include Mark Lilla (b. 1956), Steven B. Smith (b. 1951), Wilfred McClay (b. 1951), and the editor-critics who run the magazines, Roger Kimball (b. 1953) at The New Criterion among them. Younger men carry the line forward: Yuval Levin (b. 1977), Adam Kirsch (b. 1976), and Samuel Goldman. On the academic flank work the intellectual historians who share the craft and split on the politics, Martin Jay (b. 1944), Peter Gordon, and Samuel Moyn (b. 1972). The dead Germans furnish the raw material the set prizes most: Max Weber (1864-1920), Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), Hans Freyer (1887-1969), and Jacob Taubes (1923-1987). Muller wrote the life of Freyer in The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism and the life of Taubes in Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes.
They value erudition before all else, and a hard kind: command of primary sources in the original languages. The set reads Weber in German, not in translation. It takes the German tradition seriously, including its dangerous figures, rather than waving it off. It treats the long review-essay as the high form, six thousand words that a layman can read and a specialist respects, placed in Commentary, The National Interest, The New Criterion, the Times Literary Supplement, Mosaic, Tablet, and for the ones who cross over, the The New York Review of Books. It treats biography and the history of ideas as the prestige genres, because both demand archival labor and the patience to reconstruct a mind in its setting. Muller built his name on exactly this work, tracing how thinkers from Voltaire to Marcuse argued about commercial society in The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, and warning in The Tyranny of Metrics that the urge to measure everything corrupts the judgment it claims to improve.
Their heroes share one shape. The scholar-sage. The man who masters a field and then writes for the educated public without flattering it. Berlin is the patron saint, the historian of ideas as public oracle, the fox who distrusts the hedgehog’s single grand idea. Aron supplies the second model, the engaged spectator who keeps his head while his colleagues lose theirs to ideology. Bell and Trilling round out the gallery. The hero reads the unfashionable thinker and resists the fashion of his own hour. He renders measured assessment where lesser men reach for the slogan. He is the man of judgment, and judgment, in their telling, comes only from years of deep reading. Not the activist, not the technician, not the data scientist with his dashboard.
The status games follow from the heroes. A man rises by reading languages, by placing essays in the journals that confer seriousness, by writing the biography of a major figure or an interestingly minor one, and above all by earning praise from both sides at once. To be called thoughtful by people who agree on nothing else marks the highest standing. The grounded contrarian thesis carries weight too, the argument that cuts against the reigning pieties while resting on real evidence. Muller’s metrics book did this, and so did his 2008 Foreign Affairs essay on ethnic nationalism, which told liberal cosmopolitans that the force they thought spent still ran hot. Institutional perches matter less than the journals, though Catholic University, the Hudson Institute, and the German Marshall Fund world supply homes.
Their normative claims run deep and tangle with their essentialism. They hold that human goods resist counting, that the attempt to quantify teaching or medicine or scholarship destroys the good it measures. The metrics argument is a moral one wearing the costume of management critique. They hold that ideas have consequences, that thought is no mere reflection of economic interest, and they read the materialists closely to refute them on their own ground. They prize moderation as a virtue and treat utopia as the standing temptation, a stance they inherit from Berlin and from Edmund Burke (1729-1797). They defend commercial society as a civilizing force while granting its costs, and they read its critics with care to mount the better defense. The Jewish question sits near the center of the moral world for Muller and Kirsch and others: in Capitalism and the Jews, Muller argues that Jews flourished under markets and suffered under the enemies of markets, that anti-capitalism and antisemitism share a braided history. The set treats Jewish modernity as the test case for liberalism’s promises.
Underneath these claims lies an essentialist one they rarely state plainly. Some men have judgment and most do not, and the cultivation of judgment through long reading produces a type of man fit to weigh the world. This is meritocratic and elitist in the old humanist key. It explains their distrust of the crowd and their equal distrust of the expert who claims a neutral authority above judgment.
The moral grammar gives the set away in a sentence. The words of praise are serious, subtle, learned, judicious, capacious. The words of contempt are crude, reductive, tendentious, ideological, presentist. The cardinal sin is the cheap dismissal, the man who has not read the thinker he condemns. The cardinal virtue is the capacity to hold a view in its full strength before you rule against it.
The set is not a single mind, and its fault lines run clear. The Straussians read texts for a hidden teaching; the Weberians read for ideal types and disenchantment, and Muller leans Weberian and historicist, closer to Jay and Moyn in method than to Allan Bloom (1930-1992) or Smith in their Strauss. A sharper split runs between the older neoconservatives and the younger national conservatives, Yoram Hazony (b. 1964) and Patrick Deneen (b. 1964) among them. Muller saw the power of ethnic nationalism early and named it, but he named it as an analyst who fears the thing, not as an advocate who wants it. That distance, the refusal to convert clear sight into a banner, marks where he stands inside his own set and where the set now strains against itself.