What the Current Situation Requires

It happens rarely in history, but there are sometimes intellectual labors of such extraordinary significance that they influence public affairs on a mass scale. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract was such a book. So was Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and so was Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. Their impact wasn’t immediate, but without the ideas in these books the world would not have suffered the French or Communist revolutions, nor would it have been blessed by the Zionist one.

Other intellectual expressions do not envision a new historical moment but instead react to the present one. The political scientist Eric Voegelin once wrote that “in an hour of crisis, when the order of a society flounders and disintegrates, the fundamental problems of political existence in history are more apt to come into view than in periods of comparative stability.” So it was that the prophet Ezekiel looked from the exilic rivers of Babylon upon Judean sovereignty lost. Plato and Aristotle uncovered elemental truths of politics in the smoldering embers of the Peloponnesian War. And, caught in Rome’s decay, Augustine formulated a way to order man’s competing loyalties to civic authority and to God.

We’re living in our own period of disintegration, in which the cultural and political bedrock is shifting beneath us. I doubt we stand before a crisis as momentous as the one that stirred Augustine; but, of course, one never knows. At such a moment, what is the purpose of a little magazine of ideas such as Mosaic? Without pretending to approach the likes of Herzl or Ezekiel, it is worth asking what this hour requires of us.