How Burke and Agre’s thoughts intersect in shaping modern republicanism, addressing hierarchy, civic skills, and modular citizenship.
EARLY BURKE INFLUENCE CONVERGENCE WITH PHILIP AGRE’S REPUBLICANISM
FOR THOSE THAT READ MY LETTERS, YOU KNOW, THAT EDMUND BURKE was my first introduction to political philosophy, and when I was able to critique him, vistas opened for me intellectually. I carried many ideas with me since that time, and it did distinguish my thinking from peers, and also eventually hindered me in other ways. The political thinking of a young Black child is often assumed, even more in this period than my own. My period was a time of early simplified web pages, Gameboy color and then much later basic YouTube, and all the teachers were instructing us in the basics of computer science and the internet. I just often searched alot on politics coming into my teens. That was probably from the fear brought on by the Iraq war. Alongside my early readings of Burke, initiating me into the world of politics, there was another thinker that influenced me in the same period you may not know of, a humanities professor by the name of Philip E. Agre, who had papers on the web dated since the late nineties; and I kept Agre in my tabs on literally every computer and laptop I have ever possessed. I returned to him whenever I felt lost, because of the fundamental diagnostic manner of his writings, but also due to consuming political thinking that essentially formed the basis of the logic of both classical liberalism and modern conservatism that created some dissonance. The dissonance became more prominent the older I got and the more I researched without reflecting and sorting the history and perspectives I learned.
The reflecting also helped me understand the difference between my learning and accumulation versus older colleagues and others in grad school, that were trying to guide me once the conservatism came to the surface as a reaction against the liberal and leftist constraints and patterns that I had tensions with, but did not know how to sort and think through. This was because the only ways of thinking said to be in town was conservative, or liberal or radical tradition. There still was a pressure to course correct within the limits of liberal or radical tradition, and that intuition for many I think today is not met with the degree of Stoic-like meditations needed, but is affected by algorithm pipelines and so forth.
Why did Burke first appeal to me, one might ask. I studied Old Norse, African and Greco-Roman mythology, folklore, combined with Gothic and Romantic era novels since a child. Simply, themes of continuity and tradition were strung throughout. I learned to have pride in my own ancestral history as much as others, and not merely my own. Only much later when I was older, I thought the perspective I had matched best with the stream of classical liberal tradition and conservatism, until I questioned this and Burke along with it. I was an intensely imaginative child, and because I did not relate to other peers alot, or was made to feel like I did not belong, I went to journey into other worlds and worlds of the past, and with that, you could say, I gravitated to and reflected old ways of thinking. Some will try to psycho-analyze, but it is completely possible and fine to say my creative writing I have sought to hone since a child reflects exactly the combined elements of those things. I like them, and it made me feel as if I had lived many lives through literature. The depths of the human world and experience opened to me beyond the enclosures of the environment of my time, and so did ways of thinking. In this way, the idea that I was an experiencer-observer of modernity with an old critical soul of modernity made sense, and my race had no limits on that observation or critique.
Philip Agre was my convergent introduction with Burke to political philosophy during the G.W. Bush era, and atleast every year since this period, I returned to his writing till I understood it, and that took a long time without the contextual history and conceptual basis. I had it wrong. I had to return to the drawing board. Philip Agre’s essays mattered because they gave a usable account of a conflict that Burke had opened and never closed, and his writings were prescient about what would be needed in the coming period of technological advances. This was because he was writing on artificial intelligence and practical republicanism in the early 2000s.
An early reading of Burke teaches a serious lesson: institutions are accumulated capital, prejudice often encodes unstated knowledge, and abstract schemes can wreck arrangements that took generations to stabilize. That lesson is not empty. It also leaves a gap. Burke’s reverence for inheritance does not clearly separate a practice worth keeping from a hierarchy that survives by teaching people to defer. For a long time, the available political languages did not fill that gap. One side treated institutions as obstacles to be redesigned from principle. The other treated skepticism toward redesign as proof that hierarchy was wisdom. The result was cognitive dissonance as it also produced in myself: the Burkean warning about civilizational and social destruction still seemed right, while the particular modern conservative claim on that warning increasingly did not.
AGRE ON PRACTICAL POLITICS IN A 21ST CENTURY REPUBLIC, AND CONSERVATISM
There are three essays of Agre that cut the problem differently, that I understand now.
Agre argued in his essay The Practical Republic that republican citizenship is not mainly a moral posture and not the same thing as democracy in the narrow sense of rule by the majority. A republic is a polity that refuses monarchy and, in the American case, has to keep undoing habits of deference if self-government is to be real. The missing piece in social capital, deliberative democracy, and civic republicanism is a theory of social skill. Networks and trust matter, but people also have to know how to make connections, frame an issue, and move it through institutions. Deliberative democracy fails as a description because it models mass politics on the small meeting, while actual argument is produced and circulated through organized infrastructures. Citizenship, on his account, is less a bundle of rights than a set of responsibilities that only work if ordinary people can practice issue entrepreneurship inside a lattice of issues that runs across levels of government, places, institutions, and ideological camps. That lattice is what he means by civil society. The political point is practical: teach people how to make social capital, or reforms will reinforce the people who already have the skill.
In What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It (2004) Agre names the other half of the Burke problem. This was the most important article, because it did not just provide a simple answer, that Conservatism is wrong, to appease a bias. Agre dissected it, so I returned to it often, even when I had a conservative period in my life. Agre defines conservatism as the domination of society by an aristocracy, sustained by deference and redescribed in each generation. He treats the familiar conservative arguments, related to institutions as fragile capital, hierarchy as order, freedom as noninterference, as mechanisms that selectively conserve whatever keeps a superior class in place. The incompatibility he claims is not with manners or continuity but with democracy understood as equal social worth, with a dynamic economy that depends on widespread initiative, and with public reason.
His sharper claims are about method: conservatism, as he describes it, twists the language of conscience, redefines democracy so that opposition looks illegitimate, substitutes association and repetition for argument, and treats words as territory to be captured. Democracy, by contrast, is an experimental organization of knowledge: overlapping spheres, modular citizenship, skills that are not reserved for elites, and limits on arbitrary authority. Whether or not every historical instance fits the definition, the essay supplies a test Burke does not: ask who the conserved institution enables, and whether the required attitude is judgment or deference.
Agre holds that what is wrong with conservatism is not mere caution or love of continuity, as I once naively thought, but its systematic drive to organize society as aristocratic domination sustained by deference — the internalized sense that some people are simply better and therefore entitled to rule. The familiar arguments about institutions as fragile capital, hierarchy as the source of order, and freedom as non-interference function, in his account, as selective mechanisms that conserve whatever keeps a superior class in place while redefining democracy so that opposition looks illegitimate. Conservatism twists the language of conscience, treats words as territory to be captured, and substitutes association and repetition for argument, making public reason impossible. This is incompatible with democracy understood as equal social worth, with a dynamic economy that depends on widespread initiative, and with the experimental organization of knowledge across overlapping spheres. Continuous reading of Agre supplies a practical test.
This diagnosis converges with other research that treats hierarchy and reaction as central rather than incidental. Corey Robin argues in The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 29) that conservatism begins from the principle “that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” and is fundamentally a reaction against democratic challenges, in public and private life, to hierarchies of power and status; the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back produces improvisations that defend privilege even while absorbing tactical elements from the movements it opposes (Robin 2011, pp. 16-36). Albert O. Hirschman, in The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Harvard University Press, 1991), identifies three recurring theses — perversity (reforms will backfire), futility (they will change nothing), and jeopardy (they will endanger prior gains), that conservatives have used across two centuries to cut off debate rather than engage it (Hirschman 1991, pp. 7, 11-42).
Together these accounts reinforce Agre’s point that the deeper problem is not tradition itself but the combination of hierarchical defense and rhetorical closure that blocks modular citizenship and open experimental judgment.
Agre extended the same argument into reading, questions, and institutions of thought in Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Society. Intellectual life is individual and collective at once, driven by questions rather than by training objectives, and badly served by the stereotype that serious reading belongs to an elite. Agre’s concern is structural. Professional advocates have places to rehearse arguments; and most citizens meet public controversy only after the case has been built, which makes ordinary participation brittle. A democratic intellectual infrastructure of personal libraries, better matching of questions to texts, lightweight forums, reading groups, forms of review that are not confined to universities would extend that rehearsal. His phrase “the professionalization of everything” is descriptive, in that more occupations already require ongoing learning and public reasoning, so the tools of intellectual life have to scale beyond the old clerisy.
Taken together, his essays do not entirely cancel Burke but keep the part worth keeping: institutions are real to be maintained, skills are learned rather than declared, wholesale abstraction is a bad substitute for practice. I have dropped the part that produces the dissonance. Continuity is not self-justifying. A practice deserves loyalty if it spreads the capacity to act, not if it trains people to admire the order that ranks them. Practical republican politics, in Agre’s version, is the work of making that capacity common: issue skills, argument skills, and institutions that let ordinary judgment rehearse before it has to decide.
That was the formative correction. It made it possible to question modern political ideas without treating the question as a choice between ancestor worship and a blank slate. It seems many have not crossed over from the dissonance, but this is partially who I write to, and that is meant for formative periods at any stage of our lives, because we might carry so many worldviews without having reflected and dealt with the discomfort of the jagged roads our rationale converge on or do not.
When I look back, I understand that my journey was different than others, difficult and full of a sense of isolation, because it involved reflective nonconformity under dual constraints of racial particularity and ideological tribalism. Early adoption of classical liberalism fused with Burkean conservatism arose from a drive for ordered agency: valuing individual rights, market initiative, institutional continuity, and skepticism of abstract radicalism as practical bulwarks against chaos or dependency. For many other Black Americans, this can function as a rejection of narratives that reduce identity to grievance or that treat historical progress as incomplete without perpetual redesign of hierarchy. It prizes judgment within inherited forms rather than pure novelty.
Questioning many of the frameworks I had since adopted through the years led to understanding the incompleteness Agre diagnoses. Burkean arguments about fragile institutions, hierarchy as order, and freedom as non-interference can operate as selective conservation, because they preserve whatever currently stabilizes superior positions while demanding psychological deference rather than active citizenship. Classical liberalism’s non-interference, meanwhile, under-specifies the civic skills, overlapping spheres, and limits on arbitrary power that make equal social worth sustainable. The resulting shift toward a fuller republican tradition with freedom as non-domination, mixed institutions, modular participation, and experimental public reason recovers elements the dual-axis (progress versus reaction, identity versus color-blindness) flattens. It functions as “counter-modern” in the sense of retrieving pre- or early-modern resources (civic virtue, historical particularity without aristocratic essentialism, popular sovereignty bounded by constitutional form) against modernity’s atomizing or managerial dualisms.
The journey remains poorly legible to many other Black Americans and White liberals because both groups predominantly operate inside the dual-axis and racialized solidarity norms. As I will delve into this in later entries, deviation is readily coded as deference to residual hierarchy (Agre’s “aristocracy”) or as false consciousness, rather than as an independent test of institutions: who do they enable, and do they cultivate judgment or deference? Shared frameworks supply ready scripts (racial progress versus reaction; authenticity versus sell-out) that make an intermediate position of reflective recovery appear either reactionary or incomprehensible. The psychology is therefore one of high cognitive autonomy combined with structural isolation: the very capacity for self-examination that produces the transition also removes the person from the associative repetition and language-capture that stabilize group membership on either side. These are the constraints, which I stand capable of critiquing and encouraging others to break; and without the permission of those that rather I do not.
MODULAR CITIZENSHIP AGAINST ABRITARY AUTHORITY AND TECHNOCRATIC ORDER
Agre’s concept of modular citizenship is strung throughout my writings without naming it, and it is upon that concept as the basis, that I wrote Citizen Journalism, Cosmopolitanism and Resistance to Epistemic Domination. Agre’s “modular citizenship” is a technical specification of democratic agency rather than a slogan. It appears in “What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?” (2004) as one element of democracy understood as “an experimental organization of knowledge”: overlapping spheres of expertise and lay judgment, skills not reserved for elites, and limits on arbitrary authority. The term is developed more fully through contrast with conservative social capital and through the companion essay “The Practical Republic.”
It borrows Ernest Gellner’s notion of the modular individual in industrial society, describing someone who can enter and exit associations, roles, and alliances without fixed ancestral status or permanent ostracism, and applies it to political life. Where conservative (or traditionalist) social capital treats belonging as inherited, particularistic, and psychologically deferential (“the aristocracy are better people than they are”), modular citizenship treats it as reconstructible. Citizens possess “portable social skills,” for network formation, argument circulation, issue entrepreneurship, that allow them to reconstitute relationships around specific public problems rather than around permanent ranks or group essences. Institutions are not fragile capital to be conserved by deference; they are the sedimented product of those skills exercised across overlapping spheres.
Philip E. Agre’s concept of “Modular citizenship” means treating citizens as people who can move between different groups, issues, and roles by using practical skills, organizing, arguing, connecting with others, rather than being stuck in fixed ranks, inherited loyalties, or permanent group identities. It is the opposite of expecting people to defer to elites or stay locked inside one tribal category. In this view, healthy public life depends on widely shared abilities to form temporary coalitions around specific problems, across overlapping spheres of activity, instead of relying on hierarchy or pure majority will.
In “The Practical Republic,” this modularity appears as the “issue lattice”: a four-dimensional structure (vertical scale, geography, institutional context, ideological position) in which citizens act as entrepreneurs who stake claims, circulate analyses, and build temporary coalitions. The logic is fractal and isomorphic across levels, from a local association to national politics, so participation does not require entry into a single hierarchical elite. Skills are democratized rather than reserved: they can be acquired through apprenticeship in associations, taught in civics or professional settings by citizens, and amplified by technologies that lower the cost of identifying issues and connecting people. The historical American contribution Agre highlights is precisely the progressive undoing of internalized deference, converting republican self-government from an elite capacity into a widespread practical competence.
The contrast with conservatism is therefore methodological and psychological, not merely institutional. Conservatism, in Agre’s definition, selectively conserves those arrangements that stabilize superior positions and substitutes association-plus-repetition for open argument; and modular citizenship substitutes experimental knowledge-organization and equal initiative. It demands judgment (who is enabled by this arrangement? what skills does it require?) rather than deference. The dual-axis left-right framing is secondary: both progressive identity modules and conservative hierarchical modules can function as non-modular statuses that freeze relationships and reserve skills. Modular citizenship aims at the opposite with portable capacities that let citizens enter multiple overlapping spheres without permanent subordination to any single one.
In the earlier psychological trajectory of a Black American moving from a classical-liberal & Burkean fusion toward a fuller republicanism, this concept of modular citizenship supplies a concrete content for recovery beyond the dual-axis: citizenship as active, skill-based participation in public reason rather than either deference to residual hierarchies or absorption into racial or partisan modules. It tests institutions by whether they diffuse the capacities for initiative or re-inscribe the need for deference.
REPUBLICAN TRADITION VERSUS THE DUAL POLITICAL AXIS
However, the claim to move “beyond left and right” now triggers third-positionist associations, i.e., Nouvelle Droite, fascist syncretism, or related efforts that reject both liberal individualism and socialist collectivism in favor of hierarchical organicism, ethno-cultural particularism, or anti-modern romanticism. It is because those movements successfully occupied the rhetorical space. I was assumed to be a THIRD POSITIONIST when I first began writing on politics, but this is the issue I tried to explain in both Selective Memory and the Extended Republic in the Post-1945 Liberal-Internationalist Order and The Selective Historical Memory of the West: German and Central European Idealism and Romanticism.
The republican tradition actually supplies an independent and far older warrant for transcending the dual-axis. Classical and early-modern republicanism (Aristotelian mixed government, Roman civic liberty, Renaissance and Atlantic variants culminating in the American founding) organized political thought around the capacity for collective self-government, non-domination, institutional balance against both concentrated power and pure majoritarianism, and the diffusion of civic skills, not around the nineteenth and twentieth-century spectrum of progressive equality versus reactionary hierarchy or market liberty versus social provision.
Challenging the dual-axis is not to appear as some modern contrarian or troll, but to make citizens and voters less predictable as pawns, less controllable, less “manageable” by the technocratic elite; therefore, more independent and incapable of being dominated and treated like mere consumers and spectators of policies they cannot affect or have no say in. The current challenge to the dual-axis is at the moment only done so, because socialists and its variants want in using the same historical arguments, which at their basis is a critique that “the system” fundamentally does not work. I am advocating it on the grounds of our own political tradition for recovery, development on the lines of that recovery, to solve the degenerative crisis in civic education and other practical reasons.
The dual-axis itself is a contingent product of post-revolutionary European and American politics (Limits of the Modern Axis of Political Thought). The republican archive consisting of constitutions, civic education manuals, debates over representation and virtue, historical recoveries from Harrington and Montesquieu through the Federalists and Reconstruction amendments contains resources for modular citizenship, overlapping spheres of judgment, and experimental public reason that neither modern left nor modern right fully owns. Evidence for this recovery is not a fringe construction of myself, but the ordinary historical record of the tradition that produced constitutional republics. Returning to Agre’s writings helped me understand this.
The modern sacralization of “democracy” as popular will or progressive identity, paired with the demonization of “republicanism” as mere party faction (associated with perversity,, therefore damages civic education and national capacity regardless of how the public currently associates the two words. Sacralized democracy tends to collapse equal social worth into either electoral majoritarianism or deference to expert or group narratives, while sidelining the practical skills of issue entrepreneurship, institutional design, and non-deferential judgment that Agre and the longer republican literature treat as constitutive. Demonizing the republican label because of its contemporary partisan capture further obscures the tradition’s internal test, whether an arrangement enables widespread initiative or re-imposes hierarchy through deference; and leaves citizens without a non-factional vocabulary for mixed government, constitutional limits, and the modular reconstruction of political relationships. The result is not ideological hygiene but a narrowed public reason in which both residual aristocratic habits and unchecked democratic leveling remain harder to diagnose, and in which the experimental organization of knowledge across overlapping spheres is subordinated to dual-axis loyalties.
CONCLUSION ON TECHNOCRATIC ORDER, CONSERVATISM AND SACRALIZATION OF POPULAR WILL
This all essentially moves away from the modern habits that conditioned citizens to think like sad robots in a world where the office space never leaves the workplace, within a technocratic order where only gatekeeping elites have the say, and within an empire that acts as both nanny and global policeman. Those habits trained people to treat political life as an extension of the workplace: follow the process, defer to the credentialed, avoid independent judgment, and accept that the rules are set elsewhere. Modular citizenship pushes against that.
A republican recovery of the same idea treats the technocratic order and the nanny-policeman state as two faces of concentrated power that both demand deference. One reserves the skills of public reasoning for credentialed elites; the other expands administrative and security reach until citizens mainly experience government as provider or enforcer rather than as a shared capacity for self-government. Modular citizenship and the longer republican emphasis on mixed institutions and non-domination both test arrangements by a practical question: do they diffuse the ability to judge and initiate, or do they re-create the need for permanent gatekeepers and permanent clients? The dual-axis often collapses into one or the other with market managerialism on one side, and administrative managerialism on the other; while the republican resources for overlapping spheres and widely shared civic competence remain outside that framing.
While an early exposure and reading of Burke taught certain things, the continuous reading of Agre, by contrast, supplied a recurring diagnostic test rather than a settled disposition. The fact that I refused to settle on a disposition was helped by this. It trained in me the habit of asking, of any conserved arrangement, who it actually enables and whether the attitude it requires is active judgment or internalized deference. Over years this shifted the early Burkean caution from a general preference for the inherited, high-skilled or worthy toward a more precise filter: some continuities preserve the conditions for widespread initiative and modular citizenship; others selectively conserve superior positions by redefining opposition as illegitimate, capturing language, or substituting association and repetition for argument.
What accumulates is not a rejection of continuity but a sharper capacity to distinguish it from deference. Agre’s repeated emphasis on democracy as an experimental organization of knowledge through overlapping spheres, skills not reserved for elites and limits on arbitrary authority made the early fusion of classical liberalism and Burkean conservatism, that underlie my thinking, feel incomplete over time. The same institutions and traditions that once appeared as fragile capital worth preserving begin to be examined for whether they diffuse the practical abilities of issue entrepreneurship and non-deferential participation or whether they re-inscribe the need for gatekeepers. The result is less a conversion to an opposing camp than a durable method for recovering republican resources of mixed institutions, civic competence and freedom as non-domination that the dual-axis tends to flatten. Continuous reflection keeps that method available against both the selective conservation Agre diagnoses and the sacralization of pure popular will that later political habits encourage, and people find suspect to critique.
