The Wisdom of Yoram Hazony
Covenant, family, and strength in politics, scripture, and the life well lived
Well now, I'm no hero, that's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey, what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair
Well, the night's busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back, heaven's waiting down on the tracks
Oh, come take my hand
We're riding out tonight to case the promised land
— Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road
A Politics of Obligation
An Orthodox Jew, a philosopher, and leader of the National Conservatism movement, Hazony writes with clarity and conviction. His prose is lyrical but restrained, his analysis accessible but insight dense. He sees the world not through abstract theories, but as it is lived: through the empirical examples of the past, and the stubborn realities of fallibility and compromise. In Hazony’s vision, the ordinary man struggling to raise his children and the political hero navigating statecraft are bound by the same hard obligations — loyalty, duty, and the weight of inherited tradition.
“There are righteous men who perish through their righteousness, and there are the wicked who flourish by their wickedness. Be not overly righteous…”
— Ecclesiastes 7:15-16
At the heart of his political treatise is a rejection of the liberal myth of neutrality — the fantasy that society can stand for everything, and thus stands for nothing. Against this, Hazony proposes an unapologetically normative politics rooted in scripture, in covenant, and in the unchosen obligations that form the backbone of real human community. He rejects liberalism’s promise of a smorgasbord of identities as incoherent and corrosive. He rejects conservatives who pay lip service to tradition while living atomised, secular lives. He rejects bedroom philosophers — childless men like Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza — for their sterile detachment from life’s blood-bound, duty-laden demands. What could Rousseau, who abandoned all five of his children, possibly teach us about the moral architecture of a nation?1
Hazony rejects neat divides between theory and practice, reason and faith, my politics and that of my neighbour’s. It’s all one thing. Any worldview and political philosophy needs to take that into account. Hence the pragmatic plurality embedded in his political philosophy: a world of nations, with their own inheritances and ideologies and even gods. One global government would be tyranny; no government would be anarchy. A community of nations is a happy middle. And the state is a limited one, shaped by the duty of kings, the desires of the people, and the constant risk of evil from both. This is the pragmatic and surprisingly fruitful posture born of Hebrew Scripture, manifest in Anglo-American nationalism — the greatest political philosophy man has yet devised.
Hazony’s conservatism is covenantal before it is ideological. It begins with the givenness of our place in the world, of our parents, of our nation, of God. Liberalism, he argues, attempts to liberate the individual from all prior loyalties and inherited obligations. But this liberation is a mirage. Sending our daughters to the OnlyFans mines is not liberation. This is not freedom but degradation and alienation — a society of detached, autonomous individuals unable to sustain shared institutions or a coherent moral vision.
Hazony sees this fracture most clearly in the erosion of public religion. In liberal societies, religion has been privatised — confined to homes and houses of worship, stripped of political authority. But for Hazony, the biblical tradition was never meant to be a purely private affair. It was a blueprint for national life, grounded in divine law and communal covenant. The Hebrew Bible presents not merely personal piety but the architecture of a just polity: family as the root of order, elders as the source of wisdom, and God as the guarantor of justice.
Without God, without a shared recognition of the divine, society cannot distinguish between right and wrong beyond the shallow consensus of the moment. The political consequence is drift: first toward relativism, then toward coercive progressivism, as the state rushes to fill the moral vacuum left behind by a retreating faith.
That is why Hazony insists that conservatism made a mistake letting itself become defined by limited government and cutting taxes. Conservatism should instead be about recovering a moral tradition rooted in a theistic view of the world. It is about restoring the idea that truth exists outside of us, that it is revealed rather than invented, and that our deepest commitments are not chosen, but inherited. That ancient anchor is vital to resist the fashions and tumults of the moment.
Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.
― James Madison, The Federalist Papers
Hazony is perhaps what Jordan Peterson should have been. Both diagnose the same modern malaise — the collapse of meaning, the loss of virtue, the decay of institutions. Both draw on biblical wisdom and cultural memory. But whereas Peterson seems always troubled, always lost in some terrifying mist through which he bumbles back terrible secrets of the universe, Hazony is clear-eyed. He writes with a steady hand and a scalpel. While Peterson gets bogged down in a mythopoetic swamp, Hazony writes from firmer ground. He writes from a place of deep humility: he’s seen things. He’s seen how people break and how the sins of parents are visited upon the children.
The Texture of Unchosen Obligations
Hazony writes movingly of how he and his wife both emerged from broken homes, how she adopted his people and his God, and how as students at Princeton they committed to one another forever to the pangs of Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road. Like Abraham leaving his father’s house to make a covenant with God and to found a people, Hazony and his wife created something of their own. They rejected the Bacchanalian degeneracy of American student life and forged an alternative world together. They built a home and raised nine children. A father of nine understands the vicissitudes of life.
It’s how you come to read such devastating insights into parenthood and marriage in a book about nationalism. In The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony roots nationhood in unchosen obligations — the bonds that structure family life (the long quote is worth it):
[T]he responsibilities undertaken in bringing children into the world are permanent, remaining in force for the rest of our lives whether we consent to them or not. True, a husband and wife did usually agree, at one point, to bring a child into the world. But not long after this original act of consent, the difficulties involved in raising a child already bear little resemblance to anything the young lovers may have thought they were consenting to at the time. And the project of raising children only continues to throw up ever new surprises over the decades, including hardship and pain that were scarcely imagined when they first entered into it. Yet this original decision cannot be revisited, giving the parents a chance to renew their consent based on an updated assessment that weighs the benefits each child brings against the suffering endured. Just the opposite: The parents’ consent or lack thereof is irrelevant to their continuing responsibilities, and it is nothing like consent that motivates them as they persist in their efforts to raise their children to health and inheritance. What motivates them is their loyalty, which is the fact that the parents understand the child as a part of themselves—a part of themselves not only for twenty years, as certain philosophers suppose, but for the rest of their lives, forever.
Something similar can be said of the relationship between a husband and wife. It is true that they did consent to be married at a given moment. But the things they experience in their life together, including not only pleasure and joy, but also sorrow and hardship that neither ever dreamed of, are not the things that were imagined when they first wed. Nevertheless, they remain together, not because of a calculation undertaken every few months or years in which their original consent is renewed. Rather, they are sustained by mutual loyalty, which is the recognition of each that the other is a part of themselves—a part of themselves not only until their children reach adulthood, which is, after all, only the first part of the burden of a parent, but for the rest of their lives, forever.
[The Virtue of Nationalism]
What is true of parenthood, he suggests, is true of political order. A people’s loyalty to their nation is not reducible to consent or convenience. It is a matter of inheritance and duty — the same logic that binds a husband to a wife, a parent to a child, a people to their God.2
Hazony explains why a child must honour his parents and what this has to do with government. We are commanded to honour our parents precisely because it is hard. Not as children, when we see them as gods. But as adults, when they fall from being gods to mortals. When we rebel, when we see their faults, when we are tempted to withhold respect because they no longer inspire awe. What does this have to do with politics? The family is the seed of the nation. Its dynamics — hierarchy, loyalty, duty — are writ large in public life. Governments thrive when they embrace responsibility for their people, and when they are honoured in return. They decay when duty is abandoned and honour withheld.
Hazony seems to idealise a family unit of multigenerational living and occupation. A tradition where the family serves a single occupation transmuted through the generations. Where each family member is not sent off to school or to offices to spend their days and lives amongst strangers, but work together from home and where education is passed from father to son and mother to daughter. I am prepared to believe Hazony is willing to give up a lot economically to live his values. But I suspect he underestimates how dramatically poorer such a society would be. For such a pragmatist, this seems wildly idealistic. The life of an academic or an artisan or a priest, perhaps, but for everyone else? For a man who idealises Anglo-American nationalism, he totally repudiates the individualistic ethos the same strange Anglo culture that now saturates the West created and the singular economic explosion it heralded. Perhaps we might draw on the inimitable words of Caroline Ellison of FTX fame:
Hazony’s vision of obligation does not end with family. It extends outward — to the home, to the land, to the material fruits of our labour. Hazony is no fan of John Locke, so it is ironic that his treatment of property is a kind of Hebraic Locheanism. Here he is, almost in passing, on why our possessions matter, why we care about our things, why we can defile property and have ours defiled in turn:
The property, like the children, is an achievement of his spirit. It has come to be what it is through his own rule—not merely his labor, but his labor as the process through which his control and rule, his decisions and creativity, his power, are exerted on the world. Because both the children and the property continue after his death, they are the ways in which every man may evade the mortality which hangs over all men: If the objective mortality of man confirms his powerlessness, his subjective ability to create that which will endure, even that which stands as a contribution to the eternal, robs death of its absolute power; it relieves man of his absolute powerlessness before the eternal, restoring his spirit, which would otherwise drown in a perpetual hopelessness.
[Conservatism: A Rediscovery]
Esther, Agency, and Faith
Hazony’s God and Politics in Esther is perhaps his most penetrating political text (it might be my very favourite Hazony and one of my favourite books this year). Unlike Leviticus, which concerns itself with self-rule and ritual purity in a Jewish state, Esther is a manual for Jewish survival in the diaspora. How a people must navigate power and survive in a polity not of their own. God appears absent in Esther. He does not speak nor is He named.3 Yet His providence pulses beneath the narrative. Mordechai and Esther navigate palace politics with strategic brilliance, reversing an imperial genocide not through prayer alone, but through courage, shrewdness, and loyalty. Faith is not passive. It demands action.
The world is in the first instance formless, directionless, anarchical, liquid, void, an utmost darkness. Not much has changed since Genesis: Man’s place is perpetually to live in ships on the surface of the water, on the edge of the abyss. Machiavelli’s politics, and especially that of Nietzsche after him, looks out across the waves and calls on man to cease from his despair: He must impose that order which he himself decrees. He must recognize the vastness of the sea, and yet for all this, weigh anchor, engage those oarsmen whom he can command, and strive with his every fiber to give his craft direction and purpose, that it may make its way a distance across the emptiness, of its own power, before the end of it. But Mordechai speaks to us of another politics, and a greater one: of one in which a spirit blows unseen over the surface of the water, allowing it direction, tendency, order, rule, purposiveness, light. Perhaps this is no great wind; one can hardly feel it when one walks about the deck. Indeed, it is so still that when man disregards it, his ship may lie dead on the sea for a thousand years in spite of it, as though it did not exist. And yet he need only hoist a sail to see how this wind fills the world, as it has since creation. And if he has correctly aimed his craft, he then feels it shudder into motion as God answers.
[God and Politics in Esther]
Hazony draws from Esther a politics of agency. Man is propelled by a deep appetite for rule:
Like all desires, the appetite for rule serves a crucial and life-sustaining purpose when it is held within bounds. It is the spirit that urges that the uncertain, threatening and challenging be made certain, benign and beneficial. Every healthy person experiences the tides of the spirit in some measure: Self-confidence, dedication, enthusiasm, magnanimity and a sense of purpose when control and rule are at hand; anger, fear, jealousy, guilt and aimless depression when they are lost. Together, these feelings map the boundaries between that which has already been achieved and that which has not, allowing man to build his life from one achievement to the next, driving him to extend the frontiers of the controlled, of that which is as it “should” be: To invest in shelter for winter, to resolve a difficult problem, to uncover a lost object, to master an elusive skill, to invent a much-needed device, to excel in one’s profession, to win a recalcitrant love, to save a drowning child, to defend against a threat to one’s life, to right injustice.
[God and Politics in Esther]
But he cautions against a worldview that believes in human agency and nothing else, believing in the might of man above all. Hazony is no nihilist. Man must stand for what is right, alone if need be like Mordechai or even at grave risk like Esther (“If I perish, I perish”). But the world is not a dark abyss, there is virtue for us to harness.
“In Hebrew Scripture there is no fate, but only decisions made by men and the decrees of the God of Israel.”
— Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture
Incidentally, this worldview is instrumentally advantageous. It abrogates nothing from human agency, and is deeply optimistic. It both avoids complacency (only your actions matter) and fortifies your resolve (God is on your side). Success is not guaranteed in your lifetime — the Hebrews were enslaved for centuries before deliverance — but doing the right thing, even when unpopular, is a deep and unshakeable (and Jewish) prerogative.
Esther and Mordecai embody this virtuous mix of agency and faith, deftly acting at great personal risk to successfully reverse an imminent genocide of the Jews on the perpetrators. Joseph is an example of straying too far and losing oneself in power. Joseph attained the highest peaks of power in his service to the Pharoah, but, unmoored, he never delivered his people to their land. And so he condemned them to centuries of slavery in his wake.
The story of Esther ends decisively, with total political victory and no half measures: Haman is hanged on the very gallows he prepared for Mordechai; his ten sons are hanged for good measure;4 and 75,000 would-be Jew killers are massacred across Persia. And yet, this was not the just ending we experienced in the holocaust of our own times. And Hazony meditates on this too.
The Morality of Violence
Modern Jewry shies away from this massacre that crowns the story of Esther. It’s out of kilter with the clownish masquerades of modern Purim celebrations.5 We are embarrassed by victory. Hazony calls this out for what it is: the privilege of peace, a peace bought with blood.
We tell ourselves that violence is obsolete, and so must always have been unnecessary. But this is the delusion of heirs — of those who sneer at slaughter only because they have never needed to fight. They forget that their peace was forged by righteous power, wielded by men willing to do what was needed.
Hazony reminds us that the work of politics is not merely “dirty.” It is sometimes monstrous — and at times, necessarily so:
[T]he political arena is not merely “dirty.” In certain cases it leads us rapidly into a pollution in which man is transformed into a beast of the lowest grade: not merely killing individuals for his own survival, but annihilating cities, nations. It is the curse of politics that in certain cases precisely such monstrous acts of impurity may be the acts most moral given the paucity of alternatives. But it is always possible instead to preserve one’s own purity and allow the world to fall into ruin.
[God and Politics in Esther]
See, for example, Gaza.
The Rebel
The strength and conviction that courses through Hazony’s work is itself resonant with Hebrew Scripture. Hazony’s defiance of the liberal world order, of the takeover of institutions by fresh would-be Robespierres stems from Abraham’s rebellion against his father’s house and nation. It stems from Abel’s rejection to abide by God’s decree to plow the field; no, he will be a shepherd. And it stems from Jacob wrestling with God himself and limping away in victory, his older brother defeated and blessing secured, free from his malevolent father-in-law, with his eleven sons, great wealth, the love of his life and the beginnings of a nation. Hazony writes:
God admires and cherishes those who defy the decree of history, and who dare to better things for themselves and their families in ways that conflict with the order that has been created for them by king and state, by their fathers, by God himself.
[The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture]
Hazony has seen what breaks. He has built something that holds. In a world of drift and dissolution, his covenantal home stands like a small ark in rising waters. A shelter. A rebuke. And perhaps, a beginning.
Although Hazony elevates and admires Alexander Hamilton — a father of eight, yet a notorious philanderer who famously had an affair while his wife was pregnant. Perhaps Hazony would cast Hamilton as a modern Judah: a flawed patriarch, yet still a founder and moral anchor of a nation. But such figures underscore the messiness of real life. They invite personal judgment more than they offer clear principles.
It is in such terms, by the way, that Solzhenitsyn describes in The Gulag Archipelago the unprecedented betrayal of the Soviet Union of her subjects:
What is the right course of action if our mother has sold us to the gypsies? No, even worse, thrown us to the dogs? Does she really remain our mother? If a wife has become a whore, are we really still bound to her in fidelity? A Motherland that betrays its soldiers — is that really a Motherland?
Jack Miles in his superb God: A Biography notes that God never speaks again after the Book of Job which ends with His defeat by Job.
[I]f one were to ask why Haman’s ten sons had to die, it is wishful thinking to argue that every one of them was active as a leader in the camp of the anti-Semites, although some of them were exactly that. Rather, their deaths are sought, as was accepted in the course of warfare and politics in antiquity, to prevent Haman’s enmity from leaving heirs, as well as to degrade his memory and emphasize the enormity of his defeat.
[God and Politics in Esther]
“Be not overly righteous…”
“Hazony proposes an unapologetically normative politics rooted in scripture”
OK - stop right there. I have read a lot of scripture and that just sounds miserable.
A wonderful summary of Hazony’s work who I admire as one of the great thinkers of modern times in his substantive critique of liberalism. You point to some tensions and rightly so. I think there are others. But the tensions don’t negate the fruitfulness of his thought.