Mark Mitchell's fine book is filled with excellent insights, which, unfortunately, do not quite achieve what the author lays out as his aim: to present a wholly “alternative political and cultural vision,” one distinct from our current intellectual environment in which “partisans on both the left and the right express themselves primarily in terms of individual rights” (pp. xvi, xiv). That is, Mitchell wants to articulate for his readers a model of conservatism that is not parasitic upon modern individualism, but rather is grounded upon other concepts—primarily that of gratitude. This is not a new intellectual ambition; numerous students of American political thought have sought to reorient postwar conservatism in America by making use of the ideas of such diverse scholars as Robert Nisbet, Alasdair MacIntyre, or Christopher Lasch. Mitchell’s effort is a thoughtful and suggestive one, worthy of serious reflection, but its individual parts are, I think, of greater value than its overall sum.

Mitchell introduces the idea of gratitude as an alternative foundation for political reflection by way of a discussion of our creatureliness, our limits, and our particularity. The observations he lays out in these first four chapters of the book are the best of the whole work. He thoughtfully argues that we are embodied creatures who can only see and love so much or so far, and who logically must stand in only one place at a time. In weaving together these claims, Mitchell artfully takes up modern secularism and materialism, technology and “scientism,” all of which, he asserts, we use to make ourselves seem larger and more independent than we actually are. Modern liberal individualism, in short, has made us into a decidedly nonhumble bunch, obsessed with aggrandizement and self-definition. This explains our tendency to become—here Mitchell makes use of Betrand de Jouvenal—“securitarians,” people who prize above all material creations and material ways of organizing our lives. These we hope to accumulate and dominate, measure and master, thus deluding ourselves into thinking that we can create a world secure and predictable enough that life itself can become a kind of technology “in which all uncertainties are removed [and] from which mystery has been banished” (pp. 52–53).

In contrast to this prideful obsession with bigness, Mitchell wants us to be a more humble—and that means tending to those good things in our lives, learning to appreciate our dependencies and responsibilities, the ways in which we are stewards who have an obligation to that which has been given to us and to that which we must ultimately pass along to those who come after us. In general, he articulates the broad aims of this nonindividualistic, alternative conservatism with sharp examples and an inviting wit. But in order to flesh out the implications of his preference for a culture characterized by gratitude, he addresses, in separate chapters, politics, economics, the environment, the family, and education—and here, while the passionate insights continue, the attempt to knit them together into a political rhetoric that can communicate an alternative to contemporary American liberalism falters somewhat.

Consider how Mitchell’s argument in the chapter on politics develops. Here, his guiding light is Tocqueville, who presciently observed how self-government and democracy give rise to demands for equality, and how that demand will likely in turn result in greater centralization as people look for systems of government and economy capable of ensuring equal treatment across borders. As Mitchell notes, as perfect equality is an impossibility, “vast energy will be expended to alleviate the incongruity,” which opens the door toward the creation of a vast regulatory state (p. 85). I respect him for acknowledging—against the idealized history of some conservative localists—that a centralizing logic was probably operative in America's constitutional system and political culture “right from the beginning” (p. 94). But if such a tendency towards making demands beyond our limits, and thus experiencing life in an ungrateful way, is so deeply present in our political thinking, how to resist it? In the end, as part of his consideration of subsidiarity, Mitchell argues that “a metaphysical account of human nature and human society is necessary for sustaining the independence of various spheres of authority” and that “the revitalization of religious belief may be a necessary long-term solution to the problem of centralization” (pp. 97–98).

There is nothing wrong with suggesting the necessity of religious belief while engaged in political reflections; Tocqueville, among others, did it expertly. But for Mitchell, the political context for the rise of religious humility and gratitude appears to be an agrarian, land-centered one; outside of that kind of social, environmental, and economic structure, the likelihood of such a revival does not appear strong. His discussion of neighborliness makes reference to barn raising (p. 122); his discussion of the natural world becomes most impassioned with talk about growing a garden (pp. 147–48); his discussion of the family revolves around personal examples of families escaping technological tools and toys and instead engaging themselves with the land (pp. 164–66). Again and again, the grateful sensibility he urges upon his readers is connected to a turn toward a more rural and agricultural, less specialized and complex, way of life. I do not point this out as a criticism, necessarily; as it happens, I myself am a strong advocate of and participant in this lifestyle. Like many, I find resonance in his talk of the limited freedom of “citizens without property, that is, citizens who work for a wage” (p. 124); or how the artificial lights of the urban settings robs us of the inspiring and humbling power of the night sky and replaces it with a sense of “hurbis” (pp. 140–41); or when he suggests that we have gotten too far away from sustaining handcrafts and have become “too dependent on purchased goods” (p. 161). This is a powerful picture, worthy of the agrarian writer Wendell Berry (an obvious hero of Mitchell’s). But what it does not do, on my reading, is sketch out a theoretically grounded, alternative “conservative” political language that could move our modernized, pluralistic society away from an overreliance upon individualism and toward a different kind of politics.

With his sympathy for the ideas of Jefferson and Tocqueville, Mitchell clearly has some affection for republicanism, especially in its classic form as a recipe for polities that were small, land based, agrarian, and religiously (or at least morally) homogenous. But in a book of political theory that obviously addresses the America that presently exists, the development of a better language of politics needs to wrestle with the applicability of republicanism to our current moment, and there is not much evidence in this book that Mitchell is interested in weighing the arguments of theorists whose ideas about community and justice have been inspired by republican thought, such as Benjamin Barber, Richard Dagger, or Philip Pettit. Mitchell’s arguments on behalf of a constellation of alternative “conservative” positions are really more about advocating an alternative lifestyle, rather than theoretically exploring plausible alternatives to contemporary ideological stalemates. The language of gratitude alone cannot create or sustain the agricultural or pious conditions by which its rightness will be understood; more likely, it would be that by being pulled by the evocative power of Mitchell's language into a greater involvement with God or gardening, one might come to embrace his claims about creatureliness, limits, and gratitude.

Among the tiny but growing number of “countercultural” conservative thinkers, Mitchell has produced a work that stands out for its grace, thoughtfulness, and passion. I want to praise these scholars, not least for how they doggedly challenge the laziness of so much mainstream political opinion in America. The Politics of Gratitude is worth reading for its many challenging observations—and because, hopefully, it will serve as one more step along a path leading those engaged in these arguments toward a theoretical articulation of republicanism, agrarianism, and conservatism that may truly change the intellectual agenda of this country.