The Monistic Anthropology of Liberalism

7 July 2025

By Dr Adi Schlebusch

In a recent discussion on the heresy of Christian Identity I pointed out that despite all its pretentions to the contrary, it really is functionally liberal in its anthropology. This is because CI adheres to the same monistic view of man characteristic of the Enlightenment, but differs only in the sense that it defines “Man” or “Adamite” differently than Liberalism does. The Counter-Enlightenment philosopher Joseph de Maistre famously polemized against this monistic anthropology in his 1796 Considérations sur la France where he stated that “In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him, and if he exists, he is unknown to me.” What De Maistre thereby highlighted is that liberalism’s drive for a universal constitution under which to unite humanity neglects the very real distinctions inherent to what it means to be human in the first place.  

Liberalism’s monistic anthropology is based in its individualism, which manifests in a nominalist social order in which each man is an island, and which in turn leads to a universalist notion of mankind as the collection of billions of individuals, rather than of people concretely embedded in God-given familial social structures. Having abstracted man from his God-given identity, it generates the opportunity to remake man in the image of man—an opportunity that is always grasped at with both hands by socialist tyrants.  

CI suffers from the same monistic anthropological error in that it fails to account for the God-given diversity of mankind and the ethnic complementarianism necessitated by any orthodox form of Christian Nationalism. It operates with the very same anthropological framework that the liberal does, but only redefines man or adamite as “white man.” This same monistic anthropological heresy is also found with some National-Socialists such as Corey Mahler, who recently claimed that “Genocide is not per se morally wrongful,” that all Africans should be relocated to Africa before the continent should be taken over by white men, thereby suggesting that entire nations on another continent can be wiped off the face of the earth because of their wickedness. While Old Testament Israel indeed conquered Canaan as its promised land through genocide, it must be remembered that the entire territory awarded to the people of Israel following the successful conquest under Joshua’s leadership, which was roughly the size of Vermont, still represented less than 0.75% of the known territory of the ancient Near East stretching from the Nile Delta in Egypt to the Tigris-Euphrates river system in Mesopotamia, and from Anatolia in the north to the Arabian Desert in the south. The people of Israel did not proceed to conquer a greater share than that which was divinely allotted to them (see Numbers 34:1–12 and Joshua 13–21). This points to a radically different approach to international relations than the likes of Mahler advocates. While compensations for white genocide has its merit and should certainly not be ruled off the table altogether, the fact of the matter is that this kind of racial imperialism is completely alien to biblical Christianity especially in that it violates the very heart of the divine calling of Gentile, Japhethitic Christians, namely making other races envious of our successes thereby bringing them to repentance (Romans 11:11).  

Without an orthodox conception of the one-and-the-many, we end up with distorted anthropologies that fail to effectuate God-honoring social orders. The very idea of propositional nationhood advocated by post-Enlightenment Liberalism and Post-War Liberalism in particular has, by means of its elevation of the individual, actually effected an erosion of the God-given rights not only of families and peoples, but ironically eventually of individuals too. It has effectuated this by preparing the soil for the rise of Marxism by removing all the traditional intermediary barriers to tyranny between the individual and the state, such as the family, guild, nation, and church, thereby leaving atomized individuals vulnerable to both government and corporate tyranny. True reformation in our time would therefore necessitate the destruction of all forms of monism.