Freemasonry as a playground for civic nationalism

Abstract

This article explores correspondences between the ideals of ‘civic nationalism’ (hereafter CN) and the practices of Freemasonry, a worldwide male fraternity. Freemasons practice an elitist stance of civilizing the self, translated into a collective mission of society‐building. Though not a national movement, Freemasonry shares conceptual similarities with CN and was implicated in civic‐national revolutions in the Americas and the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic research on Israeli Freemasonry, the study explores Masonic sociability as a playgound for practicing civic friendship and negotiating the inherent tensions of CN. Freemasons straddle between particularist and universalist understandings of fraternity, virtue and charity, which carry over to questions of citizenship, patriotism and nationalism. This boundary work over collective attachments represents a pragmatic attempt, not to resolve universalist and particularist preferences, but to contain and incorporate both within exclusivist Masonic practices. Far from marking the failure of CN, Masonic sociability illustrates its political significance, envisioning the nation as a social club of chosen friends.

The Architecture of Collective Intimacy: Masonic Friendships as a Model for Collective Attachments

“…Unlike other historical cases in which Masons were implicated in political activism associated with civic and national struggles, Israeli Freemasons shy away from any form of activism and hold fast to an official policy of political noninvolvement in line with the British Masonic tradition. At the same time, as I discussed elsewhere (Kaplan forthcoming), Israeli members repeatedly reinterpreted Masonic prohibitions on political debating as an explicit demand to be loyal to the state in which one lives. In turn, among the Jewish members, this civic loyalty veiled a related but substantially distinct collective attachment to the state's national‐Zionist values.…”

“…I situate these broad questions in the embodied organizational context of Freemasonry, a worldwide fraternity practicing an elitist stance of civilizing the self (Hoffman ), translated into a collective mission of society building premised on a civic‐democratic political vocabulary (Jacob ). Though not a national movement, Freemasonry was implicated in national struggles against imperial rule in the Americas and the Middle East (Dumont ; Harland‐Jacobs ) and provided a secluded social space for negotiating a particularist national consciousness set in civic context (Kaplan in press).…”