On Total Humanity, The Origins of Human Rights, and Unreasonable Pluralism

[T]he totalitarian rebellion of our time is not only directed against nineteenth-century liberalism and democracy. It attacks the sum total of the tradition of the Western world, its religion, its science, its law, its State, its property, its family, its morality, and its notion of the human person. But I insist on emphasizing especially that this attack threatens a common ruin to all sorts of interests that, until now, were considered separated by irreconcilable differences [oppositions]. Today we are confronted with an extraordinary sight: theologians and scholars, believers and non-believers, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and free-thinkers, monarchists, democrats, managers and workers, in sum all the parties, all the factions, all the sects, all the interests of which the antagonisms have posed problems the two past centuries, are forced to recognize that if they do not find common ground in defense against the will of totalitarian States to dominate, they will all be ruined together.
   That should teach them that the disputes and the divisions they have had for such a long time do not derive from irreconcilable conflicts, but from their intellectual inability to discover the principles of unity that conceal their apparent disagreements. These principles of unity do exist, however, and one will be able to discover them one day: the proof of it lies in the fact that totalitarian philosophy attacks each of these diverse interests in its vital center. In the totalitarian system, there is no more room for the theologian than for the scholar, for private property than for free labor, for aristocracy than for democracy. And if all these diverse interests must today defend themselves together, it follows they must implicitly hold in common many of the things that are worth defending.
   That, I believe, is the great mission of contemporary thinkers: uncover and formulate, make explicit that which civilized men hold in common, that which men, seemingly holding such different biases and opinions, find today necessary to defend together. A great work of analysis of the old conflicts and the old confusions will be necessary so as to build a great synthesis in which all the permanent interests of civilized humanity will find their rightful place and rank. The world that we have known before the war is dying of its confusion and its incoherence. But in the agony that it goes through and has yet to go through, the civilized world can only seek and find a universal philosophy that, by its total humanity, will be able to maintain the tradition of civilization in spite of a totally inhuman enemy.
III
Some among you may deem all of that to be far removed from the immediate political questions confronting [us] in our time. I do not apologize for this, because I am profoundly convinced that this revision of human ideas, that this analysis and this synthesis that we will call the reconstruction of liberalism, is the necessary discipline, the indispensable experience in which the vital energies of the civilized world must unite in order to defend themselves against the danger that threatens them.--Walter Lippmann (1938) in "The Walter Lippmann Colloquium." The Birth of Neo-Liberalism. Edited by Reinhoudt & Audier. (2018), pp. 108-109.

It's not much of a stretch to suggest that the doctrine of 'human rights' became the unity that Lippmann sought for a post-war, reconstructed liberalism. By this I do not mean to suggest that the 1948 Declaration is itself indebted to Lippmann (about that below). Rather, what Lippmann discerned is that humanity,  total humanity, would be the glue with which anti-totalitarianism, now recast as 'inhuman' came to understand itself.

There is a two-fold (modest) irony here in that (for example) the Nazis were more than willing to treat many of their targets as sub-human/Untermenschen. Second, the conceptual and normative connections among 'humanity,' 'civilization,' and 'non-factionalism' (and even 'interests' albeit rightly understood) were forged, as Ryan Hanley shows, by David Hume in the eighteenth century. David Hume the philosopher would remain controversial for many in the 'common ground' ascribed by Lippmann.* (I think that ironic.)

While Lippmann is far more interested in articulating and reconceptualizing the nature of the rule of law (which is crucial to his argument in the book), Lippmann himself recognizes the significance of human rights in The Good Society (the book to which the 1938 colloquium is devoted [recall here; here; here; here]). While his discussion of human rights is brief, I want to note three features: first, he sees them as work in progress (that are "developed" through time). Second, for him the core feature of human rights is the right not to be treated arbitrarily by anyone else (and a concurrent duty not to treat others arbitrarily; p. 348); in particular, it is directed against "arbitrary power." Third, he thinks that human rights express underlying "moral commitments" which support what he calls the "true law" (346). In the colloquium lecture he captures this (a bit further down) with the idea that what must be protected are the "essential elements of human life."  

Of course, that to be attacked in common requires that some (reasonably interesting) principle of unity among those attacked is presupposed can reasonably be doubted. Since Rawls settled for a rather pragmatic, overlapping consensus most liberals do doubt it. Lippmann's hoped "synthesis" that would absolve all political contradictions is remarkably utopian. But what he points toward are two significant features. 

First, and I think this is a somewhat tragic tendency in (mid) twentieth century liberalism -- I have discussed the conceptual roots in scholarly fashion here -- that there must be some hunkering toward a fundamental consensus.  (Lippmann here echoes Lionel Robbins, with whom he corresponded in 1937.) That hankering was, while understandable, a technocratic mistake (that supplied Isaiah Berlin with one of his overarching themes). But in Lippmann it is expressed with a conflicting and more interesting impulse...

Second, and more important, Lippmann recognizes that from a certain vantage point ordinary, rather vehement partisan political opposites within a working (for lack of a better word) system may well share something in common against those that wish to blow up that system. The interesting point here is not when they understand that their foes are antagonists (losing to whom is painful but not disastrous) rather than "inhuman enemies" (losing to whom is a disaster). But rather the insight that the antagonists may well in an important sense be dependent on each other. (Andy Sabl [HT Jacob Levy] made the point very nicely recently in an essay on the possible future character of the ways parties in a party-system might influence each other.)**

This mutual dependence of competing antagonists is, for Lippmann, both practical -- at the level of functioning and surviving -- and spiritual. (It is no coincidence that Lippmann's language echoes Hegel at times.) For Lippmann liberalism is (recall) itself a multi-generational, open-ended spiritual project that aims to be transformative of the human condition (and this is where some of his eugenic sensibilities also enter in). While for Lippmann the content of the ideal is itself left open, it does (and this makes it partially utopian) require conditions under which war is largely banished. 

That is to say, in the moment of its possible defeat, the liberal vision grasps that for a non-totalizing liberalism to survive and thrive it may well require a political structure in which illiberal parties and commitments are present both to maintain liberalism's own vitality and then vitality of the whole. Liberalism then simultaneously comes to endorse its own fundamental commitments and a commitment to a kind of unreasonable pluralism. It is this affirmation that is forgotten in victory.

*Lippmann, who is a more than competent reader of the past, quotes from Hume's political-economic essays in The Good Society, so it is not impossible that Lippmann knows his source is Hume.

**In context, Lippmann is not thinking of any particular party-system, but rather the whole class of antagonisms characteristic of 19th century European and American political lives. 

Comments

[Charles Blattberg]

"Of course, that to be attacked in common requires that some (reasonably interesting) principle of unity among those attacked is presupposed can reasonably be doubted. Since Rawls settled for a rather pragmatic, overlapping consensus most liberals do doubt it." But Rawls' vision is, while not universal, no less monist. It's precisely the "reasonable" in his "reasonable pluralism" that is supposed to ensure this. Moreover, competitors (who must share a consensus over the rules of their contest) are also participating in a monist endeavour, since the rulebook consists of an (ostensibly) systematically unified set of rules. To monist liberals, then, illiberal parties and commitments are not a welcome source of vitality; rather, they are exceptions that (supposedly) prove the rule. (For more, see https://www.academia.edu/2067323/Taking_Politics_Seriously_-_but_Not_Too_Seriously)

[Eric Schliesser]

I think we agree about your last sentence.
Eric

[Charles Blattberg]

What about the claim that Rawls is a monist?

[Eric Schliesser]

I am not sure I agree with the terminology, but I think your underlying point is well taken. You may like what I say about him my piece "The Separation of Economics from Virtue: A Historical-Conceptual Introduction." Economics and the Virtues: building a new moral foundation, edited by J. A. Baker, and M. D. White. Oxford (2015): 141-164.

[Charles Blattberg]

Interesting paper! I do indeed agree with what you say in it about Rawls (though it seems to me that later, the "political" liberal Rawls abandons one of the features of the technocratic conception of politics, since he no longer sees legislative exchanges as constituting an "objective inquiry" so much as a contest between competing parties, or teams, in a game. Interestingly, this shares much with Knight's view of economic activity as the playing of a game.)

But why, if you believe "Rawls’s approach can be understood as offering a decision procedure that generates unanimity," aren't you comfortable with referring to him as a monist? After all, isn't "unreasonable pluralism" really just "pluralism"?

[Eric Schliesser]

For two reasons: first, I think monism tends to be associated with metaphysical views. Second, I think Rawls is complicated because his first order normative views are (in complex way) distinct from his views about what unifies and the nature of public rules. So, while I agree with your general diagnosis, I worry that it would also fail to capture something distinct.

[Charles Blattberg]

Because you agree with Rawls that it's possible for political thinkers to be disassociated from metaphysics?

What do you think of Waldron's claim that "it is impossible to avoid commitment in political theory. If we try too hard to be non-sectarian, we will end up saying nothing"?