On the Crisis of Liberalism (VII): Pandemics and the Strong State

[I]f some day a legislature, having exhausted all other ways of improving mankind, should forbid the scoring of baseball games, it might still be possible to play some sort of game in which the umpire decided according to his own sense of fair play how long the game should last, when each team should go to bat, and who should be regarded as the winner. If that game were reported in the newspapers it would consist of a record of the umpire's decisions, plus the reporter's impression of the hoots and cheers of the crowd, plus at best a vague account of how certain men, who had no specified position on the field moved around for a few hours on an unmarked piece of sod. The more you try to imagine the logic of so absurd a predicament, the more clear it becomes that for the purposes of newsgathering, (let alone the purposes of playing the game) it is impossible to do much without an apparatus and rules for naming, scoring, recording. Because that machinery is far from perfect, the umpire's life is often a distracted one....

Wherever there is a good machinery of record, the modern news service works with great precision. There is one on the stock exchange, and the news of price movements is flashed over tickers with dependable accuracy. There is a machinery for election returns, and when the counting and tabulating are well done, the result of a national election is usually known on the night of the election. In civilized communities deaths, births, marriages and divorces are recorded, and are known accurately except where there is concealment or neglect. The machinery exists for some, and only some, aspects of industry and government, in varying degrees of precision for securities, money and staples, bank clearances, realty transactions, wage scales. It exists for imports and exports because they pass through a custom house and can be directly recorded. It exists in nothing like the same degree for internal trade, and especially for trade over the counter.

It will be found, I think, that there is a very direct relation between the certainty of news and the system of record. If you call to mind the topics which form the principal indictment by reformers against the press, you find they are subjects in which the newspaper occupies the position of the umpire in the unscored baseball game. All news about states of mind is of this character: so are all descriptions of personalities, of sincerity, aspiration, motive, intention, of mass feeling, of national feeling, of public opinion, the policies of foreign governments. So is much news about what is going to happen. So are questions turning on private profit, private income, wages, working conditions, the efficiency of labor, educational opportunity, unemployment, monotony, health, discrimination, unfairness, restraint of trade, waste, "backward peoples," conservatism, imperialism, radicalism, liberty, honor, righteousness. All involve data that are at best spasmodically recorded. The data may be hidden because of a censorship or a tradition of privacy, they may not exist because nobody thinks record important, because he thinks it red tape, or because nobody has yet invented an objective system of measurement. Then the news on these subjects is bound to be debatable, when it is not wholly neglected. The events which are not scored are reported either as personal and conventional opinions, or they are not news. They do not take shape until somebody protests, or somebody investigates, or somebody publicly, in the etymological meaning of the word, makes an issue of them.--Walter Lippmann (1921) Public Opinion, Chapter 23.

The second wave of liberalism (recall) has ended and liberalism may not survive. Some readers will say, good riddance, and to you I say, I hope you do better. This is the seventh post (recall here (I);  here (II); here (III); here (IV); here (V); here (VI) in an open-ended series (see also here, here, here,  here; and here). Critics of liberalism remind their readers during the pandemic that we care for more than "market logic" (Lisa Herzog in the New Statesman) or that there is more to the economy and living than "exchange value" and "how false our beliefs about markets are" (Simon Mair in The Conversation). Indeed, given the intellectual implosion of Richard Epstein this week, one may be forgiven into thinking that a variety of classical liberalism is truly on (ahh) a ventilator. But see these two fine essays by Nick Cowen. here and here; the second one reminds fans of the Non-Aggression Principle  that "natural rights are conceived to protect life as well as liberty and property." 

Friends and critics of markets have been much impressed (recall) by Hayek's argument that markets are impressive epistemic machines. But as is well known, Hayek thinks that the state and evolving common law provides the framework for the market and, at bottom, act as (to use David Schmidtz's phrasing) its impartial umpire. Hayek's friends, the ordoliberals (Ordos), went further (recall here) and claimed that quite a bit of state capacity, expertise, and even a proper ruling ethos is needed for the state to act as an umpire and to help the market function properly. 

More than any other liberal thinker, but drawing on ideas visible in Adam Smith, Walter Lippmann recognized that for markets, the media, and public opinion to function, the state is needed not just as impartial rule-setter and arbiter, but as a generator and storehouse of reliable and usable information. Conveniently he uses the umpire analogy for this. As the quoted passage reveals, Lippmann didn't think that only the state could be a reliable source of information (the stock-market is a private association).  It's compatible with his view that for-profit enterprise can also do so.

A core capacity of the modern state is to be a machinery of record. This is, of course, also recognized by those like Foucault and James C. Scott who argue that legibility of the population is a key feature of state-building and statecraft. This is a feature and not a bug of liberalism. Because (and to combine Lippmann and Hayek) in virtue of having a machinery of record, the market machinery can do its fallible work. That means that one of the distinctive mind-sets and dispositions of the liberal state is to gather data in order to discharge its proper functions. And, as Adam Smith already noted, to "prevent" the "spread" of a most loathsome "disease" deserves the "most serious attention of government" (WN 5.i.f.60.) 

Of course, all states collect information. The distinctly liberal state does so in a rule-following fashion and respecting certain limitations which include the possibility of publicly reconstructing the data-chain and so being contestable.* One reason why modern (neural-networky) AI is causing so much trouble for liberal thinkers is that while it is rule governed its internal workings are also opaque and so difficult to contest.

We see this in the attitude of the German government which started building up the capacity to test early in the pandemic. Germany conducts "50,000 coronavirus tests a day." This is partly due, as the Financial Times reports, to its decentralized testing regime. (The US's reliance on the CDC makes it vulnerable to mismanagement, underfunding or simple errors of judgment.) But partly this is also due to the fact that German liberalism, as represented by the ORDOs, has not treated well-directed state capacity itself with suspicion.

No doubt even well functioning machinery of record can be abused or captured by sinister interests. But, going forward it would be useful for liberals to remember Lippmann's insight that maintaining the Weberian state as a machinery of record with the dispositions to act in the public's interest, remains a vital element of a liberalism worth having.

 

*Clearly the list is longer; questions of privacy, consent, and autonomy would also enter in.

Comments

[Steve Davies]

Eric, I find your historical analysis of two long waves highly persuasive. If you look at the fin de siecle there was a major cultural reaction against the dominant liberalism of the Belle Epoque very reminiscent of what we have seen over the last couple of decades and all of those trends wend on to much fuller expression after 1919. I think that if you look at things from this very long historical perspective, what emerges is the constant problem that liberalism has with the question of a political order above and beyond that of the territorial state (national or otherwise). In the nineteenth century one emerged that rested upon a particular world monetary system, a world trade system, and a political order founded on the existence of several large and powerful empires (particularly the British but others as well). This international order was shattered by the War - a lot of the liberal thinking of the interwar period was about how to replace it (I think that is what Keynes's Economic Consequences is actually about). You can see the whole period since 1944 as an attempt to move to a particular vision of international order, particularly after 1989 when the major obstacle of the Soviet Union was removed. That order has clearly come to an end as well, it's cracking up visibly and has been for some time.