On Providence, Siedentop and The Re-Invention of Liberalism (III);

It would be a mistake therefore to see only the tyrannical potential of the growth of sovereign authorities, that royal ‘absolutism’ which came to the fore during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For it contained the seeds of individual liberty. By claiming a monopoly of legal authority, sovereigns deprived many traditional attitudes and practices of legal status. What royal commands did not positively enjoin or forbid, defined – at least potentially – a sphere of choice and personal freedom.
Of course, full awareness of the model of society entailed by the claim of ‘sovereignty’ did not develop overnight. Even the late sixteenth-century French theorist of sovereignty Jean Bodin wavered over the nature of the unit of subordination entailed by the claim. Yet the time of Thomas Hobbes, in the next century, the distinctive nature of the claim to a sovereign authority was made clear, not least by Hobbes’s referring to sovereigns as secular deities.

There is one final, formidable piece of evidence about ‘inventing the individual’ available. It comes from what remains the most reliable source about social change, language itself. If we look at the word ‘individual’ in historical dictionaries of the English or French languages, we will find that it first became current in the fifteenth century. The word ‘state’, with its stipulation of a sovereign authority, became current at about the same time. And that is no accident, for the meanings of these two words depend upon each other. It was through the creation of states that the individual was invented as the primary or organizing social role.--Larry Siedentop, (2015) Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, p. 347 [HT Bart Wilson]

The quoted paragraphs are the conclusions of the central argument of Siedentop's book (that I have discussed here and here). This central argument includes two strains: first, that more than a millenium of organized Christianity created, inspired by Paul's commitment to a fundamental species of equality, entities capable of being (self-)accountable individuals with interiority, including conscience and choice. Second, the ways in which canon laws developed a notion of sovereignty (first papal, then copied by other authorities) that created a system founded on the "belief in fundamental equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system." (332) This formal equality of status is compatible with political hierarchy. For, the highest authority of such a legal system is the sovereign, which both originates law and resolves tensions in the law. The roots of canon law can be found in monastic reform movements that developed the work ethic, a democratic sensibility, and, most important, the idea of corporate life founded on consenting and voluntary association.

Siedentop is repeatedly explicit that his protagonists often do not intend nor foresee the liberal outcome of their actions (e.g., 3, 104, 197, 218, 239-240, 316,). Siedentop is  fond of unintended consequence explanations. More strikingly, many behaviors and outcomes are explained by Siedentop, by the operation of "tacit" motive/intuition/commitment to fundamental equality (e.g., 68, 123, 186,2 281) or the claims of an independent moral/spiritual order (220, 227); throughout the text such implicit understandings later become "explicit" (e.g. 252, 258, 273-6).  The problem with implicit claims is not just that their full meaning is left vague, but that their social telos is indeterminate. 

Okay, with that in place, let's consider Siedentop's claim that "it would be a mistake therefore to see only the tyrannical potential of the growth of sovereign authorities, that royal ‘absolutism’ which came to the fore during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For it contained the seeds of individual liberty." Before I criticize it, I want to acknowledge what is right about this. That is, (reall) liberalism arose as an ameliorative project in opposition to the state as developed on the ruins of feudalism. That is, originally liberalism is a mitigating project in response to state absolutism and mercantilism. And I grant, Siedentop that as a moral and political project liberalism is much indebted to Christianity (although I noted how he eliminates all traces of Judaic influence).* Now I want to make three substantive points.

First, what is peculiar about Siedentop's argument is that while it would be indeed "a mistake therefore to see only the tyrannical potential" he finds it extremely difficult to acknowledge any tyrannical potential in the legal and conceptual structures whose unfolding history he describes. I already noted his peculiar treatment of the inquisition: this he treats primarily as a legend (362), even though its existence was real enough to rest on shaky juridical foundation (288). The rhetorical implication of this last move is to prevent anybody from using the existence of the institution of the inquisition as evidence against his main argument.  At no point does Siedentop even acknowledge the crimes of the inquisition. When, in fact, the existence of true crimes are acknowledged -- see Charlemagne's mass murder of the "pagan Saxons" or his combat with "Muslims" (155) --, these have nothing to do with Christianity or the main arc of development (which is the unfolding "universality or moral equality"). [I note this because Charlamagne is one of the heroes of the book.] Siedentop has no interest at all, in exploring the role of his ideas when applied to native populations in the Americas. We might agree that Las Casas (who from a liberal perspective is not without problems) is the truer Christian, but is Sepúlveda really not a representative of true Christianity at all?**

Second, there is something very odd in Siedentop's reasoning. What he is saying is akin to the claim that 'it would be a mistake to only see bad consequences of  the emergence of the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, which caused WWI, not the least because it, in turn, led to WWII, because the alliances contained the seeds of the European Union, which, as we know, is a response to horrors of WWI-WWII.+ More subtly, not unlike Machiavelli (recall), (recall) Rousseau and Kant, he wants to take a bad history and vindicate it in terms of the good-making potential of that history. This is a kind of secular theodicy. I am not against secular theodicy, but it can easily devolve into special pleading.

Now, third, what the existence of this secular theodicy reveals, and what makes it intelligible, is Seidentop's commitment to the (soft Hegelian) idea that the last man of liberalism is the end of history. The seeds of tyranny can be safely ignored if you are confident enough that true liberalism** will prevail. But if liberalism -- qua mitigation and amelioration -- is historically and structurally parasitic on 'the growth of sovereign authorities'  then there is every reason to wonder to what degree the 'tyrannical potential' latent in, and so reproduced by, the liberal order can be successfully contained by liberalism. Even if one grants the existence of a direction to history,  no reason has been offered to think Siedentop's preferred outcome is the final word. He himself recognizes something like liberal implosion in his epilogue.  

I could close here, but I want to note one final conceptual omission in Siedentop's narrative. Throughout the book Siedentop moves and toggles between the first two central arguments, that is, (a) the invention of moralized interiority and (b) "belief in fundamental equality of status." And I have noted the similarity between his argument and Nietzsche's (who never gets mentioned). But a key Nietzschean component of the genealogy of modern individuals is missing from his argument. For, the belief in fundamental equality of status, while being compatible with other forms of social hierarchy, is also presupposed by another world-historical and older than Christianity social institution: contractual, financial debt. It is no coincidence, after all, that liberalism first presents itself in the form of a contract theory. 

 

 

*His refusal to acknowledge Islamic influence is, in fact, a feature not a bug of his approach. He wants liberal individualism (recall) to come out as the opposite of Islam. 

+The Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente taught the great powers of Europe collaboration and even adhering to treaties of friendship.

**The real problem lurking here, tacitly, is that one wonders whether Sidentop doesn't endorse what one might call civilizational liberalism (as distinct from a more pacific true liberal order); civilizational liberalism ends up supporting imperialism, species of colonialism, and humanitarian intervention. 

Comments

[Bas]

I haven't read the book (yet). But two things have struck me, reading these posts.

1) In your commentaries I've been struck by the running together of sovereignty and (proto-) equality before the law. But those are plainly separable ideas. (Admittedly, this is much later, but in Austin sovereignty is basically authority no higher than which exists. No idea of equality before the law is present there. Conversely, it's possible to have equality before the law without sovereignty, in a legally pluralistic setting, e.g.)

Does Siedentop have an argument for why these two ideas would be naturally run together? Is it just a coincidence due to the papal origin story here? Am I missing something?

2) Tying the rise of liberalism so closely to the rise of centralized political power strikes me as odd for the following reason also. At least from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, one obviously influential strand would be the Magna Carta and the common law. I see both as important to the rise of liberalism since (if I understand them correctly, at least) they transferred juridical authority away from positions of power. This is the (one?) beginning of people having claims they can press against the state (sovereign or otherwise).

Perhaps I overrate the importance of this, but it seems altogether orthogonal to what's going on here. Any thoughts on this? (Is this part of what you had in mind when you describe liberalism as a remedial development?)

[Eric Schliesser]

1) Yes, they are clearly separable. The argument is that they come together in a particular way due to a certain historical-institutional-cultural development. That it does so is contingent, but once set in motion overdetermined. The implied insight is supposed to be that it is not a coincidence that the story of liberalism starts with (or as a reaction to) Hobbes.

2. He has no interest in Magna Carta. I understand his story as a rejection of the significance of common law. If anything he things it goes in the other direction: "This Romano-canonical procedure, which involved judges investigating disputed facts and required recording of evidence in writing, contributed to the emergence of what by the fourteenth century was virtually a new common law for Western Europe: a jus commune which fused
elements of civil, canon and customary law." [Notice the date!]
So, his argument is, kings learned that if they modeled their sovereignty on papal power which functioned through a system of common law, they could eliminate the barons and other intermediary powers. [Interestingly, this also meant accepting they were less sacred than before.]
What I think this story gets right -- (as I noted in my posts on Meiksins Wood last week) it's also in Adam Smith -- is that for common law to get off the ground (and perhaps initially function well), one needs a central power willing to make the system work. [Again conceptually that's not necessary, but if the baseline is feudalism then maybe yes.]

What you have discerned is that one of the implied targets of Siedentop's analysis is a kind of Hayekian story (which is bottom up and soft anti-clerical). But he uses unintended consequence explanations to execute it.