Locke regarded curiosity and ambition as virtues and not, as he previously had done, as vices. Curiosity and ambition were now sources of uneasiness which motivate human beings to pursue knowledge and glory; these goods in themselves were, in Locke’s new view, no longer capable of motivating human beings to action....
But it also means that nagging, unfulfilled desire, what Locke calls “fantastical uneasiness (as itch after honour, power, or riches, &c.)” is needed if human beings are to escape from indolence. The itches after honor, power, or wealth are what he calls “irregular desires” inculcated by fashion, example, and education, which become natural to us through custom. But these desires, which are irregular from the point of view of the individual because they create an unease that can rarely be satisfied, are regular from the point of view of the society because they encourage industry and other public goods. Consequently they are heavily reinforced by public opinion.
What I am suggesting is that in 1689 Locke’s account of psychology and morality was a watered-down Hobbesianism, but by 1694 it was well on the way to being Mandevillian…Locke, I would argue, had also grasped [an]...insidious paradox: in order to be happy as individuals we need society; and in order for society to flourish, we must constantly devise new ways of making ourselves uneasy and anxious.--David Wootton (2018) Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison, 110-113
The main theme of Wootton's book is the embrace and endorsement of a "logic of unending accumulation or limitless pursuit" (72) of power, pleasure, and profit with the simultaneous invention of political economy as constitutive e of the "iron cage" (e.g., 247)we still inhabit.* To simplify a complex argument this joins Machiavelli admiring unbounded expansion of Rome with Newton's embrace of infinite space as the fount of modernity (236). Some other time, I explore Wootton's recasting of Machiavelli as the first modern (as distinct from the republican here of late).
In the passage quoted above, Wootton ascribes to Locke the key move in his narrative: that psychological unease triggers both behavior to remove the source of unease as well as generates goals that cannot, in principle, be fully satisfied, but are embraces as fundamental goals. It is worth noting Wootton's "insidious" which alerts the reader that Wootton is not merely tracing a slowly unfolding conceptual innovation; we're in the realm of polemic. As Wootton notes: "to be constantly in pursuit of something you can never catch up with is, it would seem, a form of madness." (72)
For, while individuals pursue mad desires, society benefits (riches, power, etc.) and becomes more stable.+ And, in virtue of being in society, as Rousseau and Smith (who knew their Locke and Mandeville), society shapes social emotions which fuel each cycle of unease (see, especially, Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) 3.1.5, 112). The price we pay, we may say, of being in a great society is permanent dissatisfaction or crisis. Wootton barely mentions Foucault, so it seems perverse to pair him with the French Maître. But, that crisis is entrenched in modern, liberal society is (recall) the great theme of Foucault's third lecture in the Birth of Biopolitics.
And, in fact, Foucault diagnoses, we may say, a second-order version of the form of the 'paradox' that Wootton notes. That is, that the very social mechanism which is supposed to remove a threat generates aspirations that are impossible to complete and so destabilizing. This is especially so when this aspiration is freedom. Wootton helpfully quotes Benjamin Franklin's early (1725) claim that "Freedom from Uneasiness is the End of all our Actions,,"** and we can understand the emancipatory project of liberalism as an open-ended and doomed, heroic effort to create the conditions of such freedom. Foucault puts the point as follows:
Another form of crisis would be due to the inflation of the compensatory mechanisms of freedom. That is to say, for the exercise of some freedoms, like that of the freedom of the market and anti-monopoly legislation, for example, you could have the formation of a legislative straitjacket which the market partners experience as excessive interventionism and excessive constraint and coercion. At a much more local level, you have everything which takes on the appearance of revolt and rejection of the world of the disciplines. Finally, and above all, there are processes of clogging such that the mechanisms for producing freedom, precisely those that are called upon to manufacture this freedom, actually produce destructive effects which prevail over the very freedom they are supposed to produce. This is, if you like, the ambiguity of all the devices which could be called “liberogenic,” that is to say, devices intended to produce freedom which potentially risk producing exactly the opposite. Michel Foucault, 24 January 1979, translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 3, The Birth of Biopolitics. 68-69
The heroism of the effort is not that it victory is out of reach, but that the very "devices intended to produce freedom...potentially risk producing exactly the opposite." That is, in virtue of aiming at freedom, liberalism is (recall) inherently a risky project. There is a more fundamental point related to the “liberogenic,” (a word only used once by Foucault) lurking here.
This more fundamental point is not the by now familiar one (also associated with Foucault) that the conditions of laissez-faire must be manufactured and policed. But rather, the more subtle one that the liberogenic mechanisms must be multiplied at infinitum and so generate unexpected and potentially destabilizing interactions. This is so because true liberalism (recall, again Locke) embraces a spirit of adaptation because of changing circumstances, which are intrinsically open-ended not just du to the infinite multiplication of the passions and the ends they aim at, but also due to the open-ended development of science and, in particular, (medical and security) technology which, in turn, may respond to evolving and deadly nature (e.g., viruses, changing ecology, etc).
Marxists will see in this the inevitability of revolution and collapse. A moralists (perhaps Wootton) may see in this a kind of historical theodicy in which the children of liberalism inevitability pay for the many sins of their parents (primarily the fathers). But if we take Foucault's great theme -- that there is a liberal art of government -- seriously, then grasping liberogenic danger just is the precondition to liberal statesmanship.
*The subordinate theme is a polemic against Adam Smith. Some other time more on that.
+While Wootton notes the political feedback mechanisms that generate stability, he misses how the very corruption of our moral sentiments that he diagnoses, also generates such stability. (See Adam Smith TMS 1.3.3.1., 61)
**Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, 17. Quoted by Wootton on p. 111.
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