Finally this blog post has a couple of issues specific to the left I wish to address. First, at some level it is clear that identifying as a liberal is just to identify as uncool and mainstream-in-a-boring-clueless-way among left cohorts. I don’t mind liberalism having a bad name, why would I?, but a result of this is I think people often miss the affinities of their thought with the liberal tradition and neglect its insights. A proper rejection of liberalism ought to involve understanding it as more than just a loser thing boring normies do — there is a reason it has won out in modernity. That reason may not (indeed I think should not) lead you to endorse liberalism; but you will get nowhere if you do not understand it, what liberalism responds to and addresses, and what of it one may wish to carry forward. Second, I think if we are being real with ourselves, a great many leftists in the academy who consider ourselves left of the Overton window should admit that we are de facto small-c conservatives — and in at least my society, to uphold the status quo just is to uphold a liberal social order. We are de facto conservatives in the sense that the modern university has clearly slotted into an important credentialing role for the approximation to meritocracy that dominates our economic, political, and ideological order. Materially speaking then just by going in to work and doing our job, however we may feel about it, we are playing the role of functionaries helping this system perpetuate itself. I think we ought be precise about the sense in which we are not liberals if only to self-acknowledge the many senses in which we are, and thereby cut out the bad faith pretences of pseudo-radicalism that so tiresomely dominate many academic spaces.---Liam Kofi Bright Why I Am Not A Liberal
When I switched professionally from professional philosophy to political theory and from a focus on early modern science and metaphysics to political philosophy, I was reminded that most political philosophers are left egalitarian liberals. Within the profession, they work with or against Rawls in order to promote redistribution of income, wealth, or status/recognition. And Liam reminds them -- these 'leftists' -- that they are de facto conservative with a small c theorists. The nostalgia visible in the Corbynista left -- with its fellow-traveling lexiters, and the fondness for the era of the family wage -- is actually a nice illustration of Liam's case.
Liam rejects liberalism on three grounds (I quote representative claims by him): (i) "there is no neutral position or viable overlapping consensus or anything of the sort;" (ii) "once market societies are allowed to develop I think they tend towards the concentration of wealth and capital, and so ultimately the ability to buy the state and shut down competition;" (iii) liberalism has :always existed along an imperial-core vs brutally proletarianised outer periphery model. " And before I say anything else, I want to state for the record that these are excellent reasons to reject really existing liberalism. And I wholeheartedly agree with Liam!
Now regular readers know that I self-identify as a 'skeptical liberal' and with that term I wish to distance myself from both the left egalitarian liberalism that dominates professional journals as well as the 'classical liberals' who tend to embrace markets. Readers may be left puzzled how I can agree with Liam's three grounds to reject liberalism, and reject the small c conservatism he ascribes to much of academic liberalism. Simply put: there is a lot more to liberalism than redistribution.:)
Before I get to that I want to mention an omission in Liam's account of "contemporary liberal ideology as the confluence of three factors that led us to where we are today." According to Liam the three factors are (a) the response to religious wars of the seventeenth century; (b) "the desire of the bourgeois to band together to create the conditions of that fair playing ground and drive the wasteful decadent aristocrats from their thrones, the peasantry from their common lands, and the blacks to the fields;" (c) "A nominalist picture of the individual person paints us as in some sense constructing our own worldview from our experiences rather than receiving the set concepts of a pre-ordered world." Liam himself actually likes (c). These three factors are very important and they also explain some of the path dependencies we see in liberalism today, and its difficulties in facing up to its challenges.
Even so, I want to suggest the bourgeoise and capital are not as unified as Liam suggests. To make this point I distinguish conceptually between mercantilism and liberalism. Historically mercantilism came first and it has never been fully vanquished. It's worth noting that the first theorist to call himself a 'liberal', Adam Smith, was much concerned with mercantilism, which just is another bourgeois and capitalist ideology. In this ideology the state is captured by capitalist interests (often this is described in terms of 'rent-seeking'), and these use the state's capacity to inflict violence internally and externally to promote their ends. I view (d) the fight to combat mercantilism as the fourth factor that led us to where we are today.
Now, as Liam's second ground to reject liberalism (recall ii) suggests, he views this -- the enduringness of mercantilism -- not as a bug, but as a feature of all really existing capitalism. In this Liam echoes (recall) Lenin after reading (the liberal) Hobson's explanation for imperialism. But the threat of mercantilism, and really existing imperialism which resulted in two bloody world wars, led to a renewal and rethinking of liberalism. For it is embarrassing that some of liberalism's greatest lights ended up defending colonialism, imperialism, and slavery; that Montesquieu, Kant, and Mill are better known and better read than, say, Gouges, Grouchy, and Liam's name-sake John Bright is not accident. (Even Hobson has too much fondness for racialized settler colonialism.) But such canonical choices are not inevitable. And a better liberalism is also lurking in the varied riches of the tradition.
This liberalism I would characterize as a mistrust of concentrated power. Concentrated power always presupposes hierarchy and means to dominate. Such mistrust requires from the state an active anti-trust policy, and a willingness to tackle concentrated powers where they arise, including state functions themselves. In so far as liberals ought to defend markets, these should be policed by vigilant anti-trust institutions. No liberal, for example, should feel at ease with de facto technology monopolies today and should be skeptical about using such technology to promote liberal ends. In fact, no liberal should feel wholly at ease with the way contemporary central banks have concentrated power that is largely unaccountable and makes us all like lab rats in various monetary social experiments. (This is one reason why crypto-currencies are welcomed by more radical liberals.)
The omission in Liam's presentation is important because so-conceived liberalism is a never ending challenge and constantly open to change because social problems change permanently. In fact, the fondness for markets among many classical liberals should be understood, on my more skeptical view, as just one mechanism among others that prevent concentrated powers from enduring. So part of the liberal response to Liam is that where monopolies do arise, they tend to rely on government sanctions (patents, copyright, and skewed labor regulation, etc.). But markets in combination with other important social institutions (education, the sciences, the arts, etc.) create unceasing change of a sort that left egalitarian liberals can't stomach, but that are exhilarating to skeptical liberals like myself.
Liberalism understood as an attack on concentrated powers -- and so as a kind of ideological war within the bourgeoisie -- cannot be neutral about the state and the ends it pursues. The skepticism about enduring hierarchies (i.e., concentrated powers) is the effect of substantive views about the good and good lives (including important roles for the arts and sciences). So, I agree with Liam that liberalism that embraces for itself (and its conception of the state) a purported neutral position and some kind of consensus cannot survive scrutiny. The defense of liberalism that I embrace is indirectly perfectionist: people will be happier and live more meaningful lives, even more moral lives, under properly liberal regimes. This kind of indirect perfectionism was the mainstream of liberalism through the early twentieth century.* It's the liberalism that embraces experiments in living such that better living is possible.
I think there is a lot of empirical evidence (including lots of poor people voting with their feet) that supports such indirect perfectionism. Unfortunately, a lot of the folk who end up stating views close to my own end up uncritical defenders of the status quo--the very status quo that has states impose evil and cruel borders that prevents people from moving where they want to move and drowns or kills people at borders. For, the truth is that within liberalism, the center-periphery dynamic can only be undermined if we do not police borders against migrants.
Liam might grant all of this and still note that really existing liberalism seems vulnerable to rent-seeking by really existing mercantilism. He might even note that liberal democracies, especially, seem rather conducive to promoting such really existing mercantilism because in them electoral majorities may well conspire to abolish estate taxes and to promote public spheres in which capital predominates and in which anti-trust (tackling monopoly media companies) is undermined and in which majorities want to keep some kind of newcomers out. After all, in really existing liberalism, judges don't always defend the rule of law, and don't always protect the innocent. And Liam would be right!
This is why a skeptical liberalism never defends the status quo without considerable qualification (and this is why one should be skeptical about liberals who always promote more markets as the answer). She always has to be willing to look at really existing institutions and confront them with a skeptical eye. Maybe human judges have to be replaced by AI systems? If the baseline is contemporary racist and sexist judiciaries, there is a lot to be said for it. (Of course, there are also good grounds for caution!) Maybe central banks have to be replaced by crypto currencies? A basic income or a birth share in capital may be useful strategies to combat some of the hierarchies produced by really existing capitalism. Really existing liberalism, as a vital force in permanent adjustment - in the spirit of adaptation -- to new social challenges, should never let any privilege endure without introducing countervailing experiments.
After all, one reason why non-liberals are properly welcome and to be celebrated as state functionaries in liberal institutions of higher learning (or their private counterparts) is that they can help liberals better understand the weaknesses in their own position, and help us all imagine better futures for our societies. In fact, as long as Liam and his critical allies forswear violence, their critical acumen indirectly promotes the cause of liberalism as they promote experiments that are alternatives to the status quo worth having. We might call it, the cunning of the bourgeoisie.
*It is worth asking why it was rejected. Short version: the attack on state privileges for religion made many liberals embrace state neutrality. (This one reason why I am not a friend of the idea that liberalism started with a reflection on the thirty years war.) That was an unnecessary mistake (with the extreme version of it France). The better liberal position is to embrace a public sphere full of many religions, but without letting any such religion dominate people's lives.
There's a fair amount I agree with here, along w/ a fair amount that seems wrong (or mysterious) but I want to ask only about one point. You say,
"But markets in combination with other important social institutions (education, the sciences, the arts, etc.) create unceasing change of a sort that left egalitarian liberals can't stomach,..."
What sorts of change do you have in mind here, and which (or which sort) of "left egalitarian liberals" "can't stomach"? I ask because this seemed like an interesting claim, but one that didn't seem so clear or obvious to me.
Posted by: Matt | 04/06/2022 at 03:00 AM