Digressions&Impressions

On Liberal Exemplification: tempered liberalism and the problem of education

Tempered liberals certainly did not present themselves as models to be imitated; this would have been inconsistent with the modesty and self-subverting irony that were important features both of the ethos they advocated and their own ways of being in the world. But they did seek to exemplify a liberal ethos by putting it into practice--in their personal interactions with others, their manner of thinking through problems, and the authorial persona or voice that each cultivated--and by depicting it in earlier thinkers, fictional characters, or political leaders. At their best, they show us, by the force of example, how to cultivate these qualities, and how to urge them gracefully upon others.
The practice of exemplification and emulation is a deeply imperfect response to the liberal problem of character formation. Relying on some to rise to the challenge of exemplariness, and leaving others free to emulate them or not, presupposes that most individuals already have significant ethical resources. This will often not be the case. It may not be possible to have a decent politics without a degree of both personal goodness and political skill that is beyond what most people are mostly able to attain. And the effort to make people better may lead to more suffering and horror. Introspection, self-cultivation, and exemplification--frail reeds though these may be--may also be the best (least bad) means to foster elusive but indispensable virtues. Reflection on exemplars may help to replenish the moral foundations of liberal democracy--habits and ideals of civility, empathy, fortitude, self-restraint, solidarity, circumspection, respect for nuance and for others--by reminding us of why we need them, as well as displaying how admirable they can be.--Joshua Cherniss (2021) Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century, 211

Cherniss's Liberalism in Dark Times is a fascinating book with studies of Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Camus, Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin. He treats the latter four as 'tempered liberals." They are treated as admirable exemplars, but by no means not perfect. (210) The main argument of the book is nicely foreshadowed in this passage:

Proponents of “tempered liberalism” accordingly undertook three broad, interlinked tasks. First, they sought to critically reconstruct liberalism--to identify and correct liberalism’s internal weaknesses and failings. Second, they sought to reconceive liberalism as a particular “temper,” a “certain condition . . . of mind or state of being,” rather than (merely) an institutional framework or policy. Finally, they sought (with varying degrees of self-consciousness) not only to explicate, but to exemplify, a liberal spirit, which could belie anti-liberal ethical critiques, and resist the temptations and pathologies of an anti-liberal ethos. (38: emphasis in original)

The passage nicely suggests that a certain kind of ethos is an important feature of being a tempered liberal. My interest in today's post is the nature and status of of liberal exemplification (the third task). In my book on Adam Smith, I had explicitly treated Smith as an exemplar of a certain kind of liberal thinker. I had done so in part, by focusing on the way Smith used Hume's life and thought as a positive and negative exemplar; I had also drawn on resources in Smith that centered on the roles of exemplary characters in his moral psychology and political theory. (These characters are largely abstract fictions.) Smith, in turn, drew on Hume's practice of exemplification and (as I insinuate in the book) Spinoza's (who also uses abstract fictions in this way). Of course, the practice has an important ancient and Machiavellian pedigree.

In both Smith and the tempered liberals, exemplification plays an important role in moral-political education. It's required because these kind of liberals (as well as Smith) highly value contextual judgment. But my approach to exemplification in Smith is different from Cherniss' in some important respects: on my account Smith is a systematic thinker and understands himself as such; exemplification is very much an integral part of this system not a kind of substitute for it as it is, by contrast, in Cherniss and his four tempered liberals. In addition, Smith rejected the kind of modesty Cherniss ascribes to his four tempered liberals, and he seems to advocate emulation of worthy exemplars as models, whereas Cherniss' tempered liberals primarily wish that only a particular kind of ethos is emulated and rejects the idea of a life as a model to be imitated (see the first quoted line above).

There is, thus, an important distinction lurking here between an agent as an exemplary model to be studied and imitated and, say, a style of agency that is exemplified. I will return to that distinction below. But it is important to recognize that on both sides of the distinction there is a commitment to the idea that some things don't fall under a rule or principle, but require the acquisition of certain dispositions and cultivated judgment. (The crispness of this observation I owe to reading David Owen's forthcoming, "On Exemplarity and Public Philosophy.")

But in reading Cherniss I also came to realize I had not really thought through what liberal exemplification might mean. So, what follows is an exploration of Cherniss' account with an eye toward that larger project. As my remark above implies, the status of Weber in Cherniss' argument is a bit ambiguous. Anyone familiar with the depth of Weber's nationalism (and his anti-Polish sentiment) will be hard-pressed to call him a 'tempered liberal.' But he is important to Cherniss to set up the themes of the book. I quote an important passage:

Weber rejected both; this rejection was central to his own revision of liberalism. If liberals sloughed of the elements within liberal thought that reflected an ethic of normative necessity and an ethic of success, they could fortify their commitments and themselves for the hard, uncertain struggle ahead. To look for guarantees reflected inner weakness. Liberals should exemplify, as well as advocate, a dignified and free life, by affirming and defending principles without guarantees, devoting their lives to values that could not be demonstrated as rationally necessary and whose ultimate triumph was in doubt. (67)

It's unclear to me what, according to Cherniss, leads him to think that Weber advocates such exemplification. But it's clear that on Cherniss's account of Weber, exemplification is something that liberals as such should aim for. It's difficult not to think here of, say, puritan (and protestant more widely) ideas about the elect having to live godly lives as individuals and the community. I don't think that association is an accident: in the first half of the twentieth century, as Liberalism seems to be in retreat, the idea that liberalism rests on faith, or requires faith, shows up in other places. I have documented this in the case of Lippmann (here); and it's also visible in the title of Morris R. Cohen's (1946) Faith of a Liberal. (Cohen was then arguably one of the most important philosophers Stateside.)*

Interestingly enough, in the rest of Cherniss' argument, it seems not everyone should aim at such exemplification. Rather this is reserved for liberal intellectuals and public figures (like the four tempered liberals discussed by Cherniss), and, perhaps, also liberal statesmen. On Camus' possible self-understanding as an exemplar see p. 76 (and p. 85). Aron is treated by Cherniss an exemplar (p. 102, and also by Alan Bloom (p. 131)!), but I see no evidence to think Aron thought of himself that way. Cherniss convincingly suggests that Niebuhr did see himself that way (159ff).

That liberal statesman and artists could be exemplars is clearly Berlin's position. Cherniss skillfully takes us through Berlin's portraits of Herzen and Turgenev. Cherniss treatment of Berlin's "accounts of such leaders--Winston Churchill, Chaim Weizmann, and Franklin Roosevelt" is terser and in my view not especially convincing. This is a shame because the question "how political greatness and moral goodness could be balanced, in ways that could serve to sustain a liberal politics" (182) is a vital one. For, I would have liked to have read Cherniss on Berlin's blind-spots (e.g., Churchill's racialized imperialism (which led to a grossly inadequate response to Indian famine) or the fire-bombing of German cities). [To be sure such problems are hinted at by Cherniss because it's acknowledged they were a "morally mixed bunch, as he [Berlin] acknowledged." (pp. 182-3)] Chaim Weizmann as exemplar is even more complex because he was never more important than, say, Ben Gurion. In political terms, much of the last (say) decade of Weizmann's life was a sort of failure. And because of this Weizmann also seems to have been somewhat removed from decisions surrounding Zionist ethnic cleansing during Israel's war of independence.

As a non-trivial aside, in my view Berlin's personal admiration for Weizmann arguably prevented a sober reflection on Weizmann's political life by Berlin. In fact, I read Berlin as treating Weizmann as a model of a new kind of Jew: see his much quoted claim about Weizmann, as the "first totally free Jew of the modern world." But in that same sentence Berlin goes on to claim "the State of Israel was constructed, whether or not it knows it, in his image." And this part of the sentence has aged badly if it ever was plausible.

Now, Cherniss extracts a kind of gross generalization from these portraits by Berlin: "Berlin suggested that the cultivation of political judgment might indeed be connected to the promotion of a more humane politics--and that the dispositions that contributed to failures of political judgment also tended to produce inhumanity." (183) As a generalization it's not very remarkable. But it can only convince, I think, through the sketching of biographies/lives. So, the focus on exemplars allows for a species of political education, especially with those already sharing a certain ethical outlook. This is, in fact, Cherniss own understanding (while drawing on Linda T. Zagzebski and Nancy Rosenblum).

I quote a lengthy passage because I think it helps illustrate what it might mean (for Cherniss) to think of what I called 'a style of agency that is exemplified.'

Pedagogic exemplification involves two elements: exemplification itself, and emulation. The latter consists not of slavish imitation, but a conscious, critical attempt to identify what is admirable and applicable in the exemplar, and to adapt this to the situation and the already-partially-shaped character--of the emulator. Exemplification respects liberty and individuality because the selection of an exemplar reflects the judgment and the needs of the “student,” rather than the exemplar’s will or ability to use force. This means that success is never fully in the hands of the exemplar. As a form of persuasion and guidance, rather than conditioning or compulsion, exemplification relies more on conscious human action--and requires less comprehensive control over background conditions and the experiences of the learner--than a program of habituation. At the same time, since it employs the force of example rather than (or in addition to) purely rational persuasion, it can appeal to the emotions, and promote skills of judgment that are not rule-based. (p. 210)

What's nice about this passage is that helps illustrate what is distinctly liberal about Cherniss' idea of exemplification (although not necessarily unique to liberalism). This is a form of teaching and moral/political education that leaves considerable freedom, individuality, and agency to those of us who wish to become better at being liberal (or liberal intellectuals, citizens, politicians, etc.) It echoes Mill-ean ideas (as well as those we find in Montessori) about education itself being an experiment in living and the cultivation of one's moral sentiments through the development of personality and authenticity.

Of course, the question is how much (to use Cherniss' language) pre-shaping is necessary for this to work as partially intended. That may be an empirical question. But it is also a political one (that is theoretically highly salient since the days of Plato). For example, Mill thought such pre-shaping had to be made compulsory, but was best left to the judgment of parents. Most liberal democracies have thought otherwise. And while this is no criticism of Cherniss' book, it is worth noting that in its very un-systematicity, tempered liberalism as such -- with its neglect of institutions -- has no answer to this question.+ To be continued...

 

 

On Crooked Timber.

The last two months have been challenging for me, hence my lack of blogging. They aren’t limited to losing my advisor. But what I have seen running throughout many of these challenges is a kind of a deep psychological that I will call wounds of the heart.

A wound of the heart is an emotional hurt that generates intense, seemingly unbearable psychic stress and that can create long-term damage to one’s personality due to overpowering negative moral emotions, like resentment and hatred, and that may last for the rest of one’s life. They are typically caused by some act by one’s close friends, family, or community. The wounded person believes the act signals that the offending group bears him or her bad will, and that the group does not love or support the wounded person in the way he or she had counted upon in the past. It can overwhelm the wounded person’s agency, leading them to lash out and creating a new harm, and perhaps wounding the hearts of others. When multiple parties to a relationship have wounds of the heart, that can spell the death of the relationship, even if the relationship continues pro forma.--Kevin Vallier The Wounds of the Heart

Because one of my entries into the history of philosophy was by way of Isaiah Berlin, I have always associated his quotation from Kant that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made" with an important truth. To this day the core idea informs my own skeptical liberalism.

But as always the story has wrinkles.

So for years I shared Ingrid Robeyns' sense, appropriately shared at the mother of all philosophical blogs, CT, that Berlin's translation improved on the original, Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. I still do. However, it is not often remarked that Kant added a footnote, to this very sentence; and it is worth noting it, too:

The role of man is very artificial. How it may be with the dwellers on other planets and their nature we do not know. If, however, we carry out well the mandate given us by Nature, we can perhaps flatter ourselves that we may claim among our neighbors in the cosmos no mean rank. Maybe among them each individual can perfectly attain his destiny in his own life. Among us, it is different; only the [human] race can hope to attain it."*

There are really two fine issues here: first, that we may be part of a larger family of planetary denizens. This is an idea that excited Huygens and Newton. And from Kant's pre-critical writings we know (recall) that Kant was much impressed by Newton's ideas on this point. And Kant assumes that, once we get into the habit of  this, we will adopt a perspective in which we are judged by such aliens. Maria Pia Paganelli has suggested -- in commenting on a similar idea in Adam Smith -- that this can be traced by to Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. It's plausible this also influenced Kant because Kant's earlier Universal Natural History is clearly shaped as I argued (based on a suggestion by Martin Schönfeld) by Fontenelle's work. So, Kant's cosmopolitanism here is truly cosmopolitan. I assume this is known among Kant experts, but the thought always delights me. 

Second, in the note Kant articulates the thought that that any attainable future worth having is a collaborative or shared project. I can think no better way of characterizing the liberal project in that it simultaneously holds that we should assume the unreformable weakness of individuals and that as humanity we're in it together. This is why, the more I reflect on it, the more I recognize that global, maybe cosmic (yeah for Star Trek!) federation is the liberal political destiny. 

This morning, in a wistful, apprehensive mood,  I returned to Seneca Letter 50. The letter is really about the comic-from- without-maddening-from-within realization that the more we run away from our problems, and disown them, the more we find them not just sneaking up on us, but defining us:

For what else are you busied with except improving yourself every day, laying aside some error, and coming to understand that the faults which you attribute to circumstances are in yourself? We are indeed apt to ascribe certain faults to the place or to the time; but those faults will follow us, no matter how we change our place.

And yet, I was in no mood to be preached to by Seneca that the way forward is a regimen of self-improvement. My mind drifted back toward's Vallier's post quoted above. As the reach of life has shrunk during this pandemic, and in my solitude, I more easily and directly encounter evidence of how my past wounds create new harms; I re-read, and I recognize myself in the self-portrait he draws. Kevin writes of 'soldiering on.' I wince at the bellicose nature of the phrase, despite seeing the tenderness in the rest of Kevin's words. The soldiering on reminds me of the bit of the part of Seneca -- preparing for death -- I like least.    

Without realizing it I had read on in Seneca. And there, I was surprised to read (in  Richard Gummere's 1917 translation), There is nothing that will not surrender to persistent treatment, to concentrated and careful attention; however much the timber may be bent, you can make it straight again.  [Nihil est, quod non expugnet pertinax opera et intenta ac diligens cura; robora in rectum quamvis flexa revocabis. Curvatas trabes calor explicat et aliter natae in id finguntur, quod usus noster exigit; quanto facilius animus accipit formam, flexibilis et.]

    Of course, Seneca must believe that self-improvement is possible, I think.

But, as I re-read I realize that Seneca thinks this, too, is a collaborative project: "we begin to mold and reconstruct our souls before they are hardened by crookedness" ["ante animum nostrum formare incipimus et recorrigere quam indurescat pravitas eius]. In Kevin's vocabulary, we soldier on in a platoon. Of course, the larger context of the Letter suggests that Seneca thinks we do this under the guidance of a mentor. 

I then remembered Kant. And now looking at what I have written, I am struck by the thought that I have been eavesdropping on a great debate between the two wings of cosmopolitanism: disagreeing about the means, but both claiming that we're in this together. My gloom dissipates. 

 

 

7 March 1979: Foucault on The Demands of Critical Morality (XXIV)

I have dwelt so long on this problem of German neo-liberalism first of all for methodological reasons, because, continuing what I began to say last year, I wanted to see what concrete content could be given to the analysis of relations of power—it being understood, of course, and I repeat it once again, that power can in no way be considered either as a principle in itself, or as having explanatory value which functions from the outset. The term itself, power, does no more than designate a term of relations which are entirely still to be analyzed, and what I have proposed to call governmentality, that is to say, the way in which one conducts the conduct of men, is no more than a proposed analytical grid for these relations of power.
So, we have been trying out this notion of governmentality and, second, seeing how this grid of governmentality, which we may assume is valid for the analysis of ways of conducting the conduct of mad people, patients, delinquents, and children, may equally be valid when we are dealing with phenomena of a completely different scale, such as an economic policy, for example, or the management of a whole social body, and so on. What I wanted to do—and this was what was at stake in the analysis—was to see the extent to which we could accept that the analysis of micro-powers, or of procedures of governmentality, is not confined by definition to a precise domain determined by a sector of the scale, but should be considered simply as a point of view, a method of decipherment which may be valid for the whole scale, whatever its size. In other words, the analysis of micro-powers is not a question of scale, and it is not a question of a sector, it is a question of a point of view. Good. This, if you like, was the methodological reason.
A second reason for dwelling on these problems of neo-liberalism is what I would call a reason of critical morality. Actually, going by the recurrence of certain themes, we could say that what is currently challenged, and from a great many perspectives, is almost always the state...--Michel Foucault, 7 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 8, The Birth of Biopolitics, 186

After my last post, I wanted to move on quickly to lecture 9 with its spectacular fireworks on Gary Becker. But an unease -- I almost wrote 'daimon' -- held me back. When last week, I re-read lecture 8, again, I realized I had underestimated the significance of Foucault's treatment of the evolution of the French welfare state, which Foucault treats not just as one of the diffussions of ORDO liberal though (in elite opinion not among wider public) -- the other, among a wider kind of counter-elite, is the American diffusion --, but also as an instance of its "radicalization." (207)

And, yet, rather than discussing the significance of such radicalization, here i am back again at the start of lecture 8, which is the middle of the lecture-series. And suddenly, with clarity, I notice that Foucault is offering, again, a kind of Apologia Pro Lectiones Sua. As the passage above shows, he offers two reasons for dwelling on the ORDOs. 

First, the lecture series is supposed to exhibit a methodological innovation. It is supposed to exhibit what happens when one discards 'power' as a ground, or explanation, and replaces it with 'governmentality,' which is the way one conducts the conduct of men, not just on the micro scale, but also on the macro-scale, in particular, "as an economic policy...or the management of a whole social body." We might say governmentality is a tool in the study of a kind of meta-orchestration. This should be distinguished, I think, from the art of government. Governmentality is a concept or method within the study of the art of government.

However, the distinction between the art of government and its study by way of governmentality is not un-permeable; in so far as the normative art of government reflects on its own ground, that is, it becomes philosophical, it can appropriate governmentality in its own self-understanding. The problematic of this lecture-series can be, then, stated that Foucault has taken upon itself (recall first lecture) the obligation to present his analysis of German neo-liberalism as yet another exemplar of governmentality, and, simultaneously, contribute to the art of government at its best.

It is important to discern that like the German counterparts -- (recall here his fifth lecture; and here) the fraternal strife between Frankfurt and Freiburg -- Foucault is grappling with the legacy of Weber. And we see him here, as it were, with stiletto in hand, deciding to strike at the fact-value distinction while, simultaneously, he is developing an ideal-typical analysis of Ordoliberalism capable of entering into a kind of, if not social science, then social theory.

Second, he explains he does so because of what he calls "a critical morality." Unfortunately, in the lecture series he does not explain what he means by this term. In my last post I explored what, in the name of a critical morality, he attacked: namely the widespread and intellectually lazy uptake of a state-phobia which manifested itself in a certain form of the road-to-serfdom thesis outside its original formulation, by thinking types across the political spectrum that becomes an instrument for manichean thinking and de facto a new form of populism. It sees the rise of fascism everywhere and, if I am not mistaken, is itself in its own way a contribution toward fascism because it refuses to make distinctions and address political reality in its concrete manifestations.

And, so, critical morality has its task to diagnose, police, and correct a kind of thinking man's (and other humans') shared conceptual deformation that prevents better thinking in the intellectual life of (ahh) public opinion. And, in my last post, I got so fascinated by Foucault's first-order analysis of the uptake of inflated state-phobia, that I failed to address the nature of serving or promoting critical morality.*

To the best of my knowledge Foucault does not use 'critical morality' [moralité critique] again. But we see here a willingness to embrace not just the demands of responsible speech, but a desire to challenge and even try to reform leading ideas in circulation. 

I have deliberately not used 'ideology' because it is clear that the main business of "critical morality" is not the policing of ideology, but rather the engagement with the kind of background, low-level conceptual framework by which intellectuals, (people like you and me), journalists, students and policy-makers describe and analyze, even try to mobilize, social reality.  That is to say, critical morality is addressed at the shared commitments of what Julien Benda called 'clerks' and their wider circle/habitat. 

Somewhat surprising, Foucault here takes on something very close to the very project Isaiah Berlin had articulated for himself in his famous inaugural lecture. Recall that Berlin thought that the role of the political theorist was to guide society's ideas (if we don't such ideas "remain blind and undirected.") In particular, Berlin believed it is the duty of philosophers to "disarm" dangerous ideas before they become too dangerous.

Foucault clearly, and one might say, more liberally, does not think it is his role to guide society's ideas. But from the perspective of critical morality, he does think, more Socratically, it his role to criticize and disarm society's critical doxa. And, so part of the point of the Birth of Biopolitics is to supply the educated with a better conceptual framework, and narrative, to describe and analyze contemporary political life. 

 

On Quentin Skinner's neo-roman criticism of classical liberalism; or Hume vs Skinner (IV)

I...concentrate...on the other and more knock-down objection commonly levelled against the theory I have been laying out. According to a number of eminent critics, the analysis of the concept of liberty underlying the claim that it is only possible to live freely in a free state is itself misleading and confused. Those who have raised this objection commonly mount their attack in two waves. First they reaffirm the Hobbesian principle that the extent of your individual liberty depends on the extent to which the performance of actions within your powers is or is not physically or legally constrained. As Paley, for example, puts it, 'the degree of actual liberty' will always bear 'a reversed proportion to the number and severity of the restrictions' placed on your ability to pursue your chosen ends. But the neo-roman theorists, according to Paley, are not talking about this situation. They are talking about the extent to which the performance of such actions may or may not be free from the possible danger of being constrained. But this, Paley goes on, is to confuse the idea of liberty with a wholly different value, that of enjoying security for your liberty and the exercise of your rights. So the neo-roman writers 'do not so much describe liberty itself, as the safeguards and preservatives of liberty: for example, a man's being governed by no laws, but those to which he has given his consent, were it practicable, is no otherwise necessary to the enjoyment of civil liberty, than as it affords a probable security against the dictation of laws, imposing arbitrary and superfluous restrictions upon his private will'
The second wave of the attack then follows at once. As soon as this confusion is uncovered, we can see that the basic claim made by the neo-roman theorists to the effect that you can only be free in a free state is simply a mistake. The extent of your freedom as a citizen depends on the extent to which you are left unconstrained by the coercive apparatus of the law from exercising your powers at will. But this means that what matters for civic liberty is not who makes the laws, but simply how many laws are made, and thus how many of your actions are in fact constrained. This in turn shows that there is no necessary connection between the preservation of individual liberty and the maintenance of any particular form of government. As Paley concludes, there is no reason in principle why 'an absolute form of government' might not leave you no less free than the purest democracy'.

...It seems to me, however, that Paley's line of criticism fails to come to terms with the most basic and distinctive claim that the neo-roman theorists are labouring to make about the concept of civil liberty. The claim is implicit in the analysis I have already given, but it is now time to spell it out.
The neo-roman writers fully accept that the extent of your freedom as a citizen should be measured by the extent to which you are or are not constrained from acting at will in pursuit of your chosen ends. They have no quarrel, that is, with the liberal tenet that, as Jeremy Bentham was later to formulate it, the concept of liberty 'is merely a negative one' in the sense that its presence is always marked by the absence of something, and specifically by the absence of some measure of restraint or constraint. Nor have they any wish to deny that the exercise of force or the coercive threat of it must be listed among the forms of constraint that interfere with individual liberty. Despite what a number of recent commentators have implied, they are far from merely wishing to put forward an alternative account of unfreedom according to which it is held to be the product not of coercion but only of dependence.

What, then, divides the neo-roman from the liberal understanding of freedom? What the neoroman writers repudiate avant la lettre is the key assumption of classical liberalism to the effect that force or the coercive threat of it constitute the only forms of constraint that interfere with individual liberty. The neo-roman writers insist, by contrast, that to live in a condition of dependence is in itself a source and a form of constraint. As soon as you recognise that you are living in such a condition, this will serve in itself to constrain you from exercising a number of your civil rights. This is why they insist, pace Paley, that to live in such a condition is to suffer a diminution not merely of security for your liberty but of liberty itself.

The issue, in short, is how to interpret the underlying idea of constraint...

If you are a subject of the sultan, you will be less free than a citizen of Lucca, simply because your freedom in Constantinople, however great in extent, will remain wholly dependent on the sultan's goodwill. But this means that in Constantinople you will suffer from a form of constraint unknown even to the humblest citizen of Lucca. You will find yourself constrained in what you can say and do by the reflection that, as Harrington brutally puts it, even the greatest bashaw in Constantinople is merely a tenant of his head, liable to lose it as soon as he speaks or acts in such a way as to cause the sultan offence. The very fact, in other words, that the law and the will of the sultan are one and the same has the effect of limiting your liberty. Whether the commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is not still the same...
...

By the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Sidgwick felt able to declare in his great summation of classical liberalism that the errors underlying the neoroman theory of liberty are beyond dispute. To speak of individual liberty, Sidgwick first reminds us in his Elements of Politics, is to speak of an absence of external impediments to action, either in the form of 'physical coercion or confinement', or else of coercive threats that inhibit us by 'the fear of painful consequences'. Once this is understood, we can see that to think of the freedom of citizens as possible only within free states is simply to fall into 'the confusion which the common use of the word "Freedom" is apt to cause'. The truth is that individual freedom has no necessary connection with forms of government, since it is perfectly possible for a representative legislature to 'interfere with the free action of individuals more than an absolute monarch With this reiteration of the classical utilitarian case, Sidgwick dearly felt that the neoroman theory had finally been laid to rest.--Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 79-99.

This is the concluding post ((recall here; here; here; here; here) in my series on Skinner's Liberty before Liberalism , and the one in which I disagree with him. One important feature of Skinner's treatment of the debate between the "neoroman theory" and the "liberal," even "classical liberal" response to it is that the main representatives of the latter he discusses, from Paley to Sidgwick, are all utilitarians. And of these, Mill goes entirely unmentioned (except for in Skinner's "preface"). This subtly skews the terms of the debate. 

For in Skinner's hands the neoroman litmus test for freedom is the ability to speak one's mind at court by those"devoted to public service by acting as advisers and counsellors to the rulers and governments." (87ff) Since utilitarians often conceive of their own science in terms of such (philanthropic) service -- they model their own activity in terms of social planner or philanthropy -- this is entirely fair. And, indeed, in their public service, in so far as policy-advisors become dependent on the whims of the prince, and, as Machiavelli (recall) already noted, incentivized to flatter the prince and disagree among themselves, the neoromans are right to regard it as a mistake to treat them as paradigmatically free in such an unstable political environment. 

Why then do I say that the debate is skewed? First that there is nothing distinctively liberal about these utilitarian responses to the neoromans. By this I do not mean to imply that the utilitarians are hostile to liberalism. I agree with, say, Foucault (recall) that they constitute the epitome of the "radical" tradition within liberalism. But it doesn't mean that in all things utilitarians are constitutive of liberalism or especially liberal in their sensibility. When in  Considerations on Representative Government, Chapter 3. Mill, who himself has a tendency toward paternalism, warns against the attractions of "good despotism" he is attacking the fondness for Enlightened dictatorship to be found in (other) utilitarians (and earlier the physiocrats). Again, I do not mean to deny that within otherwise eminently liberal thinkers there is a recurring lapse toward the attractions of the wise legislator who resolves political problems by fiat.

My point is that so-called negative liberty by itself is not especially liberal. For, one thing notably missing in the presentation of the liberal response to the neoroman account of freedom, as presented by Skinner, is the significance of the rule of law.+ The classical liberals granted the neoromans that one was not free under despots. For, example the sultan's mastery "of the life and fortune of any individual" is treated as a danger to and restriction of freedom by Hume. This despite the fact that the sultan was, according to Hume, constrained in his ability to impose taxes. 

But informed by Machiavelli on the significance of mechanism design, the classical liberals also claimed that the rule of law was compatible with a variety of constitutional and political formats. What's needed, in addition to the rule of law, is a separation of powers capable of resisting the executive so that impartial and general rule of law is secured. As Hume, who is by no means the greatest friend of liberty among the classical liberals, writes in remarking on the "struggle" between "authority and liberty:"

The government, which, in common appellation, receives the appellation of free, is that which admits of a partition of power among several members, whose united authority is no less, or is commonly greater than that of any monarch; but who, in the usual course of administration, must act by general and equal laws, that are previously known to all the members and to all their subjects. In this sense, it must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society;

Notice that in the quoted passage, Hume accepts the neoroman claim that you can only be free in a free state. The problem with the neoroman position for Hume is not that the neoromans confuse freedom with constraints on freedom (and should adopt the Hobbesian, negative conception of freedom). Skinner is entirely right that this line of argument that is ground in the idea that "individual liberty is basically a matter of non-interference" (116, in context this is a criticism of Isaiah Berlin) begs the question against the neoroman account of liberty. Hume does not beg the question in that way.*

Rather, the neoroman theorists call the wrong kind of states free. This needs to be corrected. For Hume, the problem with the neoroman account is that, as (recall Constant) any reader of Rousseau's Social Contract will have recognized, the neoroman theory facilitates what one may call democratic despotism. (This was noted in Berlin's Two Concepts.") And in so far as republican theorists recognize this, and introduce  institutional safeguards against it, they move toward the liberal position articulated by Hume (and Montesquieu, etc.), and, indeed, Livy.++

I do not mean to deny that lurking here is an important disagreement over the best form of life. Classical liberals do not sign up for the neoroman idea that devoted public servant is the paradigmatic citizen,  although Hume and Smith felt the pull of it. And from a neoroman perspective this is indeed troubling. But the liberal rejoinder is that in their kind of free state, which is compatible with a whole range of constitutional forms (but not despotism/tyranny, etc.), the public servant is no more dependent or unfree on the ruler than any other citizen is. But that's because the liberal espouses the idea when, in a free state (in the corrected sense), the citizen exercises her judgment in order to make meaningful choices, she can express her personal freedom in a diversity of ways in the pursuit of many valuable ends.

 

 

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.

On Counter Cyclical Political Theory, Bernard Williams, and the Liberalism of Fear

The liberalism of fear has historically been taken to have such [empowered] listeners. But when it is so taken, it naturally attracts the traditional criticisms, because what it can be taken to enjoin is the extreme limitation of state power, the message that indeed it has traditionally conveyed. And that will not do for us, now, because it is not state power that we have most to fear. And when we ask what it has to tell legislators who are in that situation, it is less than clear what it has to add. [p. 59]

It asks, too, how secure what has been secured is. It is disposed not to be too sanguine about that, particularly since it remembers to look beyond national boundaries. It is conscious that nothing is safe, that the task is never-ending. This part of its being, as Judith Shklar said, is resolutely nonutopian. But that does not mean that it is simply the politics of pessimism which has not collapsed into the politics of cynicism. In the words that Shklar quoted from Emerson, it is very importantly the party of memory. But it can be, in good times, the politics of hope as well.---Bernard Williams, "The Liberalism of Fear," in In the Beginning was The Deed (2005), edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn, [p.61]. [HT Nakul Krishna in The Point]

Posthumously, Bernard Williams (1929 – 2003) has become increasingly remembered as a political philosopher. In part, this is so because various scholars (primarily working in Britain and the European mainland and) influenced by Geuss' version of political realism (their term) have found it convenient to treat Williams as one of their main sources of inspiration. If somebody had told me this around 2003, I would have been genuinely surprised. I think I would not have been alone in thinking that Williams was primarily a moral philosopher in the broadest possible sense of that word (and perhaps anti-moral philosopher) who, of course,  had genuinely political interests and had served the public in politically salient matters. Williams the political philosopher is a construction, a very successful construction I hasten to add, by a very astute selection of his writings (by Geoffrey Hawthorn and Patricia Williams). So, while I am about to be critical, the underlying affect is gratitude. 

"The Liberalism of Fear" is a lecture delivered at, it seems, Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1994 as the fourth Isaiah Berlin Lecture (see here). Berlin was still alive, and presumably in the audience. One subtext, even framing-device, of lecture is, in fact, Berlin's own status as a political philosopher in the context of the sociology of philosophy (of the 1930s and 40s) in which to situate Berlin's career. Williams leaves no doubt that Berlin is a political philosopher (recall this post!), but he notes, astutely, that "Berlin...led people to agree with him that he got of out of philosophy" and so that he was a political philosopher was "concealed."  (53)* I will return to Williams' sociology before long. But it is clear we, the readers of the essay (and perhaps some in its initial audience), are meant to understand that Williams, too, was in a certain sense a concealed political philosopher visible to the astute eye (Berlin). 

Joking aside, the point of the passage about the work concealing the political philosopher in the text is to assert that political philosophy has a tight connection with history and that, in fact, its true intelligibility -- Collingwood is in the air -- requires "historical commitments," a "sense of the past," and "strongly developed historical memory." (54-55) A more important point is, by an act of legislative fiat, to inscribe Shklar's "the liberalism of fear" into political philosophy (recall my posts which I presuppose here, and here). I am grateful for Williams' act. 

Even so, I fear Williams misunderstands a key point of Shklar's project and, in so doing, his own historical moment. The mistake can be revealed when we re-read this sentence: "that will not do for us, now, because it is not state power that we have most to fear." The problem is not here Williams' attempt to respond to the critic of Shklar who sees in the liberalism of fear only a minimalist, mitigating program. That a response to such a critic is required is easy to feel (I have felt this myself). The problem is also not, primarily, Williams' use of the pluralis maiestatis. But Williams' royal 'we' is manifestly not the we of the powerless and vulnerable, who even in 1994 have plenty to fear from the state,+ even the liberal nation-state. (For a more thoroughgoing analysis of the problematic features of Williams's stance in several of his essays, see Kate Manne's excellent essay here.) In 1994 police brutality, unjust convictions, unfair convictions, improperly rejected asylum requests, and -- as Williams notes -- torture all existed.

More subtly, and here I follow Williams' surprising parochialism by focusing on the US, the accumulation of executive power in the office of the American's president has, despite a post-Nixon lull, continued apace. The main insight that the liberalism of fear accepts from the Republican tradition (I learned it from Sophie de Grouchy), is that latent despotic power, is to be feared greatly. It is galling that critics of President Trump only wake up to this fact, when it is too late.** 

Of course, it is quite possible that despite many known evils, Stateside, 1994 was one of the better times to be alive in the history of the world. But, and here's my disagreement with Williams, the liberalism of fear is most needed in (self-proclaimed) "good times;" these are not the main periods when "hope" is required; what's needed is to guard against hubris, to shine a light on the hidden corners that our self-satisfied propaganda misses, etc. And, by contrast, in bad times we don't need the liberalism of fear. Then its message is self-evidently true,++ but we do need a source of hope that can organize our collective longings; this it cannot provide. That is to say, "the liberalism of fear" is a durable, counter-cyclical political philosophy.***

 

 

On the Crisis of Liberalism (II)

Regular readers know (recall) that I believe the second wave of liberalism+ has ended and that it may not survive the present darkness. (In brief: first long wave: 1776-1914; second wave: 1945-2009. Some readers will say, good riddance, and to you I say, I hope you do better.) The present crisis is much visible in our daily politics (and headlines), shifting public norms, and the rising confidence of regimes and thinkers who, again, openly espouse hierarchical, ethnic, zero-sum, eugenic, and violent solutions to present conflicts.* While there is much urgent, practical work to be done to salvage institutions that may be at the core of a renewal, some reflection away from daily politics is also required. This also requires attention not just because we need polities that make minimal decency possible,** but also because we need (or so I assume today) properly functioning liberal institutions to meet humanity's great challenges -- environmental disaster, genetic engineering, ethnic conflict, -- ahead.  To reflect on our shortcomings is a means of being liberal as well as a path toward its possible renewal. This is the second post (recall) in an open-ended series (see also here, here, and here).

What follows, then is the start of an attempt to display the existential challenges to liberalism that arise from within. I do not offer solutions to these challenges and so invite readers to chime in. In earlier posts, I discussed self-inflicted wounds such as (i) For profit media; and (ii) the financialization of the economy.

Today i focus on (iii) the Embrace of Revealed Preferences/The Rejection of a Philosophy of Life. One striking feature of the second half of the second wave of liberalism is that its most prominent advocates were economists and ('ethics first') political philosophers (or both). Jointly, their prominence conveyed the message that the point of a liberal project is protecting rights in order to make and re-distribute money. Of course, making money is not the end of the story, it is taken to be an instrument for the pursuit of one's private welfare and the embrace of (what a Rawlsian may call) private, nonpublic values and individual life-plans. Liberalism was seen as an important political and economic doctrine, not a philosophy of life.+ This has two important consequences, first, liberals embrace state-neutrality with respect to fundamental values/goods; and, second, we have a tendency to promote the idea that public speech and justification must be articulated in terms of public reason (with respect for fairness, principles of freedom, equality, and justice, etc.). 

By contrast, critics of liberalism appeal to shared, action-guiding projects: the health of the nation, submission to the divine plan, a green future, a post-revolutionary communist/socialist paradise, social harmony, traditional values, etc. Obviously, these projects are often incompatible with each other. And liberals are often tempted to argue from the pluralist reality of conflicting values in societies with advanced division of labor (and so conflicting interests) and a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds to the prudential idea that state neutrality is required. We may even add that conflicting values are epistemically fruitful in preventing the dogmatic and premature embrace of any ideology.

But this stance generates a tactical and a philosophical challenge.  The tactical challenge is that critics of liberalism are left to articulate profound shared action-guiding projects, while liberals are left to point to statistics of rising GDP. Now, one may argue that the rejection of shared projects is a feature of liberal political ideology not a bug. And one may claim that rising GDP is often a sign of the removal of famines, the reduction of poverty, increased life expectancy, lower crime, etc. So, it's not as if the liberal's pointing to such statistics is morally worthless. But tactically, the liberal is left with uninspiring politic projects, especially in a context where by historical standards modern societies are already fairly wealthy and not very likely to suffer famine or violent crimes. (Yeah, go read your Pinker!)

The philosophical challenge is the articulation of a liberalism worth having that is both a shared, action-guiding project and does not violate core liberal commitments (the harm principle, the avoidance of cruelty, individual autonomy, non-dogmatism, freedom, justice, etc.). For, shared visionary projects are action-guiding (recall this post critical of Jacob Levy). The articulation of such shared projects, means rejecting a relatively recent, second-wave liberal dogma, nicely articulated by Shklar, "liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make." (Again, I pick Shklar because in many ways she is least like the problematic version of liberalism I am rejecting.) I think this claim is a mistake, even if I grant Shklar and her followers that creating political conditions and institutions in which cruelty is avoided a crucial and difficult enough task as it is.

The first sentence of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, asserts, as an axiom, that flourishing of others is necessary to us.** He goes on to describe how such flourishing is possible and what objective conditions for it are. In particular, he draws a sharp contrast between what people imagine is worth attaining and what are true means toward flourishing. The liberal enterprise is, thus, from the beginning concerned with articulating shared projects, the institutions that may facilitate them, and an embrace of ideas that imply that people's flourishing is an objective state of affairs.++  

Now, one may worry -- as Shklar evidently did -- that if one asserts that joint flourishing is an objective state of affairs worth promoting that one then may provide "public authorities the unconditional right to impose beliefs and even a vocabulary as they may see fit upon the citizenry." This is a reasonable fear and most of the critics of liberalism who promote a shared project do so to some degree (even if some will abhor an unconditional right). But Shklar and modern liberals ignore, that there is a half-way station between imposing approved beliefs/vocabulary and being neutral.+++  

What matters is that (again echoing Smith) individuals have the security, capabilities, dispositions, and options to make meaningful choices of the sort that will allow them to flourish jointly. Today, in the context of this post, I do not offer a substantive program (which would have to draw on more recent social science and moral psychology). (Such flourishing will probably involve good health, mutual recognition, lack of fear, the opportunity for love, capabilities for meaningful choices, cultural development, etc.)  Rather, all I point out here is that within constraints, the state can promote indirect incentives conducive to joint flourishing and virtue, while generating strong, indirect disincentives that prevent mutual misery while not encroaching on people's individual freedoms.*** What such a liberalism worth having is, is something that, for now, I must leave -- and this is a political invitation, my dear reader -- to your imagination.

 

 

 

On Freedom with constraints

Disabled people are constrained and limited by their bodies....The simple act is that, disabled or non-disabled, we are all limited and constrained by our bodies. To have a body that is any particular way is to have a body that is limited and constrained in some respects an in comparison to other kinds of bodies. That's just part of what it is  to have a body. Some of us are male, some of us are female. Some of us are tall, some of us are short. Some of us are flexible, some of us are stiff. Some of us are stocky, some of us are willowy. There are all sorts of ways that bodies can be. And each way a body can be comes with some limitations and constraints.

We all adapt our preferences due in part to the limitations of our bodies---that's an utterly ordinary thing to do. Elizabeth Barnes (2016) The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, 132 (emphasis in original).

Recall that at the core of Barnes's book is the idea that all human bodies face constraints. In particular, it is part of the nature of what it is to be a human body that all human bodies are in a position of not being able to do some X; with X being something other human bodies can do (or could be/have or can instantiate), and X being really important to some humans. It is a fairly common conceptual and maybe even phenomenological mistake to think of disability in terms of constraint, but to ignore simultaneously the existence of constraints in the context of (complex) experiences that arise from having other types of bodies (even though those bodies by necessity include all kinds of constraints).

Now one way to understand Barnes's contribution, is that constraints -- or to put it Spinozistically, limitations -- are constitutive of our embodied existence. When states as such it may seem an obvious point, but (i) I doubt it is really properly represented in much philosophical theorizing (despite the growth of embodied cognition), especially in political philosophy (outside some areas of feminism); in particular, (ii) to overlook Barnes's insight (on the constrained nature of human existence) is, when one is discussing, say, human freedom, to contribute to possibility that one may tacitly assume away a whole bunch of constraints because one (tacitly) brackets those as belonging to some image of our biological or (proper) natural functioning.

I think something like (ii) (because of (i)) occurs in political philosophy. (This is also an important place to call attention to Elizabeth Anderson's (1999) important point that much of the literature in luck egalitarianism treats disability as something pitiful and somehow fails to represent what the political aims of minority bodies might be.) Let me give an example from the literature on social freedom; in this scholarship, the Hobbesian conception of freedom (to speak anachronistically) as preference satisfaction is replaced by all kinds of conceptions in which absence of constraints (or counterfactual constraints) are treated as intrinsic to social freedom. Here's an illustration from (2016) Christian List & Laura Valentini:

Freedom as independence: An agent is (socially) free to do X if and only if, robustly, there are no constraints on her doing X. (1067)

I use List & Valentini because they write clearly and offer a nice survey of alternative views (and how to classify them). All these views have absence from constraints (in some sense or another) built into their conception. As they point out, "Liberals, following Isaiah Berlin, define freedom as the absence of constraints on action, where the constraints that matter can be spelled out in various ways. Republicans, especially in Philip Pettit’s influential interpretation, instead argue that freedom requires nondomination: the guaranteed or robust absence of arbitrary constraints." (1044)*

As they unpack freedom as independence, they add the following remark on the nature of constraints:

We have already commented on the availability of different notions of possibility in defining freedom as independence, based on the intended application. The possible freedom-undermining constraints may be social (e.g., legal, political, customary) or purely “natural” (concerning what is possible given the laws of physics and biology), for example. From a social perspective, it makes little sense to describe an agent as “unfree” to jump 1,000 meters in the air, yet from a physical one it does. Once we become aware of these different notions of possibility, we need not accuse those who describe physical inabilities as “unfreedoms” of conceptual confusion. We can more charitably point out that the freedom they are talking about is not “social” freedom—the kind of freedom in which social and political philosophers are interested. (1070)

Now, I have no desire to describe physical inabilities as “unfreedoms,” but I do think that reflection on the existence of minority bodies and the constitutive role of constraints in our existence show that: (a) both the opposition between the social and natural that List/Valentini rely on can't really be sustained [that is, the realm of the 'natural' needs to be drawn much narrower] and (b) that embodied "inabilities" are central to social and political philosophy, even if (c) too many political philosophers have failed to be "interested." I recognize that some readers may wish for a detailed argument here (and it may not be trivial to supply it), but I hope that the point is clear with some reflection.

Before I am misunderstood: I am not denying that 'liberals' and republicans' in the sense used here can talk about the ways in which we organize society inhibits minority bodies and can even be made to reflect that these ways are deplorable and need to be addressed. But I am suggesting that they tend to presuppose an image of normal functioning -- and the Republican version is traditionally gendered in masculine and virile ways -- that does not quite due justice to important features of human existence and treats minority bodies de facto as less free or less capable of being free (because subject to more constraints).+

So, what is needed is, and I suspect I am not the first to notice this, is a conception of freedom with constraints that is not merely preference satisfaction, but that can do justice to the fact that all human bodies are in a position of not being able to do some X; with X being something other human bodies can do (or could be/have or can instantiate), and X being really important to some humans, and that society structures the political and social significance of both X and not X. 

 

 

Isaiah Berlin on Transformative Political Experience and Faith in Development

THE rich development of historical studies in the nineteenth century transformed men's views about their origins and the importance of growth, development and time. The causes of the emergence of the new historical consciousness were many and diverse. Those most often given are the rapid and profound transformation of human lives and thought in the West by the unparalleled progress of the natural sciences since the Renaissance, by the impact on society of new technology and, in particular, the growth of large-scale industry; the disintegration of the unity of Christendom and the rise of new states, classes, social and political formations, and the search for origins, pedi grees, connections with, or return to, a real or imaginary past. All of this culminated in the most transforming event of all? the French Revolution, which exploded, or at the very least pro foundly altered, some of the most deeply rooted presuppositions and concepts by which men lived. It made men acutely conscious of change and excited interest in the laws that governed it.--Isaiah Berlin (1972) "THE BENT TWIG: A Note on Nationalism," Foreign Affairs.

THE rich development of historical studies in the nineteenth century transformed men's views about their origins and the importance of growth, development and time. The causes of the emergence of the new historical consciousness were many and diverse. Those most often given are the rapid and profound transformation of human lives and thought in the West by the unparalleled progress of the natural sciences since the Renaissance, by the impact on society of new technology and, in particular, the growth of large-scale industry; the disintegration of the unity of Christendom and the rise of new states, classes, social and political formations, and the search for origins, pedigrees, connections with, or return to, a real or imaginary past. All of this culminated in the most transforming event of all--the French Revolution, which exploded, or at the very least profoundly altered, some of the most deeply rooted presuppositions and concepts by which men lived. It made men acutely conscious of change and excited interest in the laws that governed it.--Isaiah Berlin (1972) "THE BENT TWIG: A Note on Nationalism," Foreign Affairs.

The quoted passage is the opening paragraph of Berlin's essay which argues that nationalism “is an inflamed condition of national consciousness which can be, and has on occasion been, tolerant and peaceful. It usually seems to be caused by wounds, some form of collective humiliation.” (17) The response to the collective humiliation can be “pathological” (a word repeated in the piece) and then nationalism becomes dangerous in various ways or, as the narrative implies, it can be worked through in healthier, less virulent ways. This may sound all very dismissive of nationalism (and it is in a certain sense), but Berlin argues, and this is distinctive, that in fact nationalist historical agents themselves understand the goal of nationalism as a means toward national health (vitality) or renewal (or recovery). (29)

In context, Berlin’s interest (or the influential readers of Foreign Affairs) in nationalism is driven (ahhh) anxiety over the wave of decolonization of the 1950s and 60s (see especially the last paragraph, where Berlin grants (with a clever nod to Fanon) that the “brutal and destructive side of modern nationalism” must be “recognized for what it is -- a worldwide response to a profound and natural need on the part of newly liberated slaves – “the decolonized"--a phenomenon unpredicted in the Europe-centered society of the nineteenth century.” (30)

The very last remark points to one of the major themes that frames the essay, and that is how the nineteenth century was a great age of social explanation as well as remarkable philosophical “prophecy.”* In fact the first paragraph of the piece quoted above, argues in historicizing fashion that this great flowering of social explanation was itself a consequence of what I – inspired by L.A. Paul’s work on Transformative Experience call Transformative political Experience (hereafter TPE), that is, an experience that is both epistemically and politically transformative.

TPE arises (recall here and here) in situations where collective agents (e.g., social activists, financial regulators, voters, etc.) think of themselves as authoritatively controlling their choices by collectively projecting themselves forward and considering possible futures and their plans are undermined by cognitive and epistemic limitations (that is, epistemic uncertainty). In particular, it is a political theory of unforeseen consequences in which those consequences change political actors in ways they could not have willed. (That’s compatible with that very same event also creating very foreseeable consequences; it’s not wholly a skeptical concept.)

We can now appreciate one layer of deliberate, rich irony in Berlin’s essay: an transformative political experience with enormous unforeseen consequences (the French revolution) gives rise to epistemic practices – sometimes building on –pre-exiting work [say Scottish Enlightenment thought] -- that try to grasp large scale social change. But these very impressive (sometimes totalizing) epistemic practices (and Berlin is not deflationary about nineteenth century ways of knowing) turn out (with benefit of hindsight) to have non-trivial omissions; these omissions are not due to the obscurity of the topic. (It’s a bit peculiar that Berlin lumps race and nation together here, because the nineteenth century is full of grand, social theorizing about race.) So much for irony, although it’s not entirely clear if Berlin thinks that these omissions themselves are part of a further cycle of social change and the character of social explanation.

As an aside (although it also sets up the final observation below), if we put Berlin’s origin story of transformative political experience – to be sure, he does not argue that the French revolution was the first – alongside L.A. Paul’s account of transformative experience – which I have suggested finds its animating ur-source in Paul’s (perhaps Platonizing) religious conversion experience --, we can see that there may well be many different kinds of historical roads to the concept of transformative experience even if one grants that the very possibility of understanding the French revolution in terms of a transformative experience itself (and I am surely not the first to suggest this) presupposes great familiarity with Pauline conversion.** (The previous sentence is a homage to Berlin’s footnote-less, neo-Ciceronian style!)

I could have ended here. But I wondered how Berlin treats his own perspective. For, after all, not unlike, say, Thomas Kuhn, he presents (the form of) historicist history as if he himself stands outside of history. That is, the historicism is framed by a positivist stance in which the historicist historical phenomena are treated like data and to be evaluated by a trans-historical framework or taxonomy. This is clear in Berlin because while the manifestations of nationalism are idiosyncratic both by the lights of the nationalist agents and according to Berlin, they do fall under a general kind. And maybe there are also further specific historical and social conditions that generate the first possibility of some phenomena falling under the kind – Berlin has a tendency to treat the origins of nationalism as a German, Herderian and Romantic revolt against French cultural and political supremacy (etc.; see 15ff.) --, but, nevertheless, there is genuine social kind (nationalism) and it shares at some level of abstraction in a characteristic (even if not exception-less) set of manifestations and, this is crucial to my final point, development.

For, Berlin assumes (without explanation or defense) that nations and their nationalism develop (and develop in characteristic fashion). Like many twentieth century social scientists, he speaks of “developing nations” (18) and he himself writes, albeit with great empathy and characteristic Verstehen of the idiosyncratic experience of the (ahh) non-developed, from the vantage point of developed nations. (Here he does not hint at the irony of modern social science’s inability to discard the central nationalist and organicist conceptual frame of a nation’s or society’s development.) And Berlin’s very idea of development (with its healthy and pathological trajectories and its insistence that there are “genuinely successful diagnoses of the direction in which Western society was moving” (the reference is to nineteenth century social theory), which again has uncanny resemblance to the commitments that structure, say, development economics (and development studies), includes, thus, first the idea that some collections of nations and their nationalism can develop into (oh the miracles of alchemy) such a thing as ‘Western society’ and, more subtly, a further commitment to the thought that the ills accompanying passionate nationalism have somehow been tamed by this West (from which Berlin is writing). This last point becomes clear by Berlin’s realist aside (he is no ‘naïve’ adherent to “Liberal rationalism” despite the fact that “there is a sense” in which the [quoting Burke] "sophisters, economists and calculators," the rationalists, the Victorian progressives, have won”):

This, faith in countervailing forces -- in multinational corporations which, whatever their relationship with class war and social conflict, at any rate do cross national borders, or in the United Nations as a barrier to unbridled chauvinism-- seems about as realistic (at least so far as lands outside Western Europe are concerned) as Cobden's belief that the development of free trade throughout the world would of itself ensure peace and harmonious cooperation between nations. (24)

This is not to deny that Berlin allows there can be nationalism within “Western” states (he makes a nod to Québécois nationalism in Canada, Scotland and Wales in Great Britain, Basques (but not Catalonians) in Spain, etc.). But these cases are treated as minority, “social resistance to exploitation” to electoral majorities. They are not instances of majoritarian, Western nationalism. In fact, Berlin articulates a now familiar interpretation of nationalist segments of electorates:

“This kind of nationalism is, perhaps, as much a form of social or class resistance as of purely national self-assertion, creating a mood in which men prefer to be ordered about, even if this en tails ill-treatment, by members of their own faith or nation or class to tutelage, however benevolent, on the part of ultimately patronizing superiors from a foreign land or alien class or milieu.” (22)

That is to say, Berlin’s is a non-rationalist liberal that understands that his sides victory will always generate responses that outside the West can generate existential excesses, but within the developed West (and let’s grant him that any nation can develop to become ‘Western’ in his sense [he does not flirt with ethnic or cultural essentialism] only will generate governance problems.

‘So much the worst for liberalism’ some of my favorite readers will mutter. Yes, indeed, but that’s not the end of the story; we may be able to transform liberalism into a doctrine (say, inspired by Shklar’s liberalism of fear) that neither presupposes faith in progress nor assumes a friendly reception among the powerful.

On Being Political Qua Philosopher

Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other.--David Hume.*

Unlike Hume (and like Schattschneider (recall)--a name I never encountered in professional philosophy, although he is significant in the history of political science--), I think political parties are important to the proper functioning of liberal democracy.  They do so because they can  help cultivate political talent and organize the energies, aspirations, and interest of many in the services of -- to echo and adapt Burke (recall) -- minimal national unity and some fundamental values or ideology. That is, and again, Burke noticed this first, it seems, in the long arc since the 18th century, political parties have been a  means, in part, to make philosophy worldly. On the Burkean view politicians are, in a non-trivial sense, applied philosophers or figureheads for (more hidden) applied philosophers.

As a non-trivial aside, of course, political parties can be mere vehicles for the pursuit of power and lack interest in minimal national unity and be ideology-free. That's compatible with them offering the public entertainment. Arguably, we have been turning that ever-present, ugly corner (recall my post on Justin Smith.)

Yet, while I recognize the way in which party politics and politicians can be philosophical, last week, I wrote that I happen to think (but have never argued) that attachment to party and candidate corrupts philosophers in pretty much the way Hume feared (fiercest animosities etc.). In context I offered some examples of such corruption (that is, it raises the probability of selective treatment of evidence, logical fallacies, inhumane conduct, etc.). Such corruption is nearly impossible to avoid because of the existence of partisanship (people like their side to win), rapid echo-chambers, group polarization, and self-deception. In particular, in politics, the pursuit of truth and humanity will inevitably be made instrumental to, and be sacrificed to, other ends. Politics is (as Plato, Madison, and Arendt emphasized) the realm of opinion, not truth--in part, because the mechanisms of discovery and truth-saying are lacking (recall here, and here). (That's not an encouragement to lie.)  In fact, (adhering to one's principles with) strict consistency -- a non-trivial commitment of most philosophers --is not just often a hindrance in politics, but (as one may say in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin) can easily lead to the worst tyrannies.

The whole previous paragraph is written with great deal of respect for and recognition of the importance of politics, even the very flawed politics of our times--I am all for participation in it. But my view is that philosophers should stay clear of adhering to parties (and think tanks allied strictly to them) and politicians because it is (nearly) impossible to maintain one's philosophical integrity. Recall, philosophical integrity is the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere (recall, and here). Obviously, if one rejects such integrity, one also rejects my position.

Now it does not follow that I thereby embrace for myself or others (i) a Weberian neutrality model as the only legitimate one for philosophers.** I think such neutrality is legitimate, although, in practice, it tends to be rather awkward and it incorporates (often tacitly) considerable status quo bias. It does so because it tends to be quiet about ends, which it, in principle, leaves for others, and the means it becomes expert on and is willing to offer informed views about to others are nearly always given means. [Of course, this stance is not inevitably status quo biased.] Often such neutrality is a mere disguise for (non transparently) assumed values or values that, surprisingly enough, advance the interests of the expert all too well. (Much of my scholarship explores the complications in the vicinity.)

Yet, despite the previous paragraph, I do not (ii) endorse quietism; quietism can slide a bit too easily into complicity in the moral horrors of our age. Even so I can respect it in more principled others, especially when it is accompanied by a kind of do-no-harm principle. Moreover, I can't simply reject it because one of the great purposes of politics is to make the life of philosophy, the arts, and all the other joyful activities that ennoble our existence possible.

So, that leaves room for (iii) philosophical service on behalf of a cause or a group. The term (service) is indebted to Dotson (recall). The service ideal can encourage philosophical integrity. For example,*** if one's philosophy shows that the death penalty is immoral or the basic income moral, one can dedicate one's political life to advocating such a principle and make one's all things considered views and one's public utterances cohere. Of course, such coherence may well result in a certain, intolerant fierceness. It's all too familiar that ine may become quite zealous in one's advocacy.

That's okay, for the advocate of a principle or cause -- unlike the politician -- need not (in the intellectual and professional division of labor) balance and navigate competing priorities and interests, including national union or survival. That is the philosophical advocate is, if she is self-aware (know thyself and all that), cognizant of her limitations. For, such a unity worth having is constituted by and a product of the art of leadership that promotes practices, narratives, and public understandings that facilitate some dispositions conducive to minimal, political union. For too long humane political theorists and philosophers have neglected the significance of such political leadership--and ceded talk of leadership to (conservative) lovers of authority (or worse, neo-fascists) and to business consultants. It is an open question if an engaged philosophy can be practiced that promotes such an art and what form it would take.