This post is a follow-up to the previous one: https://jzmcgowan.com/2025/03/11/moral-renewal/
In particular, I am intrigued by Alexandre Lefebvre’s desire to write a description of illiberal thought that does not verve immediately (or even eventually) into a critique of that thought. Instead, the idea is to describe illiberal thought on its own terms. With the pay-off being 1) a better understanding of illiberal views (because not biased, not looking out for “gotchas” as that thought is described) and 2) a way of understanding how illiberal views are appealing to illiberalism’s followers. Since illiberalism obviously makes sense to millions of people now, it is better not to disparage its followers or insist that they are misinformed, stupid, malicious etc. Is it possible, in other words, to be illiberal in good faith? And what would an outsider’s account of illiberalism look like if good faith on the part of its adherents was assumed?
I am trying to think through the implications of this approach to the thinking of writers/activists/politicians with whom I deeply disagree. For starters, I am entirely on board with the desire to stop preaching to the choir, i.e. to the endless conversations among progressives (for lack of a better term) about the horrors of the right wing. I have become notorious among my friends for calling a halt to conversations in which we all sit around tut-tutting about the latest Trump outrages. Such conversations follow completely predictable lines and feel smug, like the Pharisee in the gospel, to me. Not to mention that it is incredibly rare for anything new or interesting to be said.
On the positive side, I am perplexed by the appeal of these anti-liberal guys to half the American populace. (Russia and China didn’t get to vote for their anti-liberal overlords; Modi’s India is perhaps closer to the US in that regard, i.e. in having secured popular support.) So, yes, trying to provide an unbiased, straight up account of what these guys have to say for themselves is an incredibly worthwhile project.
But I would want to couple that account with some more speculative thinking about why people buy into that worldview. What about it resonates with them? We all know the familiar memes that try to answer that question. Status loss; owning the libs; resentment against cultural elites; feeling disrespected by those elites; loss of solid blue collar jobs to deindustrialization; the rise of women and people of color. All true enough, but why would these erstwhile new deal democrats turn their backs on the social democratic regulations and institutions that produced a large middle class? Why fail to see that the attack on social democracy, and on unions, was orchestrated and bank-rolled by those who were determined to redistribute wealth upwards? Why, in short, do the ideals and actual achievements of social democracy now inspire hostility more than loyalty?
All that’s familiar territory—and, it would seem, territory Lefebvre does not want to traverse since it is well-trodden. Fair enough. He wants to attempt something different: to enter into the mindset of various anti-liberals without any prejudice as to the truth or validity of those mindsets.
His project resonates with the “strong programme” in sociology (it had its heyday in the 80s and 90s). Its practitioners tried to achieve “epistemic symmetry”; that is, they wanted to approach all webs of belief as equivalent and contingent. In other words, they wanted to avoid the starting premise that my beliefs are true, but the other guy’s are false. Instead, the starting premise should be that the other guy is as rational or irrational as I am, that he has “reasons” for his beliefs just as I do for mine. So in attempting to describe and understand his beliefs I should evaluate them along exactly the same lines that I would evaluate my own.
Here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry on the strong programme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_programme
And here’s a long quote from Barbara Herrnstein Smith that lays out the basic idea. (From Belief and Resistance, Harvard UP, 1997, p. xvi, Smith’s italics).
“If what I believe is true, then how is the other fellow’s skepticism or different belief possible? The stability of every contested belief depends on a stable explanation for the resistance to that belief and, with it, a more or less coherent account of how beliefs generally are formed and validated, that is, an epistemology (though not necessarily a formal one). The two favored solutions to the puzzle just posed seem to be demonology and, so to speak, dementology: that is, the comforting and sometimes automatic conclusion that the other fellow . . . is either a devil or a fool—or, in more enlightened terms, that he or she suffers from defects or deficiencies of character and/or intellect: ignorance, innate incapacity, delusion, poor training, captivity to false doctrine, and so on. Both solutions reflect a more general tendency of some significance here, namely ‘epistemic self-privileging’ or ‘epistemic asymmetry’: that is, our inclination to believe that we believe the true and sensible things we do because they are true and sensible, while other people believe the foolish and outrageous things they do because there is something the matter with those people. . . .
[What would it mean/entail] to maintain ‘symmetry’ in analyses of scientific and other beliefs, those beliefs currently seen as absurd and wrong as well as those generally accepted as true? Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, this commitment to methodological symmetry is not equivalent to maintaining that all beliefs are equally valid (objectively? subjectively?) Such a claim would have to be, from a constructivist perspective, either vacuous (constructivism, by definition, rejects classic ideas of objective validity) or tautologous (to say all beliefs are equally subjectively valid is just to say that people really believe what they believe). That commitment is equivalent, however, to maintaining that the credibility of all beliefs, including those currently regarded as true, reasonable, self-evident, and so forth, is equally contingent: equally the product, in other words, of conditions (experiential, contextual, institutional, and so forth) that are fundamentally variable and always to some extent unpredictable and uncontrollable.”
The model here would be Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (Harvard UP, 1987), which attempts to lay out all those variables that combine to make a scientific theory or a scientific “fact” acquire widespread consent.
I am very attracted to a project that aspires to methodological symmetry. And want to cheer on any and all attempts to overcome the temptations to demonology or dementology. I think such a project is very, very difficult to pull off—all the more reason to try it.
The Herrnstein Smith description of the enterprise is not, however, to provide a simple recapitulation of some one’s views. Rather, she is describing what might be called a “transcendent” account of a view—if we take “transcendent” in its Kantian sense. She wants also to delineate the underlying “conditions” (or factors) that combine to make a viewpoint plausible, credible, attract a substantial number of adherents. It’s the William James point: truth is made; it only comes into existence through a process; it is not an inert, pre-existing, self-evident thing.
Since I spent my whole writing life basically describing and assessing the views of other writers, I was pushed to think about how my own practice over the years aligns with the “Strong programme”—and with what I take to be Lefebvre’s project. The most obvious thing to say is that I have never come close to (and have never really undertaken) a “transcendent” analysis. I have not considered the material, societal, institutional, and political bases that leads ideas or beliefs to be formulated, disseminated, and endorsed by various social groups. I have speculated some on the professional proclivities of intellectuals and on the nature of their institutional base: the university. But generally in that work [certain essays, and in Democracy’s Children (Cornell UP, 2002)] I don’t consider how their social positioning affects the actual ideas articulated or the belief/nonbelief attached to particular views.
Instead, I have (as philosophers tend to do) tried to 1) lay out what a certain writer thinks, 2) make sense of that thought in the places where it seems hard to understand, and 3) evaluate the plausibility of the thinking in relation to canons of consistency and rationality (very generally construed in terms of what renders an argument convincing) and what can roughly be categorized as “reflective equilibrium.” That is, do the presented ideas make sense in relation to other things we know about the world, where those “other things” come from experience, from alternative views presented by other writers than the one being examined, and from a sense of what kinds of claims “hang together” as opposed to negating one another. (One key issue here is the role of “intuitions.” How much does my judgment of a writer’s positions depend on whether they align with my pre-rational, originary, intuitions about how the world works and what is right. William James leads us to suspect that a basic sensibility, a basic orientation to others and the world, comes first–and our ideas, our articulated viewpoints, only come second. Those viewpoints exist as after the fact attempts to rationalize, to make seem reasonable, convictions that aren’t based on reason at all. I think he is right about the grounding of our convictions in the pre-rational, but also think that the process of having to articulate reasons for our views–often in response to others who challenge those views–can lead to revisions of our beliefs and commitments.)
Granting that I have not done the work of a “transcendent” account, I still think my work can be seen as occupying four different registers of philosophical presentation. 1. In Postmodernism and its Critics (Cornell UP, 1992), I did offer overviews of various writers (Derrida, Foucault, Said as well as short sections on Kant, Hegel etc.) that could serve as introductions to people not familiar with their work. However, my overviews were biased in relation to an overarching argument about the nature of postmodern thought generally. Thus, I was at pains to show what these writers shared—and how they understood and used the work of their 19th century predecessors (hence the sections on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche). So my descriptions of any writer’s work was “motivated”—and their work was evaluated (even as it was explained) within the framework of a contrast between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.” In short, an introduction (to postmodern thought) with an attitude. I was not an unbiased explicator, but I was trying to be a trustworthy one even as I acknowledged my biases. So I was trying to accomplish a two-sided goal. I wanted my readers to better understand the postmodern thinkers I discussed, but I also wanted to convince them of the political deficiencies of postmodern thinking.
2) In my book on Hannah Arendt [Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1998) I took the more standard route of attempting to provide a synthetic overview of a writer’s whole career (although I will eternally regret that I didn’t include her book on totalitarianism in my account, an omission that made no sense at the time and much less sense now). But the book is not mere description of what Arendt thought because 1) it strives to make sense of things in Arendt that are perplexing (such as her hostility to the “social” and the puzzle about what the content of political action could actually be given her views); that is, I try to put together the most plausible reconstructive accounts that would explain moments in her text that are particularly hard to make sense of. And 2) I do evaluate her thinking, allowing myself to explain where I think she gets things wrong or makes assertions that are dubious or that contradict what she asserts elsewhere. All of this, however, sticks closely to the logic and arguments of Arendt’s own writing, with very little (really, almost none) attention to the “conditions” in which Arendt wrote or under which her work circulated and found adherents/critics.
3) My work on the headnotes for the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, first edition 2001; third edition 2018) was much more straightforward textbook work. The idea was to offer a short summary of a writer’s characteristic concerns and ideas, with a look at how that writer’s work responded to or was aligned with various traditions (or schools) in the field, and a very short synapses of some objections other writers had raised to the work of the writer in question. The first person was strictly absent. I was not evaluating this writer’s views. I was simply explaining what they believed and how they were located in the field and what some responses to their work had been. All judgment was left to the reader—or, perhaps, to the field.
I don’t think Lefebvre is necessarily looking for this kind of textbook impersonality in his project. But this does approach the suspension of judgment (along with eschewing any temptation to debunking or critique or moral condemnation) that he seems to aspire to. One trouble, of course, is that textbooks are boring. The “view from nowhere” style (neither an advocate, or even in sympathy, with the views examined, nor a critic of those views) can prove unreadable after a while. Advocacy yields piquancy. On the other hand, the Olympian style of all-seeing and impartial Homer has a sublimity of its own to recommend it. So non-advocacy can have its own style, its own sources of interest. I think they are hard for a writer to access/deploy, but hardly impossible. I don’t think anyone would really want to read the over 150 headnotes in our Norton anthology one right after the other.
4) I had one final mode that was pretty much present in all my books, but was absolutely to the fore both in American Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Pragmatist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). These works were very much in line with a certain kind of philosophic practice—one that would be called (mostly by those hostile to it) “idealist” and “presentist.” My goal in both books was to present a particular understanding of what “liberalism” and “democracy” “mean” in normative (or ideal) terms. To what does an adherence to liberalism or democracy commit a person if those two ideals are understood in the way that I present? So the books argue for a certain understanding of liberalism and democracy, attempt to lay out the consequences of accepting that the presented understanding of these terms is normative and desirable, and to then consider how actual conditions in 21st century America fall short of the ideal.
In pursuing that goal, I raid writers for whatever ideas or arguments are useful to my making my case. (The subtitle of the pragmatist book is “making the case for liberal democracy.”) So I am not 1) offering an examination or explication of the various writers I do discuss and 2) am very partial in what I take from those writers—partial in both senses of the word. I am biased in what I choose to focus on in their work and incomplete in my engagement with their work. So, for example, I offer a very secular view of William James, ignoring all his mystical yearnings and interest in the para-normal. I announce in my preface that I have no investment in offering an “accurate” reading of James’s work or of any of the other pragmatist writers (Peirce, Dewey, Rorty). I am just stealing from them ideas and arguments I find help me toward articulating my own position. Thus, in sharp distinction from my postmodernism book, in making my argument in these two later books, a charge of inaccuracy in my portrayal of various writers would be beside the point. But in the postmodernism book, my whole argument would fall apart if what I had to say about Derrida or Foucault was not “true” in the sense of being a very plausible account of what they have to say. Accuracy matters in the postmodernism case, but not in the other one. The two latter books stand or fall on the basis of how convincing my “case” is, not on whether I have gotten James or Dewey “right.”
OK. So where does Lefebvre’s project fit amidst all these ways of skinning the cat. I don’t know, but I think he wants to get as close as possible to neutral, non-judgmental description.
Is pure, neutral distillation possible—in the manner of an introduction for those unfamiliar with the terrain? Lefebvre would do the hard work for us of reading/listening to various right-wing voices and then present us with an overview of their thinking, their commitments, and their beliefs. The audience consists of people with only vague and incomplete ideas about the right-wing world view and right-wing aspirations. So now, after reading his (projected) book, I know more about the right-wingers.
But . . . How much does it advance our understanding of those views if Lefebvre eschews any analysis or evaluation of them? Wouldn’t he need, at the very least, to identify the “perks” of becoming the kind of person the right-wing perfectionists want you to be? In other words, the right-wing views have their negative side (a critique of the liberal world “we” all swim in, where “we” hardly includes the majority of the world’s population) and their positive side (the blessings they say will accrue to people living in illiberal societies). But those blessings are not very well articulated (at least in right-wing American discourse). Only vague promises of more economic prosperity and retrieval of lost status are offered; their vision of illiberal man (akin to Lefebvre vision of liberal personhood in his liberalism book [Liberalism as a Way of Life, Princeton UP, 2024]) needs to be fleshed out since it is only hinted at. Does Lefebvre just let these silences sit unnoticed as he offers his overview of their thinking? In other words, his liberalism book draws out the implications of liberalism as a “comprehensive doctrine” even where those implications have rarely been noted or highlighted. The implications are a neglected feature of liberalism. Wouldn’t a writer be called upon to do the same in an exposition of right-wing views? (I have written a review of Lefebvre liberalism book that I will post in the next few days.)
Once a writer begins articulating unexpressed implications, it is very hard to avoid evaluation. As Herrnstein Smith says, all positions engage in demonology—and that is what Lefebvre is striving mightily to avoid. But the right-wing is addicted to telling lies about its opponents and to identifying scapegoats to explain current dysfunctions. Muslims for Modi; Uighurs and Tibetans for the Chinese; Mexican rapists and drug dealing immigrants for Trump etc. This isn’t a side-note for right wing views; it’s explicitly and persistently built in. So Lefebvre is going to need a strategy for addressing those claims about the enemies within—and perhaps he is also going to need to do some kind of Latourian analysis in order to avoid arm-chair psychologizing and/or his own version of demonology/dementology. In short, the goal of symmetrical epistemology is to not pathologize the right-wing views he describes. So he has to show how right-wing beliefs do make sense within a broad experiential and institutional context; but that shouldn’t mean (in my view) that he can’t point to the huge effort right-wingers make to disseminate lies and to foster animosities.
Similarly, I don’t see how Lefebvre can sidestep the fact that calls to violence are a feature, not a bug, of right-wing views. Not pathologizing such views does not entail ignoring their real world consequences. To understand why some people believe that some other people need to be deported, jailed, censored, or killed is not to condone such beliefs. But that’s a line that will be fuzzy (I think) if repudiation of violence is not made explicit. In other words, pure description of right-wing views would necessarily include accounts of right-wing hate mongering. I guess one could just lay out the fact of such hate-mongering and leave it to the reader to pass judgment. But that’s not a position (i.e. neutral and non-judgmental about violent repudiation of demonized groups of people) I would want to occupy. So, for example, can a writer just report the claims about Haitians eating cats in Ohio without also doing some fact-checking?
Maybe the easiest way to say all this is that right-wing views double down on the ”closed Society” that Lebrvre describes in his Bergson book [Human Rights as a Way of Life, Stanford UP, 2014.] For my synapsis of this book, see https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/27/alexandre-lefebvres-human-rights-as-a-way-of-life-on-bergsons-political-philosophy/
The right-wingers are stalwart opponents of “open societies”—their whole world view is built on the conviction that open societies are soul-destroying, depriving individuals of grounded communities, and upsetting the unanimity, the untroubled consensus in values and beliefs, enjoyed by tight-knit, closed groups. Hannah Arendt believed that totalitarian regimes must lie, must strive to replace the real world with a fictional one, precisely because there is no unity in the real world—never was and never will be. Plurality is a fundamental, inescapable fact about “the human condition.” And her hopeful belief was that totalitarian fictions must inevitably collapse in the face of the fundamental fact of plurality. That’s probably too optimistic; totalitarian fictions, underwritten by violence (by terror) wielded by the state can last a very long time. Historical examples abound. What such totalitarian regimes can never achieve is the moment of conflict-free harmony they claim to aspire to. Instead, the violence is unending as ever new enemies (the ones responsible for harmony not arriving) are identified.
My point is that recognizing how seductive narratives of a return to lost idylls of unity can be is very different from refusing to say how the consequences of those narratives are catastrophic. Right-wing visions must, like every world view, be disseminated through various channels that aim to persuade others of their validity, their desirability. Lefebvre’s liberalism book is an attempt to contribute to the dissemination of liberalism. His current project, it would seem, wants to stand above or beside any persuasive motive or effect. He is just going to present what right-wingers believe, without prejudicing his account by taking a negative stance toward those beliefs. No demonology, no pathologizing. As I have said, the attempt intrigues me even as I see problems with it.
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