One further word about my basic argument.  I am accusing those who throw around the word “liberalism” of essentialist thinking.  Such uses appear to assume that liberalism is an identifiable single thing, sharing an essence manifested in all its appearances, an essence that has remained unchanged over centuries and impervious to revision in light of changing historical conditions or experiences.  Martha Nussbaum and John Locke are, somehow, soul mates, with all the differences between them merely epiphenomenal in light of their shared essence.  That’s why I think such uses are cases of lazy and sloppy thinking.  To say the differences between Nussbaum and Locke are negligible is to refuse to actually engage their work.

I am, of course, guilty myself of using the word “liberalism.”  I wrote a book entitled American Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) that attempted to lay out the values and commitments characteristic of a certain brand of liberalism, namely the brand associated with FDR and that I thought could also be derived from the work of John Dewey, John Rawls, and Martha Nussbaum.  The book also tries to characterize various versions of modern-day conservatism, by way of contrast.

So, I guess, I am committed to using the term liberalism in cases where its lineaments are specified.  However, given the widespread flinging around of the term as if we know what it means, I think we would be better off without it.  Not that my plea for a moratorium on its use is likely to have any effect.

Here’s a few proposals to bring clarity.

1. I think the term “social democracy” has a fairly specific referent.  So, for example, a social democrat is clearly in favor of the “social rights” or “entitlements” characteristic of 20^th century Western societies: unemployment insurance, old age pensions, free public education, and the like.  So no confusion there about whether “liberalism” encompasses social welfare provisions.  Similarly, social democrats favor heavy state regulation of markets.  Social democrats also clearly  accept some form of market economy.  Finally, there are some “actually existing” social democracies, especially in Scandinavia, so we can look at social democracy in practice—and how it evolves in relation to changing historical circumstances.  In short, “social democrat” covers one type of “liberalism” (the FDR type) while clearly excluding another type of “liberalism” (the Hayek variety).  So calling someone a social democrat promotes clarity.

2. I also think it is worthwhile to distinguish broadly between the left and the right. My idea is that there are two vectors along which it makes sense to make this contrast.  The first is equality.  A leftist position is one who works toward the promotion of equality in all its guises: political, economic, social (i.e. status), material.  Rightist positions are characterized by their efforts to protect and sustain privilege.  Hence cultural conservatives want to protect “masterpieces” against the leveling impulses of the herd, just as economic conservatives want to protect accumulated wealth against the “envy” of the crowd and the “redistributionist” policies of the left.

If we take “equality” as our focus, the issue of “freedom” looks rather different.  (And I do depart from Dustin’s book insofar as I think his discussions of freedom suffer from his neglect of issues of equality.)  To be concrete: the freedom touted by someone like Hayek as the supreme political good is a freedom that necessarily, once given free rein, will produce inequality.  Forr Hayek, that is a completely acceptable outcome.  The leftist has two possible responses to such a position.  One is to say that equality is a higher good to which freedom must be sacrificed.  The other is to say that freedom, unaccompanied by the material resources to act upon it, is void of any real or “effective” value.  In short, if you want a litmus test for a position being leftist or rightist, look for the writer or party’s attitude toward equality.  That’s where the rubber hits the road.  Worth saying, also, that we are not dealing with an either/or here, but with a spectrum.  Many leftists would say that “liberals” are those who are lukewarm toward equality.  Better to think here about centrists rather than liberals.  Why?  Because of the confusion that takes certain rightist positions (such as Hayek’s or libertarians of the Ayn Rand sort) as “liberal.”   Still, keeping the eye of the ball of equality allows us to focus very sharply on what is at stake in very, very many political battles.

3. The second dimension upon which to assess political positions is power. Montesquieu is the classic political theorist who argues that concentration of power in one hand or in one branch of government is a recipe for tyranny.  Now, of course, the distribution of power is directly related to issues of equality.  So it’s a bit artificial to say these are two different dimensions.  But since equality has such a wide field of relevance, I think it worthwhile to separate out the narrower, institutional question of the distribution of power.  (Foucault, of course, has taught us to think of power as dispersed throughout a disciplinary society.  But he is careful to say that such power is exercised by its various functionaries, not possessed.) I would define power in relation to effective freedom, in terms of capacities.  Someone has power when they have the capability of achieving their desired ends.  Someone lacks power when their efforts are directed toward achieving the desired ends of another.  Of course, I can choose to work for your desired ends; but then I have made those ends my own.  Generally speaking, I would argue that we know when our efforts are constrained by the power another has over us, a power that allows them to direct our efforts in the way that they choose.  Thus, the dispersion of power (all the way down to the individual) is connected to the enhancement of freedom.

Again, we are talking a continuum here, from totalitarian states at the “right” end and anarchism at the “left” end.  Hence we could have states that, conceivably, are very egalitarian, but use centralized power to achieve and maintain such equality.  Taking Lenin’s Russia as such a state means that it is hard to say it was “leftist” or “rightist,” since it is contradictory along these two different dimensions.  Of course, we could argue quite plausibly that any concentration of power will inevitably work against equality—so that you can’t really achieve social and political equality if power is not widely distributed as well.  I take it that Dustin Howes’s argument that revolutionary violence is self-defeating is an argument along similar lines.  He is pointing to the relation between violence and power.  Where power is over others, i.e. is used to get them to do things they would rather not do, then power will often resort to violence.  And violence as a way of gathering power into one’s own hands is inegalitarian and, thus, an undermining of the very thing the revolution claims to be trying to achieve.

In short, I think attention to equality and power is a better way to proceed than a focus on freedom.  For me, freedom (and justice, the other key term among political “goods”) will be defined in relation to equality and power, which are (if you like) the more “primitive” terms.  Freedom is about having the power to do things with a reasonable chance of success, and equality is the fundamental constituent of a justice that denies privilege, that denies to any human being the right to more of the things that make success achievable.

More to come in subsequent posts.  I want to talk about Berlin’s pluralism, Rorty’s “bleeding heart liberalism,” and the whole notion of “rights.”

This post is much less a direct response to Dustin Howes’s book and more a cross between a report and a rant.  A report on something I have been thinking about for quite some time.  A rant against the silly and thoughtless ways that the term “liberalism” gets thrown around in numerous places.

The claim: there is no coherent political philosophy that is captured by the term “liberalism.”  The heterogeneous grab-bag of theoretical principles, grounding assumptions, political sentiments, and value commitments that get labeled as “liberal” do not constitute an identifiable position, especially because completely contradictory things are considered “liberal.”

Some arguments to render the above claim plausible.

1. What do F. A. Hayek, J.S. Mill, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, John Dewey, Martha Nussbaum, Jurgen Habermas, FDR, and Margaret Thatcher have in common that would justify characterizing each of them as “liberal”?  Any label that encompasses all of these figures is already bursting at any seams that might hold it together.

2. What do habeas corpus, Social Security, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Veterans Administration, and gay marriage have in common? Each of these is related to the state and its perceived limits and/or responsibilities.  And each of them is generally considered, in general parlance, to be “liberal.”  But we would be hard pressed to identify the common principle or essential characteristic that unites them.  Rather, my argument is that each of these things were developed at specific historical moments to address specific problems or issues.  There is no necessity that says that proponents of habeas corpus, as that notion was developed from the 14^th to the 19^th century, also (logically, on the pain of self-contradiction) should be proponents of gay marriage.  The various commitments of people who are called “liberals” simply do not “hang together” in some way that is attributable to a set of articulable principles.

3. Take for example, Medicare, Obamacare, and the Veterans Administration hospital system. Here we have, in order, a single-payer system utilizing non-state facilities and care-givers; a multiple payer system of insurance that is underwritten by government subsidies; and, finally, a state-run system where the hospitals and their staffs are government employees.  Which one of these is more “liberal”?  Each of them, I argue, was created in relation to a felt need and in relation to what was politically possible at the time of its passage as well as what seemed workable.  To try to hold each up against some idealize portrait of “liberalism” in order to figure out which is “more liberal” is not, as far as I can see, analytically or politically useful.  We can certainly argue about which gets the job done in a better fashion.  But to worry—or to care—about which is more liberal just seems silly.

4. Everybody hates liberalism. The term, it seems to me, has proved so unkillable because it gives everyone—on both the left and the right—something to sneer at.  Liberalism serves as the theoretical original sin of the West’s politics, the wrong turn taken at the very beginning that explains everything wrong with our societies.  For the right, liberalism is the progenitor of the “nanny state,” whereas for the left it is the enabler of ruthless capitalism.  And for both it is mealy-mouthed, sentimental, ineffective, and hypocritical.  So what is liberalism?  It is everything that you think bad and believe that your non-liberal position avoids.

5. Let’s apply this way of thinking to the understanding of liberalism to which most leftists subscribe. Liberalism is tainted by a deep commitment to individualism.  Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and families” strikes the authentic liberal note.  It’s Locke’s assumption of totally isolated individuals prior to the formation of the state that defines liberalism and explains its persistent anti-state and anti-collective biases.  Liberalism invalidates any collective action and justifies selfishness of various kinds, not least economic greed.  In this way—along with its specious division between the “public” and the “private”—liberalism is the political philosophy that goes hand-in-glove with capitalism.  The problem, of course, is that liberalism is also associated with an activist state—and it is hated by the capitalists.  Only “socialism” is a dirtier word for our industrialists and Wall Street financiers.  Are they simply mistaken that liberalism is their foe?  To solve this problem, we now have introduce distinctions between “classical liberalism,” “FDR or American liberalism,” and “neoliberalism.”  And then we get to worry about how “neoliberalism” is different from “conservatism”—and pretty soon American conservatism, which despises liberalism, turns out to be more liberal than the liberalism it abhors because the conservatives are the rugged individualists and the opponents of all governmental regulation of the “private sector.”  Since the conservatives proudly call themselves “conservative,” what is gained by insisting they are actually liberals.? Yet the contempt piled on “liberalism” by leftists more accurately describes the positions adopted by today’s soi-disant conservatives.  The head spins.

6. So my complaint is that various writers throw around the term “liberalism” as if we all know what it means—and then proceed to blame various ills on the hegemony of that self-same liberalism.  I am accusing these writers of sloppy and lazy thinking.  If you want to discuss Locke, Mill, Nozick, Hayek, FDR, or Rawls, all to the good.  But don’t talk about “liberalism,” because there is no referent for that word, at least not a coherent, understandable referent.

7. My next post will attempt to consider some sign-posts that can function to identify some political positions.