Category: Liberalism

Judith Butler on Life

Have just finished reading Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard UP, 2015), which is a bit of a slog since it is repetitive and not leavened with many concrete examples. But Butler appears obsessed with the same issues and problems that occupy much of my mental space, so I was grateful to find I am not alone in my worries or entirely off the rails. I also pretty much agree with most of her political intuitions and ambitions. As when I read Dewey, I find that I think Butler is right 80% of the time—and there are very few writers with whom I find myself in such alignment.

To the point: Butler just forthrightly declares that Arendt is wrong about “life.” What Arendt fails to register is that the means for life are “differentially distributed”—and that such distribution is a matter of politics, of power. It is, therefore, not just wrong but a matter of pernicious blindness to place the question of sustaining life outside the realm of politics, at the same time condemning those whose lives are overwhelmingly (out of necessity) devoted to “labor,” to securing the means of survival, to nonappearance in the political space of appearances.

Butler ends up, though she is adamantly resistant to admitting it, in a position akin to that of Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. Here is the key Butler paragraph:

“We have mentioned that bodies cannot be understood at all without the environments, the machines, and the social organization of interdependency upon which they rely, all of which form the conditions of their persistence and flourishing. And finally, even if we come to understand and enumerate the requirements of the body, do we struggle only for those requirements to be met? As we have seen, Arendt surely opposed that view. Or do we struggle as well for bodies to thrive, and for lives to become livable? As I hope to have suggested, we cannot struggle for a good life, a livable life, without meeting the requirements that allow a body to persist. It is necessary to demand that bodies have what they need to survive, for survival is surely a precondition for all other claims we make. And yet, that demand proves insufficient since we survive precisely in order to live, and life, as much as it requires survival, must be more than survival in order to be livable. One can survive without being able to live one’s life. And in some cases, it surely does not seem worth it to survive under such conditions. So, an overarching demand must be precisely for a livable life, that is, a life that can be lived” (208-209, emphasis Butler’s).

Butler says a little bit more about this idea of a “livable life,” but not much. She fights shy, as we would expect (and hope), of identifying any single standard by which we could judge a life’s “worth.” But her very appeal to the notion that life requires more than just survival, along with her use (throughout the book) of the term “flourishing,” means that her politics must function on two levels.

Level one is the minimalist level/position. Here the point is to protest stringently against all those forms of power and social organization that deny survival to people (and, perhaps, other beings). Along with that protest should come attempts to imagine—and even to embody—alternative organizations that do meet the “requirements” of “persistence.” In seeing those requirements as “preconditions,” Butler points toward what, in my terms, I would consider a “floor,” a minimal set of primary goods (to use Rawls’s terms) all (with no exceptions) can access. In our horrible political moment, when a resurgent right wing can openly declare its desire to deny such access (to health care, to clean air and water, to safe working conditions, to protection from state violence and from war) to some populations, insistence on that minimum has assumed a new importance. Egalitarianism in our current context takes, I believe, this form of insisting on a minimalist provision of those things that meet the “requirements of persistence.”

But Butler, like everyone who approaches this topic, takes the position that the minimalist position is not enough. It is not even clear that it should take logical or political priority. A minimalist life is not obviously a life that can be affirmed. “[I]n some cases,” as Butler puts it, “it surely does not seem worth it to survive under such conditions.” Life shouldn’t just survive, it should flourish.

And it is with that term “flourish,” [which comes from an Aristotelean tradition that Butler, in an off-hand remark earlier in the book calls “outdated” (194)] that Nussbaum’s work can prove useful. When Butler goes to flesh out what makes a life livable, she highlights “the complex relationalities” in which any body is entangled and advocates a politics that “understand[s] and attend[s] to the complex set of relations without which we do not exist at all” (209). This thought, not unsurprisingly, leads Butler into a bit of a swamp. How to think our inevitable dependency (our lives cannot persist, no less flourish without relations to other beings that also make us dependent and vulnerable) without reinforcing all the forms of dependency that power installs? In short, we need to find ways to manage dependency, to organize it, that do not enable differential access to the means of persistence and flourishing. To put in another way: the inevitable fact of dependency provides a worrisome perfect opportunity for the establishment of non-egalitarian hierarchies.

Butler’s core philosophical position (her transcendental claim in her recent books) is the dependency of the human condition (to use Arendt’s terms) or, more broadly, the condition of all planetary life. I use “transcendental” here in its Kantian sense—and Butler is performing what I called elsewhere “transcendental blackmail.” If we accept that she has identified “necessary,” inescapable conditions of our existence, then she has us where she wants us. We must come to terms with dependency because we are all dependent, whether we want to be or not.

From there, her argument must operate on three levels. The first is to oppose those who would deny that dependency is our basic condition. Here Butler retains the psychoanalytic perspective that has retreated to the margins in her recent work (as contrasted to earlier work like Gender Trouble and The Passionate Attachment to Subjection.) Humans are prone to “disavow” dependency, to fantasize a self-sufficiency that aims to escape the vulnerability to others that dependency entails. And the psychic/political costs of disavowal, especially in its generation of aggression against anything that threatens the delusion, are high.

The second level we might call the egalitarian one. Here we get the political position I have called minimalist, with its commitment to an egalitarian distribution of vulnerability—and to the resources by which we (as a political community) attempt to protect ourselves from “precarity,” from the fact that every life is open to the forces that can end life. None of us, ultimately, is protected from death. The actual things that will cause my death and the date of that death are contingent; but the fact that I will die is not contingent. Politics involves, among other things, an attempt to protect selves against untimely (premature) and unnecessary (gratuitous) death. That is where “biopolitics” enters: public health measures so I don’t die of cholera or influenza when certain actions could minimize my chances of contracting such diseases, or food distribution systems that prevent malnutrition and starvation, or refugee provisions that protect selves against state violence and/or war. The idea seems to be that there are preventable deaths, even if death itself cannot be prevented, and that politics rightfully attends to securing “life” wherever possible. To that extent, Butler is with Ruskin—and against Arendt, Taylor, and (maybe) Foucault, all of whom are deeply suspicious of a politics organized around “life” as a (if not “the”) supreme good.

The third level brings us to flourishing. Mere survival is not enough. In some conditions (in prison or a concentration camp) perhaps survival is not even a good. Such lives, in Butler’s incantatory phrase, are not deemed “livable.” So a politics should demand more than attention to the conditions of life’s persistence. Biopolitics is not enough if it only attends to biology, to the requirements of the body. Here is where the notion of “flourishing” enters—and the only specific thing Butler has to say about flourishing is that it involves the question of our relations to others—where others are not just human beings, but the whole ensemble of beings and things with whom we co-inhabit the planet. (Is this the Arendtian “world”? I think yes and no—and may take up the complexity of that question in a future post.)

Nussbaum goes much, much further in trying to specify what would qualify as flourishing. Nussbaum certainly highlights “affiliation” in her list of ten things that flourishing encompasses. She (Nussbaum) does not base the need to have relations with others that are sustaining and fulfilling on the basis of a shared dependency as Butler would, but she does recognize sociality (my term, not hers) as constitutive of life itself. To block the capacity to have families or friends (as American slavery did, for example) is to deny a fundamental requirement of life, even if the person so deprived has enough food and shelter and rest to survive. The third level, then, of a politics of life attends to those things above the minimalist requirements for survival that are part and parcel of a “full” or “flourishing” life.

Butler does not go into specifics, I think, for a whole host of reasons—and most of them are not good reasons. To put it most bluntly, I think it’s a failure of courage. To remain on the level of slogan and abstraction—the level of Butler’s repeated appeal to her notion of a “livable life,” with less frequent employment of the word “flourishing”—is to avoid risking offending anyone by listing concrete requirements for flourishing. Butler has always been hyper-sensitive (an artefact of her early formation in the schools of Hegel and Derrida) to the ways that any positive term both excludes and relies upon the negative. So, for example, Butler avoids the difficult issue of autonomy. Surely, Butler believes that flourishing would include the ability to make some basic choices for oneself: about religious belief, about where to live, about career, about romantic/sexual partners. But she is clearly also committed to the view that autonomy is precarious at the least, and a delusion at the worst. How, then, to affirm some kind of autonomy while also acknowledging how a self’s existence in a web of social, cultural, emotional, and dependent relationships qualifies that autonomy? Or, even worse, how to think through the ways that attempts to achieve autonomy are, in some cases, not only counter-productive but positively destructive? Butler, as a thinker, is allergic (it seems to me) to thinking through trade-offs and compromises among competing goods. By remaining on a certain level of abstraction, she can avoid such messiness.

So let me end by laying my cards on the table. I think that I find Butler’s recent work so appealing, so consonant with my own worries and obsessions, because I think hers is a liberal sensibility in the Richard Rorty way of describing that sensibility. Rorty calls it “bleeding heart liberalism,” a deep disgust at the suffering that humans inflict on other humans (which can now be extended to a disgust with the way humans treat non-human beings and the environment) and the consequent attempt to organize politics to minimize suffering. Add to that sensibility the egalitarian insistence that all humans have an equal claim to be protected from suffering—and to live a full life—and you get the fundamentals of liberalism. The details (where the devil resides) is in how to organize the polity to advance those goods. But the emotional bases of liberalism lie in that antipathy to inflicted suffering—no matter what the source (the state, the corporation, the bully) of that suffering.

But there is also another way of thinking about liberalism, the Isiah Berlin way, and here Butler fights shy of liberalism. Berlin’s focus was on plural goods and trade-offs. Basically, he was saying that humans can’t get it all to work logically and seamlessly, that our beautiful philosophical models, logically coherent, can never be materialized. Instead, we live amidst the endless contestation of competing goods, many of which are fully worthy of endorsement, but which cannot be all realized simultaneously. It is learning how to live with, manage, and tolerate compromises—even as whatever trade-off we have accepted today will be rejected and revised tomorrow—that characterizes a certain kind of pragmatic liberalism. Call it “good enough” politics (echoing Melanie Klein on mothering), with the added proviso that any arrangement will only be temporary, and will always fail to satisfy someone. Politics is endless wrangling—and thus deeply unsatisfying. But the dream of ending the wrangling is the stuff of the ever present frustration with parliamentary democracy—and most often fuels authoritarian visions that hope to transcend the displeasures of pluralism.

I am not accusing Butler of being an authoritarian thinker. She is as wary of being authoritarian as any writer that I know. But I do think that wariness leads her to pull her punches fairly often. She won’t take a concrete stand for fear of seeming to want to legislate. But I take Berlin’s point to be that legislation is something we need to do, even as every act of legislation is an imperfect compromise, an unsatisfying trade-off. We can’t get what we want, and all too often don’t get what we need. But holding out for the perfect is no solution to that dilemma. As Rorty always insisted, we are in the realm of the comparative when it comes to making judgments about political decisions, actions, and arrangements. We are not in a position to identify—even less to enact—the best. We are only in a position to consider if this action, arrangement, law, decision is better than that one. Butler only does that kind of judging at a very high level of abstraction, where a livable life is better than a non-livable one.

Free Speech and Civility

I have, over the past month, been a member of a University committee that has produced a “resolution” that will have the faculty at UNC endorsing the “Chicago principles” on free speech.

I went into our deliberations deeply suspicious of this whole furor about “free speech” on campus. If the ability to speak one’s mind freely is in jeopardy in the United States, it is not on college campuses the main threat exists. An excellent law review article we were given to read made it very clear that case law is unambiguous: employees have just about no right to free speech. The courts have upheld corporation’s right to fire any employee for just about any reason, including expressing an opinion the employer finds objectionable. Similarly, high school students have almost no right to free speech—and absolutely no right to a free press. High school newspapers are routinely censored and, it turns out, so are college newspapers.

I remain convinced that the furor over free speech on campus is a red herring, a typical jujitsu move by an authoritarian right wing that loves to portray itself as the victim of an authoritarian left.

Furthermore, I think that no one has a “right” to speak on a college campus. Universities are in the business of evaluating knowledge claims. Your opinion that the Holocaust did not happen or that climate change is not real or caused by human actions does not meet the minimum standards by which academia determines the legitimacy of statements. The university can—and should—extend invitations to speak judiciously—and is fully justified not to extend such invitations to those who reject canons of evidence and logic that govern the identification of knowledge in specific fields, nor to those who espouse views that certain people should not be on our campus as students or teachers.

And, finally, I came in very sympathetic to the idea that speakers who express disdain and outright hostility to members of the university community should not be given an opportunity to express their uncivil (to put it mildly) views on campus.

Our deliberations changed my mind. The lawyers in the room convinced me that, simply as a matter of law, there was no way to limit what could be said on a campus that is, after all, public property. If someone wants to walk across our campus carrying a Confederate flag and spouting racist bile, there is no legal recourse but to allow him to continue (unless direct threats or incitements to violence are uttered). And, on the whole, that’s a good thing.

Why a good thing? Because I do remain convinced that threats to free speech come more from the right than from the left. So it would be a massive mistake, at this moment (or any moment) in time, to let the right wrap itself in the mantle of free speech, while the left tries on various forms of abridging that freedom. Not only are the optics bad, but it is also a substantive mistake. Just because the devil can quote scripture, that doesn’t mean we should cede the field to the devil. Democracy, human rights, and now free speech have been slogans used by the right in the past twenty years to justify hateful and disastrous policies. But we need to accept as inevitable that such terms will be contested—and that all sides will try to wrap themselves in the mantle of these high ideals. It is one of the jobs of the left to fight the corruption of these terms, to fight for what we deem their proper and salutary referents.

So: I would much prefer that no one in our community invite Richard Spencer or Ann Coulter to come on campus to speak. We are not compelled to invite anyone—and we should not dignify their bile with such an invitation. But we are also not in a position to keep them from walking onto campus and speaking their piece.

Finally, I did come to believe that a strong statement on free speech might prove useful to our university’s employees, who do not feel free to speak their minds. Unprotected by either academic freedom or tenure, they feel all the precarity that afflicts employees in this day and age. Perhaps, they might be able to leverage this enunciation of principle to afford themselves more freedom.

All that said, the Chicago principles seemed to me an aggressive, in your face, statement of the principle of free speech. That is, those principles are couched in such a way to support the right wing narrative about the suppression of non-leftist ideas on campus. So I rewrote the Chicago principles in a way that I thought a) softened their implied criticism of leftist censors and b) indicated that the law was not the only norm operative when considering the tenor of speech on campus.

My idea is that universities should be committed to productive speech, to dialogic exchanges that actually move the conversation forward, that build bridges across intellectual, political, disciplinary, and other divides. We could, while acknowledging the stringencies of the First Amendment, also articulate a commitment to civility—and recognize that it was our collective responsibility as a community to realize those ideals of civility. My thought was that universities could model the kinds of civil conversations that have become increasingly rare, even impossible, in our society. I will even venture to say that I have been party to many such productive conversations over my years in academia. The way that this committee’s meetings changed my mind offers only one example.

So here, in italics, is the way that I rewrote the Chicago principles, with the aim of outlining the legal norms while also adding to them an extra-legal statement of support for a norm of civility:

The University greatly values civility—and we remind all the members of our community that they share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect. The advancement of knowledge depends fundamentally on open-mindedness, which entails granting a hearing to even seemingly outrageous claims and views. Because all views share a right to free public expression, the University may restrict expression only if it violates the law, falsely defames a specific individual, constitutes a general threat or harassment, unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality issues, or is directly incompatible with the functioning of the University. In addition, the University may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the University. These narrow exceptions afford the University the ability to constrain speech and actions that would unduly interfere with others’ freedom of expression and/or are not instances of protected speech under the First Amendment. The requirements for civility and open-mindedness extend beyond such legal protections—and a truly welcoming and productive intellectual community requires forms of mutual respect and civility that cannot be mandated by law.

In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose. Indeed, fostering the ability of members of the University community to engage in such debate and deliberation in an effective and responsible manner is an essential part of the University’s educational mission.

This attempted revision proved a spectacular failure. We have not yet had our faculty vote on whether to endorse the Chicago principles. But we at UNC will vote on the unrevised principles (reprinted below), with their stringent statement of the legal requirements, including the Chicago principles’ explicit comment (in the unrevised principles) that “civility” cannot be used as a standard to censor someone’s speech.

What caused the failure? Basically, the notion that appeals to “civility” would be used to silence unwelcome expressions of opinion. The employees, especially, saw “civility” as a subtle—or not so subtle—form of censorship, of putting people in their place. Politeness was a bar to candor as well as a way to shut people up.

I don’t fully know what to make of this argument. On the one hand, it fills me with despair. It suggests that people have no desire to be civil. They just want to shout loudly and score points, tossing “red meat” to those on their side. I guess we should never underestimate the pleasures of indignant self-righteousness. It does seem emblematic of our times that civility is seen as a vice, not a virtue.

On the other hand, this seems a case where the current obsession with “privilege” is applicable. Sitting where I do, as a tenured and respected member of the university’s faculty, my words in just about any setting are met with respect. I seldom feel that I have not been heard, while no one dares to shut me up, and I have tenure to protect me even when I criticize the Chancellor in the press and at public meetings. Civility, in other words, comes easy for me—and poses no threat.

I still want to make a plea for civility—one that returns to this notion of “productive” dialogue. If we cannot foster respect for our interlocutors, we are not going to move forward. Yes, it’s the old liberal dilemma—which keeps rearing its familiar ugly head precisely because it is a real dilemma. How are we to respond to participants in the dialogue who are committed to shutting the dialogue down or to excluding some from participation in the dialogue? I can’t believe that abandoning a norm of civility, based upon an attempt to establish mutual respect and an equal right to be fully heard, is a fruitful response to that dilemma.

Here are the unrevised Chicago principles:

[T]he ideas of different members of the University community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.

The freedom to debate and discuss the merits of competing ideas does not, of course, mean that individuals may say whatever they wish, wherever they wish. The University may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the University. In addition, the University may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the University. But these are narrow exceptions to the general principle of freedom of expression, and it is vitally important that these exceptions never be used in a manner that is inconsistent with the University’s commitment to a completely free and open discussion of ideas.

In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose. Indeed, fostering the ability of members of the University community to engage in such debate and deliberation in an effective and responsible manner is an essential part of the University’s educational mission.

As a corollary to the University’s commitment to protect and promote free expression, members of the University community must also act in conformity with the principle of free expression. Although members of the University community are free to criticize and contest the views expressed on campus, and to criticize and contest speakers who are invited to express their views on campus, they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe. To this end, the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.

Utopian Passion

The heartfelt disgust at neoliberalism’s cruelty that animates Hardt and Negri’s work is, quite simply, admirable. And the equally passionate desire for the “commons” and for “cooperation”—along with the desire to imagine a politics, along with forms of political action, that body forth such cooperation in a shared space—is also praiseworthy. Just because their sharp analysis of neoliberalism is not matched with a correspondingly acute description of what to do next is no reason to disparage the work.

Here’s the fullest statement of the longed-for utopia in the book.

“The history of general strikes is animated by an insurrectional and constituent passion: not passion in the sense of a charismatic or thaumaturgic event, but passion that lives in the highest moments of political ethics, in the intersection of resistance and solidarity, when spontaneity and organization, insurrection and constituent power are most closely tied together. It is an act, to use the language of ethical philosophy, when rationality and love triumph together. In the ‘strike’ passion, reason creates a dynamic of common freedom and love generates an expansive action of equality. Calls for coalition, tous ensemble, speak the language of reason and freedom; expressions of camaraderie, companer@s, sisters and brothers, are the language of love and equality. The general strike thus gives flesh to the bare bones of the language of human rights” (Assembly, 241).

“O, then was it bliss to be alive. The resemblance to Arendt’s celebration of “the lost treasure of revolution” impresses me. The importance of ends, of purposes, of outcomes shrinks; it is the political action itself that looms large, the ecstatic moment of union with others in the fierce present of “resistance,” of love. Success is almost beside the point. The strike is not a moment of building or of becoming. It is a moment of pure being, of being-with, of the ecstatic loss of self in something larger than the self.

(To be fair, Hardt and Negri’s term “constituent power” is meant to signal that the power immanent to the general strike is constructive, it constitutes things. They certainly don’t want to say that the strike, like Auden’s poetry, “makes nothing happen.” But “constituent power” is another instance of their sloganeering. How this power constitutes anything and what it constitutes are never addressed.)

The longing for a worthy collective, a larger cause to which I can willingly, happily, in a full unshadowed endorsement, immerse myself must beckon to us all at some point or another. Even the staunchest individual imagines a soul mate, an absorbing and fulfilling love. A perfect union.

Love, admittedly, is difficult. I am often astonished at both how mundane love is—and how improbable at exactly the same time. We are all such prickly beasts, full of selfish desires and self-regarding hurts and shames and needs. The slightest things rub us the wrong way, make us wrinkle our noses in disgust. “I don’t want to be associated with that.” Such sensitivities afflict our personal loves and consistently poison less personal associations. So when it actually works, when our incorporation (a potent word when its bodily root is taken seriously) is complete—and satisfying–it seems nothing short of a miracle.

And here’s the rub. Few experiences appear to scratch the itch for belonging so intensely as war. Nostalgia for war is rampant among those who have participated in one. And Hardt and Negri’s romance of the general strike sounds remarkably similar to soldier’s memories of being in the army. The logic of William James’s famous essay, “A Moral Equivalent of War,” weighs upon me. James was eloquent, in Varieties of Religious Experience, about the desire to merge the self into some cause, some entity, larger than self. In many respects, that longing is religion for James. War can look like religion’s equivalent—the stakes are appropriately high, the denial of the self’s petty needs fully imperative.

“War is the health of the state,” wrote Randolph Bourne. Presumably, war thus should be the exact opposite of everything that Hardt and Negri desire from politics. They want ecstasy without destruction, with everything on the line even though violence is absent. I sympathize. I, too, want that. At least some of the time. I am, I suspect, more attached to individuality than they are. I want to reserve my right to have reservations, to maintain an ironic distance from collective enterprises, to be allowed to judge them as well as participate in them. No unreflective belonging.

One final thought. Bourne’s famous statement can be taken in another way. Reading the book about the American war in the Pacific, it is impossible not to be impressed by the feats of organization and coordination the state managed during World War II. The moving parts were almost infinite; the details that needed to be anticipated and then taken care of simply mind-boggling. As an intellectual challenge, a challenge then joined to the material and psychological challenges, the war—and how America responded to it—is awe-inspiring. If anything ever proved that communism could work, it was what America did in the five years from 1940 to 1945, when a centrally planned economy that appropriated every single member of society and assigned them their place in the war-making machine performed its task extremely well.

Hornfischer (the author of the book on the Pacific War) is a fairly typical right-leaning military historian. He is fully taken with the romance of American power and deeply proud of American know-how and courage. He never cottons on the extent that the America of the war years was a communist society if ever there was one. But he also pays just about no attention to the sand in the machine. For him, the war operations were just about frictionless, with only a few minor, if unfortunate, mishaps (he really can’t even bring himself to call them screw-ups). Most telling, perhaps, is the fact that he deems artillery and air bombardment (long-distance killing) as almost always effective, whereas most analysts have concluded that the military has always over-estimated their efficacy.

It wasn’t just for humor’s sake, with no connection to reality, that the common sailor resorted to the ever-present euphemism, SNAFU. Situation Normal All Fucked Up. The best laid plans and all that. The romance of war, like all romances, tends to eliminate the warts. Many a soldier was not a happy camper, and even the happy ones usually had scant respect for the abilities of the higher-ups, with their fancy uniforms and even fancier plans.

Assembly is driven by a desire for a moment (at least a moment, even though it seems to suggest we could have an era) when all are in lockstep. Be careful what you wish for. War, based on nationalist solidarity, is the closest we’ve come to such ecstatic unity. Maybe the revolutionary moment, the longed for assembly of the multitude out in the public square protesting the evils of neoliberalism, compares. But I’ll put in my two cheers for liberal pluralism all the same. Lockstep just doesn’t appeal to me all that much.

Independence and Freedom Not the Same

“It would be wrong to muddle independence with freedom. No one is less independent than a free citizen” (269, footnote 46, in The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution).

No statement in Tocqueville more succinctly captures the difference between his version of conservatism and the hyper-individualistic ideology that passes as conservatism in contemporary America. I sympathize with the Corey Robin point that conservatism is always about protecting privilege, that Burke’s corporate conservatism and Hayek’s individualistic conservatism may look different in various ways, but, au fond, they are both about preserving power and wealth in the hands of thems that already gots.

That’s why republican virtue is perhaps the best tradition to attach Tocqueville to. He is against liberal individualism if that means vigorous pursuit of economic prosperity; but he is all in favor of individual rights, seeing the protected civil liberties are essential—and that they should be extended to all. In that respect, he is not a conservative. He has no truck with privileges being granted to only one class of citizens. He is an egalitarian.

But . . . He also believes that there should be a political class that takes on the responsibility of managing public affairs. It is that class which truly enjoys “freedom,” but which lacks independence precisely because of its great responsibilities. Self-government (which is freedom) is not an exemption from the collective; it is, rather, action within the collective. That’s where he is not liberal—and where he tends to conservatism because he is an elitist about this political class. But it is also where he is most at odds with contemporary American conservatives for whom independence is the essence of freedom—the very mistake that Tocqueville deplores.

Two complications.

1. “The aims recommended by the reformers were many and varied but their methods were the same. They wanted to borrow the strength of central government and use it to smash everything and rebuild it according to a new plan of their own devising. Such a task could, they thought, be accomplished only by the central power” (77). This is the liberalism of fear (Judith Schlar’s term.) Fear the accumulation of power. Build in checks and balances; disperse power so it resides in several locations. Yes, he wants a political class—but he also wants to hem in its power by various institutional safeguards. Revolutionaries are to be feared both because they want to smash everything, want to rebuild according to a plan grounded solely in unrealistic theory, and because they are all about accumulating power into their own hands. They are the quintessential centrailizers.

2. Not completely clear in Tocqueville what he sees as the optimal relation of the legislative to the executive power. He is very clear that local assemblies, the more local the better, should legislate. But he also seems to say in various places that a truly free people executes its own decisions. The doing should be done by the people who are also the beneficiaries of those actions. So he can seem a very radical proponent of direct or participatory democracy at times—even while at other times he relies on a distinct political class to alone be the political actors. So he can write with despair about a situation in which “no one imagined that an important matter could be brought to a successful conclusion without the involvement of the state” (77)—suggesting that his ideal is when the state proves unnecessary because the people take matters into their own hands. But he will show a deep distrust of the people in other places. And, of course, his anti-state bias in favor of a republican mode of citizen involvement has all the classic scale problems that afflict the republican tradition. The emphasis on the local works against any larger political entity—but empire and, subsequently, the nation-state are persistent historical forms that swallow up small-scale city-states and their like.