There Is No Such Thing as Liberalism

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.

  1. 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 14th to the 19th 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

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

The Social Contract

This post on “the social contract” is going to set up a longer post on liberalism as such.

Howes correctly, and astutely, points us to Hobbes and Locke to remind us that they locate the origin of the state in the suppression of violence.  The whole social contract thing is premised on the claim that a non-state society will be one of endless violence that pits everyone against every one else.  The state, then, is a protection racket.  The only incentive to join the social contract (which, after all, means alienating various freedoms to the state) is to gain some protection against the violence visited upon oneself by one’s neighbors.

This argument–that states are necessary to the suppression of violence–can be found in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside.  The basic claim is that, without the effective and systematic enforcement of laws against violence, an endless cycle of vengeance will result.  Where law enforcement prevails, violence crimes, especially homicides, become less common.  There is very impressive statistical evidence–not least among black populations in the United States–to justify this conclusion.  Correlation is not causation, of course.  But the correlation is there.

Here is Jill Leovy’s statement of this thesis:

“This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death. homicide becomes endemic.

African-Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the long-standing plague of black homicides.  Specifically, black America has not benefited from what Max Weber called a state monopoly on violence–the government’s exclusive right to exercise legitimate force.  A monopoly provides citizens with legal autonomy, the liberating knowledge that the government will pursue anyone who violates their personal safety.  But slavery, Jim Crow, and conditions across much of black America for generations worked against the formation of such a monopoly where blacks were concerned.  Since personal violence inevitably flares where the state’s monopoly is absent, this situation results in the deaths of thousands of Americans every year” (page 8).

The biggest problem for this way of thinking is that states, because of their capacity to organize acts of violence through the creation of armed units like the police and the army, are capable of much more violence than the perpetrators of non-state violence (even where those perpetrators are organized into gangs or Mafias.)  We seem to have a tragic double-bind here: either anarchic perpetual violence in the absence of the state or large-scale state-sponsored violence.  Choose your poison.

Or, in other words, Leovy is not denying that the state uses its violence against black people.  Many of them are victims of state violence.  But the state’s failure to prosecute those blacks who murder (or violently harm) other blacks also enables a different form of violence against blacks: namely, the black on black violence that is the single biggest source of violent death among African Americans.  Despite the high incarceration rates of black men on our country, the majority of crimes in which blacks are the victims of violence go unsolved.  The “justice system” incarcerates for drug offenses and for crimes against property–and for violence against white people.  But it mostly ignores violent crimes against blacks.

Hobbes and Locke imagine individuals as having the opportunity to make a choice between anarchic freedom or a protectionist state. (The key word here is “imagine.”) They think almost everyone will choose the state.

One final thought here.  In a comment to an earlier post, Susan Bickford warns against taking violence as “natural.”  We get into a tragic bind only if we see violence as an inevitable feature of human sociality.  That’s a tough one for me.  On the one hand, I do want to support thought experiments that imagine what social conditions would generate a violence-free human togetherness.  Utopian thinking is vitally important.  But, on the other hand, I call such thinking utopian because I don’t know that we have any actual historical or contemporary instances of non-violent societies.  Yes, we have people who live their whole lives without ever acting violently–but are they members of societies in which no violence occurs?  This gets back to my worry that non-violent social movements are enabled by the protection of a state.  And this could lead to an additional worry that leading a life of non-violence is a privilege some get to have while others do not.  All of which may be just a way of saying that Ghettoside is a sobering read.

I don’t know entirely what to do with the “natural” issue.  I am inclined to say that lions are naturally violent–and that we would think it rather absurd to attempt to “reform” lions of their violent proclivities.  But what humans do is so varied that a single notion of “human nature” appears invalid.  I am very fond of the old saw that there is only one valid sociological law: some do, some don’t.  So let’s not claim anything about human behavior is “natural,” if we mean by that term behavior that is inevitable and incorrigible.  But that still doesn’t help us with designing the conditions under which violent behavior would become rare, unthinkable, or extinct.

 

 

Seeing the History of Human Freedom (Dustin Howes’s Second Post)

Here is Dustin Howes’s second post:

In this post I will address the historical arguments John forwards in his posts Defending Freedom and Collective Self-Rule.

Anthony Parel once remarked that Gandhi had been “taken over by nonviolence,” a striking point about our inability to see the full measure of his political thought. Similarly, nonviolence has been overtaken by the Indian Independence movement and the American Civil rights movement, obscuring our ability to see the full measure of its historical significance. I discuss both but place them in the context of larger trends. To do otherwise distorts our understanding of how political power has been exercised more generally. My argument in the book is that it has largely obscured the struggles that have gained freedom for many millions of people.

The three pillars of the nonviolent movement for freedom over the last two centuries are the abolitionist, women’s rights, and prodemocracy movements. The worldwide abolitionist movement was almost entirely nonviolent and indeed central to innovating the concept of what was then called nonresistance. I discuss the two important exceptions of the Haitian revolution and the American Civil War, but the organized efforts of committed, creative, relentless nonviolent activists is what brought an end to the most lucrative slave system in the history of the world. These activists succeeded in making slavery a signature moral evil and for the first time in history making it illegal everywhere. The women’s rights movement was born from women participating in abolition. With similar techniques and new innovations, feminists continue a worldwide struggle that achieved astonishing results. Without a single violent revolution, the women’s movement has already advanced freedom for more people than all the violent revolutions combined. Finally, prodemocracy, people power movements have toppled some of the most brutal regimes of the past century. The Velvet revolutions and the Arab Spring are perhaps the most prominent examples, but from Bosnia to Chile to the Philippines to South Africa nonviolence has spread democracy more effectively than violence. A potential fourth pillar is the labor movement, which I discuss extensively but has a complicated relationship to violence and nonviolence.

John asks if the organizations of voluntary collective self-rule that are the lifeblood of power require states that nourish them or at least allow them to exist. The answer is clearly no. In fact, they can form in the face of the most brutal attempts to stomp them out. They also transcend state boundaries and transform states. Regimes, laws, structures, armies, have all proven to be malleable to nonviolence, which is just to say the exercise of power by people without violence.

I discuss the Civil War in the book, but to address John’s point directly. The idea that the alternative to war was ” waiting” for the slaves to be free is strange and ahistorical. The reason the South seceded is because abolitionists were succeeding. The underground railroad in combination with making the international slave trade illegal, put tremendous pressure on the Southern economy. The idea that the Civil War accelerated the end of slavery is certainly the conventional wisdom, but half a million people dead, abolition the world over without violence, and the horrors of the post reconstruction backlash should give us pause.

Without reiterating the details of the first two chapters, I feel compelled to underscore some of the main points when it comes to the history of slavery. The Haitian revolution is the only successful large scale slave rebellion in the history of the world. Even uprisings of tens of thousands of people had all failed. Freeing the slaves of one’s opponents in warfare is a common occurrence historically and the American Civil War is another example of that. But none of the previous examples were part of a movement to make slavery itself illegal. The idea of ending slavery and the political process of passing the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments ended slavery as much as the war. Both were unimaginable until abolitionists articulated and struggled for them.

Without reiterating the details of the argument I make in my first book, I want to underscore some of the main points as they link up with the new one. John asks if Britain “was wrong to fight the Nazis.” My argument is not that all violence is unjust. Nor do I argue that violence is always ineffective. Instead, I stipulate that violence can be just and politically effective. My argument is that nonviolence shows that violence is never necessary. This is a consequence of freedom and also means that violence, even if politically effective, cannot ultimately forward the particular cause of human freedom. If there is a tragic aspect to the history of freedom, it lies in the quixotic efforts to achieve freedom with violence because it appears violence is the only option. In fact, it never is. As John reminds us in another post, the Nazis were fighting for freedom too.

Self-Sufficiency (by Dustin Ells Howes)

 

gandhi

 

Here’s is Dustin Howes’s first response to my thoughts on his book.  More to come, as I will also continue my posts on the book–and will respond to his comments when I feel moved to do so. (Dustin’s comments here connect to the post: Freedom without Violence). This first response seems to me not to call for any comments from me; it very clearly lays out a key argument of Dustin’s book and what is at stake:

Self-Sufficiency

The two figures I draw upon to understand the roots of the idea that violence expresses freedom are Pericles and Aristotle. Pericles argues in his famous funeral oration that Athenians are distinguished from others by their capacity for politics. The fact that they decide together what to do and know how to rule themselves makes Athenian men free. The highest expression of this freedom is the courage they display in warfare. When the Athenians lost the Peloponessian war, philosophers and women called the connection between freedom and violence into question. Aristotle is a nuanced reactionary to these critics, who attempts to resuscitate the freedom violence connection without celebrating empire for its own sake.

What I had not realized until John raised the issue is how this is baked into Aristotle’s definition of the polis. Aristotle says that what distinguishes a city-state from a family or a village is a word usually translated as self-sufficiency. To be clear, the “self” here cannot refer to the individual. Indeed, one way to interpret his argument is that freedom is only possible with the company of a certain number of people. Freedom and politics proper are collective. The only way to be free of dependency is to come together with others to exercise our uniquely human capacity for talking about and ruling with justice. This is contrasted with and requires the dependency of slaves and women, who are ruled by free men. The horizontal relationship  among a collective of equals is founded upon a vertical relationship between the free and enslaved largely defined by violence. As John mentions, most slaves were women and most were acquired in warfare.

Democratic freedom as collective self-sufficiency underwritten by violence that subdues the unfree is both familiar and unfamiliar in our time and the past century. Nationalism and socialism both assert a brand of collective freedom often expressed through violence. Independence and secessionist insurgencies all over the world assert that collective freedom requires a particular collective be unhampered by association with others.

Yet in the Anglo-American context, the idea of collective freedom is complicated by an individualistic understanding of self-sufficiency. In the book, I place the liberal individual squarely within a tradition that claims violence is only legitimate in the defense of freedom. Every individual has the ability to enforce the natural law, which reason tells us demands the preservation of life and liberty. The dynamic John describes where individuals find the actions of others frustrating and the potential for eliminating or dominating them liberating, is one liberals reject in theory. For thinkers like Locke for instance, any reasonable person will recognize the rights of others. However, not everyone is reasonable, some will take license (Locke refuses to call it liberty) and this is when violence becomes necessary. We might say that liberal individuals must defend liberty from those who mistakenly believe it can be expressed through violence.

But in practice, the figure of the self-sufficient individual is so wedded to his enforcement powers, that it is hard to imagine his identity without them. The sources informing the figure I have in mind are many, it may not even be one figure, and is almost exclusively masculine. The individual in the state of nature cultivating and defending his property, the republican militia man defending his free state, the frontiersman who survives with his wits and his musket, the cowboy who draws fast but only when needed, the cop who is tough but fair, the homeowner who stands ready to defend his family. The line between violence as expressing freedom and violence as defending freedom is blurry in these archetypes. Some also blur the line between individual and collective self-sufficiency. The militia man is part of a militia, the cop represents the state. In just war theory, states themselves become liberal individuals in relation to other states. Historically, certainly in the American context, rugged individualism and the free state have been set against the dependency and unreasonableness of savages, women, slaves and foreigners. So self-sufficiency does a tremendous amount of work here.

Our first response from the perspective of nonviolence might be to challenge the very notion of self-sufficiency and point to the undeniable interdependence of human beings. The purveyors of violence may wish to stand alone but they will need the help of others, and in particular, find that how others respond to their violence will largely determine its impact. This holds true for the violence of peoples or individuals.

But even while emphasizing our interdependence, advocates of nonviolence are keen to offer a quite different vision of self-sufficiency. Gandhi in particular argues that every single individual is capable of creative nonviolence and self-rule. Self-sufficiency and swaraj involve confronting violence and having the discipline to refrain from violence but encompass a great deal more as well. The spinning wheel as the symbol of independence and the centrality of home spun cloth to the movement are the most prominent examples but the entire system of cottage industries Gandhi sought to promote was inflected with the idea that individuals, villages, and nations ought to be self-sufficient.

Gandhi challenges the presumption that human need stands opposed to freedom. The labors of the ashram could be performed in conjunction with politics. He would sometimes spin while hosting prominent dignitaries. His public experiments with the mortification of his body and his glorification of self-sacrifice  stand in a complicated relationship to socialism and feminism. But on this particular issue of self-sufficiency, he shares much in common with certain versions of both. He collapses public and private, individual and collective self-rule, and the labor of the household and political action. Self-sufficiency stands in stark contrast with Aristotelian patriarchy and liberal individualism. He offers a vision of freedom where interdependence is acknowledged and valued while the capacity of individuals to provide for themselves is emphasized equally. This raises issues of political organization that I will address in other responses.  (BY Dustin Ells Howes)