Socialism and Liberalism
Let me start by declaring myself an ‘enemy’ of ‘the Open Society.’ If you are smart enough, you will understand what I mean by that. I draw attention to the extent to which liberal philosophers have consistently repudiated socialism as a collectivism and a totalitarianism. In the ‘Open Society,’ all goods and platforms are ‘tolerated’ within the sphere of ‘conflict pluralism.’ Attempts to institute a good that supplants ‘neutral’ liberal institutions and you are declared an ‘enemy’ beyond the public pale. The public realm becomes a realm of powerless self-cancellation, leaving nothing but the anarchy of individual choice.
In launching a sustained critique of liberalism I have found that people are really discomforted by the view that there are different ways of seeing and understanding the views they hold dear; the experience is even more discomforting when you expose the usual left-right stereotypes to show all the protagonists in the political theatre are liberals. When you are deep in a consensus about liberalism as constituting all good things for all nice people, the revelation is experienced with particular shock and horror. People are in denial here. They do not see that the liberalism they are wedded to is the source of the moral and social ills of the modern age. They are a long time in learning lessons here.
“The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. ... The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.”
C Wright Mills "Liberal Values in the Modern World," in Power, Politics and People (1963), p. 189.
To keep expounding those ideals, oblivious to the absence of a supporting moral and communal infrastructure sustaining social practices and modes of conduct, is to invite failure, hopelessness, and misery. And a tendency to resort to surrogates.
Climate change is a collective consequence of uncoordinated incremental individual choice made out of rational self-interest. Same with regard to inequality and division. These externalities are the consequences of a classical liberalism in which it is the right of each to do as they will with their own. Horrified liberals have grown accustomed to seeing such actions as the product of a conservative right. People on the right who justify the anarchy of the rich and powerful that liberals contest are quite right to argue their case in classical liberal terms. The economics of Hayek, Von Mises, Friedman and so on are all liberal. The politics of a Nozick, too, for whom taxation is organised theft and coercion, is also classically liberal. This is the economic wing of liberalism. I trace the problem to source, to the liberal ontology which separates individuality and sociality, the individual and the collective, abstracting these terms from each other and thereby turning both into abstractions. Given this split, liberalism is characterised by an institutional division between the state and civil society. Liberalism is incapable of articulating a conception of the good life through the state as universal community and ethical agency. Affirming the moral and ontological primacy and ultimacy of the individual, liberalism emphasizes that individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit, so long as they do non-harm within the law. Instead of being the embodiment of a positive good, the state and law are strictly neutral frameworks holding the ring between competing views. Liberalism is agnostic on the good, allowing individuals to pursue their own good through their own choices in the private realm. This is, of course, disingenuous in that the neutralised public realm correlates precisely with liberal values and institutions. Civil society becomes a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism, wrote Marx. That view is perfectly consistent with Thomas Hobbes’ view of society as ‘the war of all against all.’ Liberalism presents this more positively as the sphere of ‘conflict pluralism’ in which all are allowed to express their views of the good. The problem, as Marx pointed out, is that this sphere of assertion and counter-assertion is a mutual self-cancellation that, in time, becomes a mutual self-annihilation. Lacking an overarching and authoritative moral framework embodying and articulating a view of the good, the view of morality as irreducible subjective choice/value judgement dissolves the moral and social realm. All that there is is Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ monitored and checked by the authoritarian state. Here is where the universal egoism and antagonism of liberalism in its economic wing generates the surrogate universalism of the abstract state. It is this latter that those most shocked and outraged by the critique of liberalism espouse as liberalism. They identify liberalism with the use of the public realm and public resources for the social and common good. This is surely better than the libertarian anarchy of the rich and powerful in civil society, no? It is actually the political counterpart of the economic reality of liberalism. It is, Marx argued, the bourgeois heaven constituted in reaction to the bourgeois hell of civil society. (He argued this most explicitly in On the Jewish Question and other of the early writings, but also elsewhere; it was his consistent view). Marx’s point is that the universality and commonality that human beings need as social beings is suppressed and thwarted in bourgeois civil society as a sphere of antagonism and egoism. As a result, this need is projected upwards and outwards upon the abstraction of the political state as a surrogate community.
We are therefore trapped within the false dichotomies and politics arising from the liberal ontology. In falsely separating individual and social, liberalism abstracts two essential aspects of human nature from each other, wrenches them from social context, dehistoricizes them and turns them into abstractions. The stereotypical political division between individual and state is a division between two wings of liberalism. Most of all, it is a division between abstractions, the fiction of the discrete self-choosing, self-maximising individual separated from the warm, affective ties and bonds that confer identity, on the one hand, and ‘the abstraction of the political state’ (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State) as surrogate community articulating an abstract common good, on the other. In fine, remaining firmly within liberal terms, the reaction against the depredations of the rich and the powerful in the economic wing of liberalism causes recourse to the abstract community of the state and law in order to institute some semblance of the unity, peace, and commonality human beings as social beings require. I argue that a genuine universality and commonality requires that we transcend the liberal terms of the debate, mired as they are in false dualisms and abstractions based on a false ontology.
In defining a concept of ‘rational freedom,’ I have sought to refute the liberal bogey of "state" and "government" as external, alien, abstract and remote bodies inimical to individual liberty. Political institutions certainly can be repressive infringements on individual liberty, but the issue is not this simple truth. I am more concerned with analysing the social conditions and historical contexts in which commonality and universality take abstract and potentially repressive form. The "individual" and "government" set against each other in contemporary political debate are both abstractions which derive from a liberal ontology that falsely separates individuality and sociality. It is that ontology that I consistently target in my work. It exposes me to criticism for being a nasty person, to the extent that liberalism is the doctrine upheld by all nice people who stand for all good things for all people. I never take self-image as truth, a view which is entirely consistent with the critical approach of Rousseau and Marx and the search for authenticity. It upsets people. Fine. It upsets me to have my views distorted, dismissed, traduced.
The result of the liberal ontology is a false antithesis that comes to be fought out in politics between liberals of the right (individual liberty, 'free' markets, ‘free’ trade, subjective choice in economics) and liberals of the left (top-down state bureaucratic collectivists seeking to advance social justice, welfare and common good). Both sides in this political contest fail to see the extent to which they are both liberal, each the counterpart of, or reaction against, the other. They are two cheeks of the same backside, as the saying goes. The economic libertarians fail to see that the external remote government they decry is itself the product of the modern capital system. The state as an external, abstract body remote to individuals is a ‘modern product,’ Marx wrote in the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State:
The abstraction of the state as such was not born until the modern world because the abstraction of private life was not created until modern times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern product.
Marx EW CHDS 1975
Marx develops a sustained critique of abstraction in liberal society. I can do no more than quote certain passages here. Marx’s reasoning is close and dense, so I suggest people actually go to the original texts (or make the effort to read my own work):
The difference between the religious man and the citizen is the difference between the tradesman and the citizen, between the day-labourer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction which exists between religious man and political man is the same as exists between the bourgeois and the citoyen, between the member of civil society and his political lion's skin.
Marx EW OJQ 1975
People are still inclined to think socialism is statist and authoritarian. They do so for a couple of reasons: 1) because left liberalism seeking redress to social division and iniquity took it down this route, relocating it from the social to the still abstracted political realm; and 2) because given the dualism between individuality and collectivity, any form of government, law, community, and authority cannot but seem an infringement of individual liberty. (I address these questions in my 2018 works on Marx. I supply references at the bottom.) The liberal view holds that the individual is ontologically ultimate as a self-possessing being prior to society, entering society to either preserve or advance self-interest, exiting when these things are no longer served. Individuals contract in or contract out according to self-interest. More, individuals are free to enter and exit. That seems reasonable. I would just draw attention to the difficulties liberals are having in devising a climate politics in which all are enjoined to accept a common collective solution. Individuals bail out for reasons of self-interest, and are abused as climate deniers for doing so. According to the liberal framework we live under, individuals are entitled to bail out of coerced common actions via government. The problem cannot be resolved in liberal terms. The recourse to pressure, protest, bullying on the one hand and ambitious governmental legislation and regulation on the other is inevitable in liberal terms. And inadequate. We are trapped in a false antithesis ‘debating’ abstractions endlessly, hence protest, outrage, anger, and indignation. I write more on this below with respect to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre.
The (abstract) State that libertarians reject arose in symbiotic relation with capital and continues in said relation. We are being enjoined to enter a debate between different wings of liberalism. I seek to transcend the terms of that debate, precisely because the issues we need to address are without resolution in liberal terms. Protagonists on either side will be discomforted by my critique. That cannot be my concern.
Marx is crystal clear on this. The above quote on abstract individuality and commonality is from his early writings in 1843. He reaffirmed this view at the end of his life, challenging the newly formed socialist parties on their commitment to a “free state.” In the Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875, Marx wrote:
“A free state - what does that mean?
“It is by no means the goal of workers who have discarded the narrow mentality of humble subjects to make the state 'free'. In the German Reich the 'state' has almost as much 'freedom' as in Russia. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed on society into one thoroughly subordinate to it.”
Marx CGP 1974
I could repeat many such passages from Marx. His view is clear. These left-right debates over “state” and “individual” are sterile and are based on the false antitheses imposed on us by a liberal ontology that separates individuality and sociality. The ‘state’ and ‘government’ that libertarians of the right attack are the very alien concepts of power and public life that are engendered by the capital system itself. The state here is capital’s political command centre. As a competition of capitals and subjectless anarchy of production, capital cannot supply the unity it needs to survive. The state is one of capital’s second order mediations designed to impose this unity on society.
The response back is not that of the liberal left, the bureaucratic state management of society and economy, but the restitution and reorganisation of social power beyond such false dichotomies. And that means the end of the ‘abstraction of the state’ through a recovery of a genuine public life, what Marx called a ‘true state.’ And it means a government that is no longer external to the governed, confronting the individuals composing the demos in alien form. That alien politics defines ‘government’ in the capital system, a system of alien politics and power, an alienated system of production in which the endless accumulation of material quantity does nothing to fill the big gaping hole where the soul once was. So much misery and hopelessness in the midst of material abundance! This is the same system which, in its very material success, is kicking the biosphere over the cliff, and civilization with it. A system that determines our lives with irresistible force. The new idol. If you think that left wing, then try the work of Catholic conservative Patrick Deneen. In his recent book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen is unsparing on the libertarians of the right who have divided societies within by way of their economic anarchy and on the libertarians of the left whose ethical and cultural relativism has unravelled communities and spread confusion.
I shall quote Marx at length here, in the hope that people who see themselves as radical come finally to see the extent to which liberalism is inimical to the emancipatory project of the Left. (That’s an overstatement. In my work, I adopt an immanent critique of liberalism in which the universality of citizen rights are distinguished from the egoism of bourgeois rights and radicalized in democratic form. Liberalism is transcended by way of socialism).
The constitution of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals - who are related by law just as men in the estates and guilds were related by privilege - are achieved in one and the same act. But man, as member of civil society, inevitably appears as unpolitical man, as natural man. The rights of man appear as natural rights, for self-conscious activity is concentrated upon the political act. Egoistic man is the passive and merely given result of the society which has been dissolved, an object of immediate certainty, and for that reason a natural object. The political revolution dissolves civil society into its component parts without revolutionizing these parts and subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, of labour, of private interests and of civil law, as the foundation of its existence, as a presupposition which needs no further grounding, and therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as he is a member of civil society is taken to be the real man, man as distinct from citizen, since he is man in his sensuous, individual and immediate existence, whereas political man is simply abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, moral person. Actual man is acknowledged only in the form of the egoistic individual and true man only in the form of the abstract citizen.
Marx describes Rousseau's description of the abstraction of the political man as a good one, quoting Rousseau from the Social Contract:
Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a people's institutions must feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, human nature, of transforming each individual, who in himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which he somehow receives his life and his being, of substituting a partial and moral existence for physical and independent existence. He must take man's own powers away from him and substitute for them alien ones which he can only use with the assistance of others.
J.-J. Rousseau, Du control social, Book II, London, 1782, p. 67.
Marx continues:
All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man himself.
Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person.
Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres [own forces] as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.
Marx EW OJQ 1975: 234
To simplify greatly, that involves transcending political emancipation to achieve human emancipation in general, going beyond the abstract universality, commonality, and equality of liberalism to substantive forms of these things under socialism.
I note I have upset the liberals again, who reject my incredibly well-read and well-researched, designation of them. What can I say? What standards are we applying when it comes to definitions? "How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?" To argue over definitions is to imply that there really are objective standards enabling resolution of different views. Nominalism or realism? I’m a realist. Hobbes claimed that words were merely the counters of fools. All that there is is power and its accumulation. One accumulates or gets accumulated. That’s the competitive society that characterises liberalism, not just in economics but in interpersonal relations.
I developed my view here through a critical concept of alien control deriving from Marx. For Marx, both the abstraction of the modern state and capital are alienated social powers which ought to be restored back to the communities of place, work, and practice from which they originated. I developed Marx’s argument for the practical reappropriation of social power in terms of a self-governing society constituted on the basis of forms of social self-mediation. It’s a view, I later discovered, which Alasdair MacIntyre has expressed in his own work:
“[W]hat we confront today is a new leviathan, the-state-and-the-market, a monstrous amalgam of the public and the private, of interlocking and interacting corporations and government agencies of heterogenous relationships.”
— Alasdair MacIntyre
To overcome this alienation of control from human beings, MacIntyre argues for the scaling down of decision-making and power to regional levels and the return to small-scale production.
At a certain point, it becomes quite difficult to distinguish socialism and conservatism in this quest to overcome the tyranny and force of abstraction through the scaling of power to proximal human dimensions. We could refer here to Burke’s ‘little platoons’ and Tocqueville’s intermediary associations. I think the difference lies in establishing the connection between ethics and economics. I note the extent to which conservative philosophers I admire, figures such as Robert Nisbet and Roger Scruton, are big on the alienation of power away from community to the state, but silent on the similar alienation that occurs in economics. I agree with the criticisms such thinkers make with respect to the bureaucratic encroachment of the central state upon civil society. In my writings I emphasise the fact that Marx made precisely this criticism. Indeed, Marx’s critique of the alien politics of the modern abstraction of the state came before his more famous critique of political economy targeting capital. There are interesting developments in modern conservative thought, in the way that the likes of Patrick Deneen are incorporating what is to all intents and purposes a Marxist critique of economics into their accounts of a dominant but failing liberal order.
The liberal institutional division between the state and civil society has the effect of maintaining a strict separation between public and private spheres. There are many virtues to this division, strictly delimiting the scope of politics to avoid an oppressive extension of ‘the political’ over the private lives of individuals. But that dualism also encourages the view that politics is primarily an electoral activity centred on the formal political spheres, obscuring the primacy of local political activity. It fosters a focus on the pursuit, capture, and monopolisation of political power in centralised institutional forms, to the neglect of local concern and control. Without denigrating national politics, MacIntyre argues that “all politics must begin on the level of local problems.” MacIntyre’s view articulates the principle of subsidiarity at the heart of Catholic social ethics, entailing the view that power and resources must reside at the lowest level of competence.
What is surprising about MacIntyre’s work is the extent to which the conclusion to After Virtue is so frequently quoted, and then interpreted in abstraction from the claims which lead MacIntyre to draw the conclusion that he did. Here is the famous conclusion:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different
—St. Benedict. MacIntyre 18 After Virtue
Conservatives like Rod Dreher are bereft of hope with respect to contemporary civilization and thus take ‘the Benedict Option,’ according to which they withdraw from the prevailing culture to cultivate the virtues in their local communities. It’s a move which a favourite thinker of mine, Lewis Mumford, recommended long ago in face of the Megamachine. Mumford argued for withdrawal and conversion before it becomes possible once more to return to virtuous living.
What tends to be ignored is the argument which led MacIntyre to draw this conclusion. In the first chapters of After Virtue, MacIntyre explains the reason for the shrill assertiveness which characterises modern moral discourse:
“From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises; but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion.”
MacIntyre’s key point with respect to modern culture is the lack of a shared moral language by which to communicate and adjudicate the competing moral claims of contemporary debate. The conflicts at the heart of these debates are irresolvable, the arguments interminable, precisely because the values exchanged in the moral marketplace are incommensurable. Individuals in these debates appeal to different moral referents, or hold different interpretations of these things. The result is that protagonists talk past one another.
To overcome this situation and facilitate the possibilities for fruitful political debate, MacIntyre argues for the creation of new forms of community. His reasoning is that communities which are based upon commitments to a concrete and primarily local common good offer the best opportunities for rational political debate based on shared standards and language. Local problems thus serve as the locus of political debate in being encountered by individuals participating in shared projects directed towards common goods. Those who advocate the Benedict Option point to the uselessness and pointlessness of contemporary moral and political debate. This is a counsel of despair, but not necessarily mistaken for that reason. It all depends upon how those who withdraw from contemporary political culture come to act in their communities of practice – whether, indeed, they succeed in creating and sustaining such communities. Advocates of the Benedict Option need to move beyond their repudiation of contemporary culture by channelling their frustration creatively in concrete political projects oriented towards creating and sustaining the conditions necessary for local communities of virtuous practice to achieve their common good. I conclude A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience, with a substantial chapter which argues for the necessity of large-scale public community to facilitate the entrenchment and extension of MacIntyre's virtuous communities of practice throughout society so as to achieve the widespread social and moral transformation required to overcome the diremption of the modern world.
Socialist or conservative? It depends. I would say that those who see no hope for creating, sustaining, and scaling outwards these local communities of practice are conservatives turning away from the modern world, in expectation of a defeat that is sure to come. Those who affirm the possibility of the scaling upwards as well as downwards of power are working in direct descent of Marx’s critique of alien power and his demand for a social restructuring.
Here are some interesting recent articles on the significance of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of liberal modernity. I like this one on Stanley Hauerwas. Scholars Talk Writing: Stanley Hauerwas
Hauerwas comments on his work in ‘narrative ethics.’
Both philosophical and theological ethics was focused on decisions allegedly determined and justified by deontological or teleological systems. I was reading Aristotle, for whom the virtues were central. I was also influenced by Iris Murdoch’s claim that decisions are what you do when everything else has been lost. So I focused on character, which, as most novelists will tell you, is captured through a narrative. It is only through stories that we can make sense of the seemingly unrelated events that we call our lives. I also began to think that practical reason is fundamentally about how we can narrate our lives. Such a narration draws on the contingent facts that make us who we are — I am a Texan. I am a Yalie. I am a Christian.
I was playing around with these ideas when Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue was published — and the rest is history. He made the intuitions with which I was working respectable. Alasdair is a great philosopher who claims me as a friend. I have learned much from him.
There is, of course, a theological side to all this. I believe Christianity is one hell of a story about the way things are, not least being that our very existence is a gift. That is the contingency rightly called "creation." I was fortunate to have Hans Frei as a teacher. It was from Frei I learned to read Karl Barth, whose work can be read as one long story — long because the story has many subplots.
I love Hauerwas’ response to the question about his ‘astronomical’ publishing output, precisely because it rings true as a statement of my own writing journey:
Your publishing output is astronomical. How do you get so much done? Hauerwas: I was raised a bricklayer. All I have ever known is work. In my memoir, Hannah’s Child, I tried to describe what it means to come from working-class people and end up in the academy… I have tried to do what I have been asked to do. I have written books, but most of my books are collections of essays written because someone asked me to write or lecture about this or that. I bring the essays together to give the impression that they constitute a book. I do not want to be too self-deprecating, because I think I do make some interesting and coherent arguments.
I draw on Hauerwas’ communities of character a lot. The article describes him as a ‘hater of liberalism.’ I see him as a trenchant critic of liberalism. My argument is not illiberal but post-liberal. That is, in line with Marx’s immanent critique, I attempt to distinguish the emancipatory potentials of liberal rights and freedoms, give them substantive social content, and separate them from the liberal institutions in which they are encased, formalised, and neutralised. But maybe that is an optimistic view which holds that liberalism contains such potentials. The inherent individualism of the liberal ontology may well serve to undermine the potentials of such a critique. Whereas liberal philosophers criticize Marx for the totalitarian implications of his thickly-textured communitarianism, MacIntyre criticizes Marx on account of the extent to which he offers a socialized and radicalised vision of liberalism:
Secreted within Marxism from the outset is a certain radical individualism. In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like 'when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations' what he pictures is 'a community of free individuals' who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of the means of production and to various norms of production and distribution. This free individual is described by Marx as a socialized Robinson Crusoe; but on what basis he enters into his free association with others Marx does not tell us. At this key point in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately supplied. It is unsurprising that abstract moral principle and utility have in fact been the principles of association which Marxists have appealed to, and that in their practice Marxists have exemplified precisely the kind of moral attitude which they condemn in others as ideological.
MacIntyre 18 After Virtue
MacIntyre is right to draw attention to the extent to which Marx sought to transcend liberalism rather than repudiate it, converting the rights associated with political emancipation into a substantive equality and freedom within a human emancipation in general. This, in my view, makes Marx and Marxism post-liberal and not illiberal. To MacIntyre, it makes Marxist socialism susceptible to the same delusions which undermine liberalism:
Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic. For however thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it is committed to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being accumulated. Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived? It is not surprising that at this point Marxism tends to produce its own versions of the Ubermensch: Lukacs's ideal proletarian, Leninism's ideal revolutionary. When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy. One of the most admirable aspects of Trotsky's cold resolution was his refusal of all such fantasies.
MacIntyre 18 After Virtue
Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks may have taken us into totalitarian tyranny, but it had the merit of a realistic refusal of the libertarian fantasy which Marxism, as the radicalisation of liberal freedom, engenders. MacIntyre’s views are challenging. It is important to note, however, that he doesn’t single out Marxism and socialism for his critical comments here. His argument applies to the entire modern tradition:
A Marxist who took Trotsky's last writings with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism. This conclusion agrees of course with my own. For I too not only take it that Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition, a claim borne out by the almost indefinitely numerous and conflicting range of political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners — this does not at all imply that Marxism is not still one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society —but I believe that this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.
But we are not without hope, MacIntyre argues, before coming to his famous conclusion in favour of local forms of community within which to cultivate and preserve the virtues.
There is a reference to MacIntyre in this interesting article on this conservative critique of liberalism: For Sohrab Ahmari-ism
Ahmari’s critique of progressive liberalism and its classical forebear is not especially new. Years and years of extensive scholarly work (Professor Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” is the best book to read on this front) have interpreted the popular angst that has recently proliferated throughout the Western world as a sign that the supposedly values-neutral regime of liberalism has finally revealed its true nature. According to Ahmari’s diagnosis, modern-day progressive liberals have simply taken “the logic of maximal autonomy … to its logical terminus,” a logic that has trampled upon the specious idea of a neutral public square to which paradoxical liberal-conservatives like David French have fallen hook, line and sinker (the all-important John Locke excluded Roman Catholics from his ideal regime of “toleration,” after all). Thus, Ahmari believes that genuine social conservatism cannot be reconciled with the classical liberalism of Adam Smith or John Locke. It also cannot simply be blended today into a consensus with economic libertarianism or interventionist foreign policy, as post-Reagan “fusionist” conservatives like Paul Ryan or George W. Bush have explicitly or implicitly argued, without losing its grounding in the more ancient Christian tradition. A rightly understood Christian politics aspires to orient society according to man’s highest good and final end, objective standards which are foreign to the liberal project.
This view sees no accommodation possible between conservatives and socialists in the attempt to overcome liberalism:
the word “conservatism” inherently begs an essential question: What must be conserved? On this point, Ahmari and French profoundly disagree. Ahmari in particular sees within French’s classical liberal fideism a hopeless naivete that conservatives can somehow negotiate a compromise with the left by accommodating their “libertine ways and paganized ideology” and in turn expecting that the left refrain from active hostility toward traditional Christian beliefs and practices. For Ahmari, this expectation ignores reality; the left does not want to play this game, and it has not been remotely interested in doing so for quite some time. The lack of consciousness that fusionist, liberal-conservatives like David French possess about this fact is part of the problem. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre might say, conservatism does not need another Reagan, but a new, and doubtless very different, St. Benedict.
From my perspective, Ahmari’s critique is compelling because it is rooted in a broader Catholic worldview which I wholeheartedly share, a philosophy which is quite different from David French’s evangelical predilections. Ever since Martin Luther, Western politics has become increasingly detached from their theological roots in St. Paul, Augustine and Aquinas. A myriad of faithful Catholics today, especially intellectuals like Ahmari, are recognizing the need to return to the beautiful tradition of the Church to find the resources that can help resolve our present sociopolitical ills.
there is a clear tendency within Catholic intellectual circles to place far more emphasis upon classical philosophy’s quest for man’s highest good and final end on the scale of society as a whole, whereas evangelicals like David French are generally at peace with promulgating Christianity purely within the marketplace of ideas [becoming part of liberalism's 'conflict pluralism] to convince others of their sincerity. Although well-intentioned, both myself and Ahmari would agree that this strategy is doomed to fail. Christians must think and act differently.
There's the division - my roots are Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, and Catholic philosophy and I take the question of the highest good and final end very seriously indeed. I steer away from the individualism inherent in the modern project. That comes out clearly in my work on Aquinas (references at the bottom).
I can be very precise on the liberal ontology that separates individual and social. At the heart of liberalism is the moral and ontological ultimacy of the individual. Liberals have been scathing of Marx in denying this ultimacy (take Joseph Femia’s Marxism and Democracy, that makes precisely the point that Marx’s ‘thickly-textured communitarianism’ is inimical to individual liberty. There are many other examples. There are different views of freedom and individuality at work here.) Liberalism takes its stand on the discrete self-possessing abstract "individual" who contracts into society in order to protect or advance self-interest, and who is free to contract out for the same reason. Are we playing definitions, terms mean whatever we want? Liberalism is all nice things? I, of course, agree with all nice things. The problem is that, according to liberalism, individuals free to define the good as they see fit. If that is a problem. It guards against tyrannous impositions of the common good by those convinced they possess the truth. Liberalism fought and won this battle against various murderous religious fundamentalisms. The problem is that the same individualist ethos rules out other common goods, such as socialism, such as common action on climate change. If individuals are free to choose their own gods, as Weber argued, then be aware that these gods could just as easily be devils. Given the absence of the objective moral standard by which to evaluate these claims to the good, we cannot tell. We are beyond good and bad. We leave morality and enter an age of sophism in which justice is the interests and imposition of the strongest. Nietzsche’s “death of God” precisely concerned the dissolution of an authoritative and overarching moral framework by which competing claims can be evaluated, settled, ordered, and agreed. There is no agreement possible, hence protest, anger, and indignation. Climate action is a moral imperative, climate activists tell us. The problem is that, within a liberal framework, climate action entails a moral imperative that lacks a referent. Liberalism is agnosticism on ‘the good.’ There is no such good, only goods which individuals choose according to preference. We live in an objectively valueless and meaningless world in which individuals project value and meaning according to existential choice. Except that, since the world is valueless and meaningless, such choice is also empty. Individuals are ‘free to choose,’ wrote free market economist Milton Friedman. Some liberals reject this in economics, considering it to allow the rich and powerful to predate on the poor and powerless, yet hold it their right to do so in culture, society, and ethics. There’s an incoherence here. We are pitting different wings of liberalism against each other, believing that there is a meaningful political and moral choice being made. We live in a world of irreducible subjective opinion. Economics has long since discarded the language of inherent value and instead has become the ‘science’ of subjective preference. I’m interested in climate change as a ‘wicked problem.’ It is wicked precisely because collectivist solutions are being sought on individualist premises. It can’t be done. It is the failure to transcend the limitations of liberalism that led me to let my long-standing membership of The Green Party to lapse. They have the right cause. Resolution cannot come in liberal terms. In Free Choice against State Authority, criticised the views of Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley, who characterised socialism as statist and authoritarian. The terms in which he made this criticism made clear precisely what is at stake in this discussion:
"Being Green is different to being Labour. It’s a different worldview, outlook and philosophy. While we might inhabit a similar place when it comes to austerity, we are at heart a party of freedom which believes in liberation from the shackles of state authority and the critical balance between people and planet. And we trust the people. We don’t want an authoritarian state, an authoritarian electoral system or an authoritarian party structure."
I come from a ‘rational’ tradition in which the ‘chains’ of illegitimate public community are replaced by the chains of legitimate public community. That’s Rousseau’s view, developed by Marx. Liberals reject this as an infringement on individual liberty. But note well my critical point – the ‘authoritarian’ politics from which liberals seek emancipation in the name of individual freedom, is precisely the ‘abstract’ state which is the product of liberalism and capitalism. I argue for the rational and democratic constitution of authority, the same with ethics, law, and community. I do not rule these things out as inherently and necessarily ‘authoritarian,’ as those who base their politics on the individualist premises of liberalism do.
Liberalism comes in many forms. But it's drowning in its own incoherence now. It all reduces in the end, once it sheds the metaphysical assumptions within which it was once presented. God kept liberalism in line, but has now be discarded to leave individuals as their own gods. Patrick Deneen is right on this. Liberalism has been the dominant culture for a long time now, this crisis currently being protested is self-authored. Deneen calls on liberals to own it, and so do I. I have engaged in a long and informed critique of liberalism, have written on Hobbes, Locke, J.S. Mill, also Rawls, Nozick, and the communitarian version of the likes of Sandel, Taylor, Walzer. There is also the social liberalism of T.H. Green, the corporate liberalism of Hegel, there is Kant. I have studied them on and written in depth on this. I don’t take kindly to having my views cursorily dismissed as is obviously misguided. We can go back to the sophism of the ancients, if you like. Liberalism was in the field first, forcing Plato and Aristotle to issue their conservative corrections as the world descended into power struggles. Try MacIntyre's critique. I post extensively on MacIntyre, only to be met with some sappy claim that ‘at the end of the day, all you need is love.’ So The Beatles said, only to divide in acrimony a couple of years later. Love needs to be properly ordered to its true object. Or maybe it's just easier to try the same old spendthriift left-liberal Keynesian delusions that do nothing but make a bad situation worse, wasting resources and abusing hopes and good faith in the process. The Green New Deal does not touch the root of the problem (deficiencies in valorisation rather than underconsumption - it's all firmly within the growth ideology). I offer a more detailed analysis here: Changes: Climate Change, Civilization Change, System Change, Self-Change
I’d prefer not tag along out of loyalty, and go down with the ship when it sinks again. Each to their own, if we want to be liberal. I think there are more secure standards. Here's the problem with liberalism on climate change - the individual is always free to contract out and choose otherwise out of rational self-interest. And all the protests in the world won't change that. Hence the current impasse, hence the resort to emotional bullying, pressure, protest and authoritarian coercion. It's in the DNA. I'm only concerned to keep socialism out of the debacle. It always gets the blame.
My view has clear similarities with that of Alasdair MacIntyre, who responds to Nietzsche’s revelations of the nihilism characterising the modern world. Modern moral theories, Nietzsche shows, are empty. The moral language that individuals employ in pursuing and justifying their ends is empty, lacking in any referent and social practice. MacIntyre understands Nietzsche to be right about the moral condition of liberal modernity, but wrong about morality as such.
Politics and ethics, the field of practical reason, dissolves into Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all.’ MacIntyre points out that, for all of the heated exchanges in politics, the moral terms individuals use are empty, devoid of objective content. They are subjective preferences. Since this is so, ‘debates’ become passionate but are without resolution. The values being exchanged with such heated intensity are incommensurate. Those who are party to such debates often, even usually, claim to be using premises that are objective, based on reason, and therefore universally applicable. Note how often people cite facts and evidence and logic and are outraged when their opponents fail to agree. Each consider themselves to be advancing arguments based on fact and logic. To me, that indicates the extent to which individuals require an authoritative moral framework, an objective standard, by which to settle conflict. The problem is that there is no such framework in the modern world.
Hence the claim that the world is "disenchanted", lacking intrinsic meaning. The classic statement that the (modern) world lacks intrinsic meaning comes from Max Weber: 'The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world"‘ (Weber SV 1991:155). As the world is stripped of purpose, so philosophy is stripped of its normative dimension in relation to the world. It is in this context that moral philosopher J.L. Mackie’s defence of subjectivism in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) needs to be understood. Mackie highlights the "queerness" of the view that the world could contain values. Mackie questions how objective values could relate to or co-exist with those characteristics revealed by science; by what means we could come to know of them; what possible relevance they could have to our existence (Mackie 1977:38/42). Such scepticism holds out no prospect of reconstituting substantive morality.
Mackie’s notion of ‘inventing’ right and wrong (or Stuart Kauffman’s notion of Reinventing the Sacred 2007) also fails on account of contradicting itself. Why do we need to invent right and wrong, if such things do not objectively exist? To elaborate on this point, let’s examine this passage from Don Cupitt:
Our task is to make our own faith come true by building the Kingdom of God on earth. We do it all... Ethics is not a matter of fitting into a ready-made moral order, but of designing and building a better one... We are objectively valueless, but we give each other value when we love one another. And the most rational faith to adopt and to act upon is that which leads us to value each person, each aspect of the world and our life, as highly as is self-consistently possible.
‘The greening of faith in a damaged world'. The Guardian, 3 October 1988
There is no ‘ready-made moral order’ and the world is ‘objectively valueless’, therefore human beings are charged with the responsibility for building this order. I can agree with the rest of what Cupitt says, savouring as it does of the Kantian realm of ends. I have written extensively on Kant, and still consider him to be one of the very greatest of philosophers. But I now consider Kant’s self-legislating Reason ultimately to be self-validating and self-defeating; without that moral ultimacy that comes from being grounded in something more than Reason, Kant’s intersubjective universal cannot but fall in on itself. The idea that there is no objective reality or moral order and that therefore we are charged with the task of creating our own begs the question of what, precisely, is it that we think we are building? Calling it a moral order indicates that we are working with some idea of what morality is that comes from outside our subjective will and preference. That idea is transcendent in some way. And that can only be an ought-to-be which possesses objective validity. I would further argue that without an objective standard, any self-creation on our part is precarious, contingent, arbitrary and subjective, always prone to collapse in the emptiness of its own self-justification. That is the moral world in which we live today, a world of individual likes, wants and preferences that may, or may not, be formed into transitory consensuses backed by legal and political force, as removable as quickly as they are established.
We should note Cupitt’s view that since there is no ready-made moral order that we ought to build ‘a better one.’ That implies that there is, after all, a moral standard by which we can compare and contrast moral orders. Cupitt’s explicit view denies that such objective standards exist. In which case, how are we to distinguish one from another by ethical criteria? Cupitt has no basis for comparing one moral order to another. He has no moral reasons for demanding that we should design and build a ‘better’ moral order at all if he denies the existence of moral standards outside of this praxis. In the absence of objective grounds, there is no way of deciding this except by power and social convention, standards which emerge through the clash and interplay of various views within the dominant social relations. A liberal pluralist view would celebrate this in terms of victory going to the force of the better argument, tested in the public domain. A critical view would point to asymmetrical relations of class power and resources to see victory going to the mightiest. I’m not sure how that can be distinguished from Thrasymachus’ Sophist view that justice is the interest of the strongest.
Non-realism holds that the world is objectively valueless and that the only values are the ones that human beings create. But that argument contradicts itself, in that it can offer no good reason either for human beings coming to create these values or for which values human beings specifically create. An ought-to-be that comes from outside of human self-creation is required. If we are to make a moral argument that is. We can find reasons from outside the realm of ethics, in evolutionary biology, psychology, sex and survival. There is no meaning of life here: the name of the game is survival by any means necessary and nothing more. If that’s all that people think is possible, and that morality has no autonomous status as merely a rationalisation of naturalistic impulses, drives and imperatives, then they should say so, and not engage in rationalisation themselves, claiming their position to be a moral one when it is not. Beyond this, we can also find reasons in politics and consensus and social convention. And also in individualistic likes, wants and subjective preferences, the world as a market place. Does any of that satisfy the cosmic longing for meaning? Is that God enough? I say not. But I do think Cupitt has part of the answer when he writes that ‘Our task is to make our own faith come true by building the Kingdom of God on earth.’ It’s just that this faith isn’t proved to be true by being built, it’s that the success of its construction lies in its fitting the moral, psychological, spiritual and physical contours of human beings and their surroundings as well as the beings and bodies of the more-than-human and objectively valuable world that exists independently of human valuation. Successful design and building implies the existence of a plan by which to guide construction.
So I declare myself a realist. And I ask: how real do people want it?
That was Nietzsche’s question in declaring the “death of God.” All that there is is a sphere of existential choice. In an objectively valueless and meaningless world, each individual is charged with projecting truth, value, and meaning upon a disenchanted terrain. Each chooses their own gods, as Max Weber argued, but these gods could just as easily be devils, since there is no objective standard by which to evaluate these subjective choices. All that there is is the state and law as a neutral public realm maintaining the peace in the context of a civil war.
In relativizing the absolute, the modern world has fractured as a result of absolutizing the relative. In choosing their own gods, each individual believes their personal choices to be the truth and sees less and less reason to compromise. In this sophist world, power decides, with victory going to those who can command the most resources, financial and cultural. Even claims to truth backed by science are power plays, fake claims to objectivity designed to silence and suppress opponents. Such was Nietzsche’s view. I believe Nietzsche to be wrong and hold that there are objective and transcendent standards. But Nietzsche was right about liberalism, and points out the unpalatable consequences of the dissolution of such standards. Without those standards, the subjective choice of free individuals is meaningless and empty.
That’s my point and that’s MacIntyre’s point. Nietzsche goes further to emphasize the sanctimonious hypocrisy of those who dress their personal preferences in the language of the good. I’m not as cynical as Nietzsche, and take such virtue signaling as it least some kind of hunger for real virtue. It’s just that, for reasons that MacIntyre sets out, the liberal order is incapable of constituting the practices and character forms that sustain a culture of the virtues:
“Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition."
MacIntyre, After Virtue 255
Individuals may sincerely believe the moral claims they advance in making their personal choices, but they fail to understand how empty and meaningless modern moral philosophy is in being bereft of an objective evaluation standard. If individuals are free to pursue the good as they see fit, then that means precisely the good is subjective and is lacking in any supra-individual standard. The only ‘objectivity’ possible lies in the check and challenge of the public sphere as a realm of ‘debate’ and conflict between competing goods. Individuals use moral terms as though there really is an objective framework that gives them terms their truth and validity. Since this framework is lacking – Nietzsche’s “death of God” – individuals are using the language of morality merely in order to advance their own preferences. When these preferences are checked by others, individuals express moral outrage, as if their opponents are guilty of violating a necessary truth. That moral outrage is an hypocrisy, Nietzsche would argue, since this moral exchange is a mere power play in which individuals are seeking to realize their own self-interest in teeth of the opposition of others. Hence Marx’s argument that liberal freedom is a mutual self-cancellation. Marx transcends the choice between the undifferentiated unity of the pre-modern age and the differentiation without unity in the bourgeois age by restating the principle of reciprocity at the heart of 'rational freedom’ against individualist liberal freedom. Liberal 'independence' 'is at bottom merely an illusion': individuals are 'free to collide with one another and to engage in exchange within this freedom'. This appears as independence only by abstracting from 'the conditions of existence within which these individuals enter into contact', conditions 'independent of and 'not controllable by individuals' (Gr 1973:163/4). Marx thus criticises the 'absurdity’ of liberal thinkers who regard competition 'as the absolute mode of existence of free individuality’ when it is not individuals who are set free by competition but capital. He criticises the way that this is 'dogmatically propounded’ as freedom 'through constant reflection back on the barriers torn down by free competition’ rather than reflecting upon the 'real development of capital' in the present as an 'external necessity' (Gr 1973:649/51). 'Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him’ (Marx Cl 1976:381). Hence 'the insipidity of the view that free competition is the ultimate development of human freedom; and that the negation of free competition = the negation of individual freedom’ (Gr 1973:652). This is ‘free development’ on the 'limited basis' of the 'rule of capital’ (1973:652).
Capital, as a new social necessity, in a 'society in which the process of production has the mastery over man instead of being controlled by him’, This appears to the 'bourgeois consciousness’ as a 'self-evident and nature-imposed necessity' (Marx Cl 1976:174/5). But capital's relations of objective and impersonal dependency suppress individuality. Liberal freedom is the 'most complete' 'suspension’ and 'subjugation' of individuality under 'overpowering objects': 'things independent of the relations among individuals themselves’ (Gr 1973:652). The equation of free competition with freedom 'means nothing other than that middle class rule is the culmination of world history' (1973:652). But the liberal claim that the pursuit of private interest unwittingly produces the general interest could just as easily mean that 'each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests' so that the pursuit of private interests produces not a 'general affirmation' but a 'general negation' (Gr 1973:156/7). The 'collisions' between 'mutually indifferent individuals' results in their 'subordination to relations which subsist independently of them' (1973:157). The 'mutual interconnection' between individuals, a 'vital condition' for individuality, appears as something 'alien' and 'autonomous’ to individuals: 'In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things; personal capacity into objective wealth’ (1973:157). The exchange relation establishes itself as 'a power external to and independent of the producers', a means to production thus becoming 'a relation alien to the producers' (1973:146).
All that there is is competing voices, incommensurate value positions or ‘perspectives’ (Nietzsche), with no way of deciding between them, since no common standard exists. The world thus becomes one of power struggles and the play of social interests, with victory going to the strongest. You may not like Nietzsche, but he is easily the sharpest, most penetrating critic of liberal modernity, and the sooner you come to terms with his disquieting suggestions the sooner you will start to develop a response that gives flesh and content to your moral and scientific truths. Here is Nietzsche:
"Science, along with morality and religion, is to be understood, not in terms of objective truth and falsity, but in terms of the aspirations, projects, hopes and fears of its proponents. The scientific picture of the world is an expression of a particular kind of will to power, and to seek objective guarantees of its veracity is a timid evasion."
That is an explicit denial of an objective truth and morality about an objective reality that is independent of human creation, convention and will. That implies that all that there is is subjective choice. I quote Nietzsche not because I consider him to be right about morality as such, but because I consider him to reveal a truth about the social world we live in. This is a world without objective truths, in which individuals advance their own views of the good as though there are such truths. This is a world of sophists cut adrift from transcendent norms, values and truths. You can’t have them, says Nietzsche. Hume stands without refutation. Kant sought to restore the true, the good and the beautiful as projections of reason (actually, aesthetics are outside of the realm of reason, he argued). But upon what is this reason based? Only itself, and the fact that it is shared with others and therefore possesses a certain objectivity. Is that enough? Debates that soon reach an impasse of claim and counter-claim suggests not.
Individuals use the language of morality, religion, and science in an attempt to advance their own preferences and impose their choices upon the world. Whatever such individuals think they are doing, they are not really trying to persuade others opposed to them by reasoned argument, because the objective standards required for evaluation and persuasion is lacking. Many seem to think that science could do the work of God here, but it cannot. Instead of accepting the blessed facts, individuals debate them and exchange their own. All have logic and evidence on their side, note. And yet still the same disagreement. A reasoned argument about morality requires a common moral language making shared agreement on the human good possible. This is precisely what is lacking in a moral world in which morality has dissolved into value judgements. There is no shared agreement about what counts as a moral definition and a moral practice with respect to the good for human beings. This was precisely the point of my thesis on Marx, developing Marx’s ‘rational freedom’ as a sustained critique of liberalism and the loss of morality, community, and genuine authority in the modern marketplace. To sustain this critique, I reached back to Plato and Aristotle, alter introduced St Thomas Aquinas, to show what is required to reconstruct the overarching and authoritative moral framework that human beings as social beings need and which, given the extent to which individuals still advance their claims in moral language, so evidently crave. This means going beyond liberalism. Liberalism is agnostic on the good and fragments the good into irreducible subjective preference. Hence the impasse the modern world has reached. In relativizing the absolute, individuals have absolutized the relative, meaning that they do indeed choose their own gods and pointedly refuse to compromise with others out of a shared understanding of a greater good than that of egoistic projection. Debates are turning nasty and vituperative precisely because they are being recast in false theological terms. There is no God to which refer our subjective claims, only our own personal gods, upon which there can be no compromise.
The shared agreement about ‘the good’ for human beings does not exist in the modern world. Indeed, liberal modernity is defined by the absence of an authoritative moral framework in this respect, celebrating individual choice as a liberation from the restraints of moral authorities and codes. Fine and good. Except climate change is the revenge of the objective world. People who style themselves liberals are big on climate action. Unfortunately, they are failing badly to understand the extent to which climate change is a problem generated by liberal modes of thought and action and cannot be resolved in those terms. Here, objective reality impinges in the most threatening terms on individual choice. Addressing the crisis in the climate system requires agreement based on a shared moral language. Climate action is a ‘moral imperative,’ it is asserted. The problem is that in a liberal framework, there can be no such imperatives, since there is no referent. Nature may seem obviously to be such a referent, but its status in liberal terms is no more certain than God. Once morality rests on the ontological ultimacy of the self-possessing discrete individual, then it becomes self-referential. ‘There is no such thing as society,’ Margaret Thatcher claimed, ‘only individuals’ choosing the good as they see fit. She was castigated for that statement. The people who criticized her have still to understand that she was making a perfect statement of the central tenet of classical liberalism. By the same token, there is no such thing as God, either. Ayn Rand certainly argues this, considering religion an affront to reason. And there is no such thing as Nature, either. I live in hope that liberals who keep harrying me on this may finally come and see the inadequacies of liberalism when it comes to the common goods – and common good – they persist in advancing on individualist premises.
‘This system is wrong; it doesn’t work properly. And the further intensification along the same lines is just tripling the case of fanaticism. Fanaticism has been defined as an attitude of redoubling one’s efforts when knows one is on the wrong track.’
E.F. Schumacher, Good Work 1980: 144
Liberal modes of thought and action are wrong and don’t work properly. The evidence is all around us. Yet too many persist in the delusion that liberalism is the answer. Reaction and counter-reaction, economic liberalism freeing trade, markets, and individuals met by public regulation and expenditure. Liberal, liberal, liberal …
The attempt at reasoned argument with respect to the moral implications of common affairs is doomed to fail. Each of the contending parties are simply attempting to secure their preferences and gain the outcome they desire using whatever language – morality, science, religion – they consider to be the most effective. My argument seeks to reconstitute morality, science, and religion in such a way as to restore their objective, evaluative, authoritative purchase above and beyond subjective choice. That precisely entails transcending liberalism. Liberals baulk at that move, considering any such common standard and authority to be at least potentially, and probably actually, repressive of individual liberty. I am concerned to remind such people that their attempts to pursue common goods – climate change, social justice etc - on individualist are doomed to fail. They will have to bite the bullet on this one. Too often, when I present this case, I find that people retreat back to the methodological individualism that Margaret Thatcher so eloquently stated. I disagreed vehemently with Margaret Thatcher. I recognize, though, that she had the virtue of coherence and consistency on this point. Self-delusion and wishful thinking is a menace in politics.
Since there is no common agreement on the premises of morality, on the human good, and on what, precisely, morality should aim at, there is no possibility of agreeing on what counts as a reasoned argument. MacIntyre draws the conclusion that reasoned argument is therefore impossible, with the result that each individual is left attempting to manipulate other people's emotions and attitudes in order to get them to comply with one's own subjective preferences.
Marx nailed the truth on this over one hundred and fifty years ago:
“All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to exist outside the sphere of the state in civil society, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its full degree of development man leads a double life, a life in heaven and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers. The relationship of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth. The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same way as religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, i.e. it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.”
Marx EW OJQ 1975: 221
The individualism of the liberal ontology breeds instrumental relationships, abstract projection, unreality. I spell it out in more detailed terms in my philosophical writings and hope that people who challenge me on this would at least read the argument before criticizing and rejecting.
The dissolution of the moral realm into a series of subjective preferences explains the fractious and intemperate nature of ‘debate.’ MacIntyre thus highlights protest and indignation as the hallmarks of public "debate" in the modern world. He made this point decades ago, long before the angry politics of the contemporary world disabling the public realm. Governments can no longer govern, there is no mood for compromise, no basis for compromise – people are taking big stands on their own particular goods and are not inclined to budge.
MacIntyre argues that political arguments are not merely endless but increasingly loud and angry. Modern politics, he argues, is simply a form of civil war and not a reasoned way in which individuals reconcile differences. Since there is no agreement with respect to common shared language then no one can actually “win” any argument in debate. Instead of dialogue and exchange, there is endless protest and indignation, an outrage on the part of individuals who are unable to get what they want and unable to understand why. Since no one can persuade others as to the fundamental rightness of their position, all that remains open to individuals is coercion, in terms of mass protest and pressure, legal force, government authority. Hence my concern to distinguish socialism from coercive authoritarian impositions of the common good. That good has to be constituted properly in terms of modes of character, community, and social practice. It is this that the liberal order singularly fails to do, considering such things as infringement on individual liberty and the rights of the individual to choose the good as they see fit. These rights are empty, for the reasons that Max Weber (following Nietzsche) gave. Weber noted the modern predicament:
‘Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights.’
For liberalism, there can only be this ‘nothing.’ Natural rights are based on natural law. In shedding its metaphysical assumptions, liberalism became an explicitly political doctrine in which rights cease to be based on natural law and instead become conventional creations conferred by the state. The problem with such a view is that what is conferred by conventional means can just as easily be removed by the same means. Where there is ‘nothing,’ rights are insecure, a matter of power and power struggles. I seek to reinstate ‘something’ as against this ‘nothing,’ and that, I state categorically, must necessarily take us beyond the liberal order. A fundamental premise of liberalism is that each individual has the right to pursue happiness as he or she sees fit. The problem is that, in the absence of an evaluative objective standard commanding common assent, the freedom and happiness each individual pursues is mutually incompatible. Some would like each school day and each council meeting to open with prayers, others wish to put an end to such practices; some wish to outlaw abortion, others wish to make it legal; some wish to increase taxes on the rich to raise money for social causes, others see taxes as a theft, holding that individuals who have made money by their own talent and effort are entitled to spend the money as they see fit; some wish to see ambitious schemes of climate action through government, others see such things as costly and inefficient and reject them. The list of contentious issues is endless. The point is that, in the absence of a shared moral language and objective standard of the human good, each cannot persuade others as to the fundamental rightness of their position. There is no basis for agreement on a common good or the common good, with the result that liberalism can only be a neutralized, demoralized framework in which individuals pursue the good according to subjective preference, with law keeping the civil peace. Liberal politics, MacIntyre argues, is "civil war carried on by other means" (MacIntyre, After Virtue 253).
MacIntyre writes this of his communities of virtuous practice:
"the politics of such communities…is not a politics of competing interests in the way in which the politics of the modern state is."
MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals 144
I go further than MacIntyre to argue that these communities scale upwards to constitute a genuine public realm. I seek to make the transition from a liberal to a post-liberal society. Note that ‘post-liberal’ does not mean ‘illiberal,’ it all depends. I detail what is entailed by this transition in my main philosophical works. In the end, politics ceases to be civil war by other means.
I set these views out in far more detail in a series of works, and suggest that people, instead of considering me not only mistaken, but utterly beastly for not considering liberals to be the angels their own self-image presents them to be to actually read and learn.
Books
Critical Studies in Rational Freedom (this positive presentation of ‘rational freedom’ entails a sustained critique of liberal conceptions).
Being at One: Making a Home in Earth’s Commonwealth of Virtue (there are good chapters on virtue ethics here)
There is good discussion here of virtue and communities of virtuous practice, although I need to rewrite this extensively to check the impression I am arguing for a theo-political state (heaven forfend!)
Aquinas, Morality and Modernity. The Search for the Natural Moral Law and the Common Good (this includes a solid critique of the moral condition of liberal modernity)
My interest in Rousseau is well-known and long-standing. You can read my work on Rousseau, cited above. But seeing as my consistent critique of liberalism so consistently irks people who take neither the time to read my works nor the trouble to understand my arguments, I shall end with this long quote from Ellenburg’s Rousseau’s Political Philosophy (1976). You see, folks, it is very simple. My definition of ‘rational freedom’ is fashioned out a number of sources which are opposed on all the main points to the atomism, abstraction, and libertarianism of the liberal conception of freedom.
I quote, please read. These are views which I have developed through Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. There is more to freedom and happiness than is contained in liberal philosophy:
2 Rousseau and the Liberal Tradition by S Ellenburg
“Questions about the shape and circumstances of personal liberty dominate Jean-Jacques Rousseau's political thought, as they do that of the traditional liberal philosophers with whom Rousseau is often but mistakenly lumped. Moreover, Rousseau advocated absolute liberty or literal self-government so insistently that he equated all instances of external rule, whether governmental or not, with slavery. Ignorance of this anarchistic imperative animating his thought makes his ideas a tangle of arbitrary assertions and robs them of their moral urgency.
Rousseau's understanding of individual liberty and the circumstances of its realization is also grounded in a philosophical orientation radically different from that upon which classical liberal thought is based, different in premises and in structure. Rousseau's rejection of the liberal mode of thought is the subject of these next three chapters.
The Liberal Individualist Mode of Thought
“Liberalism posits the existence of a discrete individual either with private interests or with rights claimed independent of common life. The individual is either naturally endowed with rights and interests or acquires them unaided. The claim and exercise of these rights and interests originate neither in sustained, cohesive social involvement nor in mutual recognition of shared experience, even though others may be identically endowed or identically successful in their private acquisitions. The individual is literally self-made; he exclusively possesses himself because he owes no debts to others.
“According to early liberal philosophy, individuals forfeit a portion of their self-exclusiveness to fabricate a political environment in which to secure private interests. Individuals make, but are not made by, political society: aside from gaining personal security by instituting government, individuals undergo no change by their deliberate aggregation. Society remains a numerical aggregation. Political society is merely a sum of separate, preexistent parts that join together and resign and rejoin. When individuals obey and disobey identical magistrates and an identical positive law, they still share nothing but their officially recognized private interests. Liberal philosophy begins with and retains the part at the expense of the whole; political society in liberal theory betrays no more solidarity and continuity than a supervised neighborhood bingo game.
“Liberty, then, is a private remnant, the sphere of exclusiveness retained by each individual. Whatever is not surrendered to the public sphere of governmental management remains private and non-political. Liberal philosophers contradict themselves and quarrel with each other about where to draw the line, but all proceed from the distinction between two mutually exclusive spheres of life. The scope of the political extends only to governmental action and to those who seek to influence or capture government. Politics is the relationship between private individuals, who obey, disobey, petition, and vote, and representative public men, who legislate and enforce positive law. All other relationships, whether temporary or not, are private contracts and therefore free; education, religion, economic and family affairs are nonpolitical considerations in an aggregation of private solitudes.
“Liberal theorists dispute questions involving legitimacy and desirability, but they always consider governmental action to be intervention. It is an intrusion into that remnant private sector of individual freedom that announces the presence of authoritative political direction in a once fluid realm. Each individual is free when left alone within his private sphere; and liberty, preserved only by public inaction, can never be enhanced, much less created, by what must be considered external encroachment. Hence liberal thought always drifts toward laissez faire. Limited government assures security but must not tamper with individual spontaneity, self-reliance, and initiative. Correspondingly, liberal theorists emphasize the punitive and regulatory aspects of positive law, especially the appropriateness of punishments to crimes and the efficacy, usually doubtful, of governmental means to nonpublic ends.
“Of course, individuals in a political aggregation may also form smaller voluntary aggregations of a private, nonpolitical character. Liberal theorists often assume these interest groups and private institutions to be the constituent units of society. Independent groups do collide, cooperate, and bargain like discrete individuals. But these groups do not and cannot constitute a cohesive society of engaged and mutually dependent parts. Liberal society, whether composed of individuals, interest groups, or private institutions, is always an aggregation. Although deliberate actions by individuals and groups may yield arrangements based upon similarities of role, talent, interest, merit, and the like, a pattern of cohesive social engagement is inconceivable. No engaged classes, orders, or estates appear in the liberal notion of society, no groups which originate in and are perpetuated by their inescapable indebtedness, whether cooperative or competitive, to other groups. Indeed the threat to individual liberty for the liberal theorist is precisely such isolated but concentrated organization, whether a sovereign power, the uniformity of opinion, an economic monopoly, or the privileged opportunities of a semi-official aristocracy and clergy. What preserves the original competitive motion of society both assures and constitutes individual liberty—a condition of non-interference permitting self-involvement and voluntary contracts among separate parts. Liberal theorists forever recommend dispersing crowds, splintering mass opinion, mixing government, and busting trusts. These devices will either prevent or fragment official and informal concentrations of power that threaten the naturally fluid motion of self-contained parts. Problems of majority rule and minority rights, of order and liberty, are perennial dilemmas, because liberal philosophers conceive of liberty as the self-exclusiveness of private individuals.
“Liberal philosophy cannot convey an abiding and authentic sense of history, of historical periodicity or revolutionary change. If it looks at history at all, it sees temporary discontinuities, with periods of reform or revolutionary disturbance defined by the replacement of government magistrates or changes in the form of government: interregnums but not transitions. A gradual or revolutionary social transformation, resulting in a different life in common and including the disappearance and emergence of mutually dependent groups, is beyond the liberal view. Thus a succession of temporal events is basically continuous; qualitative change is unusual and difficult, if not illusory; and neither progress nor decline is measured in the social character of citizens or the quality of common life. The emergence of new types of men, heralding and responding to changed conditions of common life and to different kinds of social dependence, is inconceivable; the passions and interests of an individual are permanent because the part is always prior to the whole, and the whole is a numerical aggregate. Liberal theorists write history, but historicity is not essential to their political ideas.
“When political society is considered to be a formless aggregation, the general interest or the common good is merely a sum of the interests of each partner or a majority will. If the interests of groups conflict, the general interest is the product of this conflict, provided that competitive advantages of monopoly and privileged access are not too serious. Making due allowance for the preservation of minority rights and of the competitive fluidity of society, liberal theorists display an irresistible predilection toward defining the general interest in terms of mere process or efficient method: the common good is not a condition of common life, comprising also the good of dependent parts, but is either the process of competitive exchange or the result of the sheer forcefulness of the interests of separate parts. The term common good is in fact a misnomer, because discrete individuals cannot accurately be said to share a common life. In the familiar aphorism of liberal philosophy, the endorsement of which accompanies both reservations about and commitments to representative democracy, the individual is the best judge of his interests. But this assertion is tautological. The anchoring of liberalism to the idea of a private individual assures that each individual can be the only judge of his interest because each must be the sole originator and custodian of his interests. The individual remains a private proprietor of both himself and all that he acquires.
Ellenburg 1976 ch 2
I have a different definition of liberalism to you? I don’t doubt that I understand your liberalism much better than you do. Rousseau was all about unmasking individuals, not taking their self-image at face value. It made him unpopular. But not wrong, for all that.