An Essay on Rational Freedom
A brief introduction to the conception of 'rational freedom' which is the organizing principle of my work.
By situating political issues within the spectrum of ‘rational’ thought, I have sought to revalue the moral "voice" of the commons as against other, more sceptical, even cynical, perspectives in the post-structural and post-modern world. The conception of ‘rational freedom’ I have developed since the 1990s affirms the primacy of a moral standpoint based on transcendent standards beyond the relativism of time and place. The view is based on an ethical cognitivism which identifies moral questions to be questions of knowledge and truth. In this view, moral knowledge and moral truth takes its place alongside scientific knowledge and truth – values are more than mere subjective preferences, likes, and opinions. There are, therefore, objective considerations of "right" and "wrong," which may be adjudicated by recourse to rational methods of argumentation.
This view is defined against the dominant positions in modern moral philosophy, which have been distinctly noncognitivist or "emotivist." Modern morality is conceived in light of the split between fact and value, with the former considered the rational realm of true knowledge and the latter the non-rational sphere of irreducible subjective opinion. Under the decidedly anti-metaphysical impacts of logical positivism and the philosophy of ordinary language, modern moral philosophers tend to deny notions of objective morality and the corollary that moral disputes and judgements involve questions of truth, claiming instead that moral issues are merely a matter of individual likes, choices, and preferences, a matter of personal taste, about which nothing rational can be said. The myriad sophistries, scepticisms, solipsisms, and cynicisms of contemporary thought follow directly from this view, ensuring the continuous misapplications of a wealth of means owing to the arbitrariness of ends. Throughout this period I have walked the fairly lonely path of ‘rational freedom,’ rejecting at every point the false freedoms promised by other, more fashionable, philosophies which are more in tune with the period of late capitalism. Whereas those philosophies are now up-a-creek-without-a-paddle, I remain the unwavering champion of democratic precepts, transcendent truths, and the universal community that affirms the equality of each and all with respect to freedom, happiness, worth, and dignity.
My work is fundamentally moral and political. It is also actively democratic in the sense of seeking to stimulate, cultivate, nurture, and support the capacities that are innate to each and all. I affirm the existence of a common moral reason, seeking the conditions in which that reason is incited, canalized positively for the human betterment, and made integral to public life as the actualization, embodiment, and expression of human freedom and happiness. The conception of ‘rational freedom’ affirms a commitment to truth and knowledge but recognizes that these goods cannot merely be stated passively but must be actively sought, willed, internalized, and lived. In fine, truth-seeking is even more important than truth-telling, as the condition for the receptiveness to and recognition of truth. That points to the need to create a habitus in which both the moral and intellectual virtues are known, taught, acquired, and exercised. Truth and knowledge are therefore goods which are not delivered from above or from the outside by some form of guardianship authority, but internal goods, part of the human character. In Socratic manner, character formation emerges as more important than the mere delivery of information to empty heads. I therefore argue that truth and knowledge cannot simply be passively stated but need to be actively incorporated within and lived through human actions, practices, and relations. At the centre of this incorporation is the bridge which mediates between the realm of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, science, fact, objectivity) and the realm of practical reason (ethics and politics, values, virtues, motivations, interests and stakes, subjectivity). I seek to put the questions of knowing-what, knowing-how, and knowing-why together.
Historically, ‘rational freedom’ has been embodied and articulated as a lawful and institutional freedom, securing the right relations between individuals in society and between society and the wider world. My work in the 1990s and 2000s rooted this conception in ancient Greece, especially Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In time, I came to see that the transcendent standards I affirmed were rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where the partnership is one between God and human beings made in the image of God.
There is a significant difference between this image of the world and the one of ancient civilizations. The ancient gods were natural gods, all-powerful forces of nature, impersonal and indifferent to human concerns. It is possible to see echoes of this view in Einstein’s conception of God: ‘I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’ Humans sought to placate and appease these gods, even outwit them, but they could never get these gods to submit to the rule of moral law. Human beings therefore were in the hands of external impersonal forces, playthings of forces that proceeded without regard to human needs, desires, and appeals. Moderns are more inclined to employ science and technology to force nature to the human will and wish-fulfilment. When I see the extent to which science is being pressed into service as ethics and politics, I see Max Weber’s image of renascent nature gods taking form as impersonal forces and demanding human sacrifice. They are not true gods, just as the Nature that those who speak with the authority of science refer to is not true nature – merely the collective environmental consequences of uncoordinated incremental human actions within specific social relations. Hence my objection to science being used in lieu of a genuine ethics and politics. This gives us neither true science nor true religion/ethics, merely the ascendancy of old impersonal nature gods now transfigured through and mediating the alienated world of capitalist relations and its economic imperatives. Where once human beings were considered to be partners in Creation, with an active hand in making the laws by which they consent to be governed, they have come to be reduced to subservience not merely to the gods of the old indifferent Nature but to their own alien powers in their catastrophic impact on the environment, reified as ‘nature.’ I fear that environmentalists, with the best of intentions, are merely equipping governments with the scientific rationale to institute an environmental austerity, preserving rather than altering the very social relations driving this eco-catastrophe in the first place. My objection, then, is not to the science but to political naivety and ethical neutrality in a condition of alienation that reifies true relations. In arguing for a mediated relation between theoretical reason (scientific knowledge with technological know-how as a spin-off) and practical reason (ethics and politics), I emphasize that a bridge goes both ways and that there is an interactive, reflexive quality to reason in light of experience.
With ‘rational freedom,’ I take my stand on a moral-legal determination of the right relation to Nature. This view holds that right is sovereign over might, that truth cannot be passively given, still less dictated by philosopher-rulers, but must be actively willed, that there is a common moral reason, and that there is no legitimate government without the consent of the governed. The view is democratic but emphasizes that true democracy is conditional upon human beings fully and properly developing and exercising their innate power and reason, leading themselves, in associative endeavour, by the nous rather than allowing others to mis/lead them by the nose.
I continue to emphasize Plato’s employment of the dialectic to tease out the truth through dialogue. But I now go deeper and further to emphasize the active relation of the government to God the governor. Even God Himself does not dictate and impose truth in the manner demanded by truth-tellers of all kinds, but works through partnership with human beings as moral agents. This establishes the moral content of ‘rational freedom,’ the foundation stone of democracy, freedom, justice, and equality: no power, not even the unlimited power of God, is absolute. Above all rulers of whatever description - philosopher-kings, democratically elected governments, monarchs, emperors etc. - stands the supreme authority of the moral law. That principle is the first and eternal foundation of freedom, the eternal defence of human rights against tyranny, the tyranny of despots and autocrats but also of experts and of what Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill called ‘the tyranny of the majority.’ The democratic realization of freedom and happiness is therefore bound by the moral law which has the human good at its core.
The argument for ‘system change,’ then, is motivated by a concern to establish the appropriate regimen for the human good, restoring the connection between reason and freedom within a true law and order. In short, I argue for a coherent organization, clarity of ends, provision of effective and appropriate means of associative action, unity of purpose, and an active consent translated into conscious participation. ‘Change’ has to be given precise institutional and structural form and also democratic consent and social content. Both content and consent needs to be established to give any politics social significance and democratic legitimacy whilst also supplying it with the motivational springs to encourage people to act voluntarily through positive identification with a course of action.
A key problematic within the conception of ‘rational freedom’ concerns reconciling individuality and sociality as two sides of the one human nature: the key issue concerns how independence and association, autonomy and authority, liberty and law, freedom and solidarity are to be reconciled in true relation, each integral to and enhancing the other. In libertarian conceptions of freedom, the relations to others through law, morality, and community are experienced as constraints on individual liberty to the extent that they diverge from desire. To recover a commonality and sociality that preserves and enhances individuality requires a political identity in which these terms balance and coincide with each other, so that collective and solidaristic terms become not merely a condition of freedom but a dimension of it. Rousseau expressed the point in a phrase that liberals have found jarring when he wrote of the law forcing people to be free. The phrase may sound coercive and repressive, but only when set in the context of a dualism between individuality and sociality. That dualism is integral to liberalism, whose false ontology is the source of the ills that afflict the age. By forcing people to be free, Rousseau meant that the law embodies a social good and moral ideal which coincides with individual good, and embodies a moral and educative purpose in bringing individuals to internalize and articulate that coincidence, a reason which educates desire from within. Freedom is therefore achieved through internal education rather than external command, with the experience of constraint dissolving the more that law succeeds in its educative purpose. The more that law and desire are brought into conflict, the more the individual experiences political order and authority as constraint rather than freedom. When politics is in command mode, then, with truths being dictated from the outside and relayed downwards, the conflict with desire means that truth is felt as a constraint to resist in the name of freedom. The modern world, premised on the antinomies the heart of the liberal ontology, swings constantly between the twin evils of authoritarianism and libertarianism, the depredations and excesses of the one calling forth and justifying the depredations and excesses of the other. ‘Rational freedom’ is premised on a thoroughgoing critique of libertarian freedom, but argues for a genuine authority, one in balance with autonomy, as against authoritarianism. The loss of the moral and educative dimension within any command and constraint model will prove debilitating in the short run – it doesn’t cultivate and incite the inner motives that generates response and co-responsibility – and politically catastrophic in the long run - it effectively legitimates a politics which reverses the democratic revolution of recent centuries by giving up the urge to educate desire to legitimize the dictate of experts. ‘Necessity’ is not an argument, merely the licence for rank bad politics.
At the heart of ‘rational freedom’ is the idea of creating the collective conditions of a genuine freedom as happiness, understood in the ancient sense of flourishing within a public life. This entails the creation of a legal-institutional structure within an overarching and authoritative moral framework, sustained by and sustaining a socio-relational and moral-psychological infrastructure. The basic idea concerns the education of desire so that the individual transcends selfish interest to see the common good as also a personal good. With the attainment of this happy coincidence, the law comes to be experienced as freedom as self-actualization, and not as external command and constraint; the law has been internalized. It should also be underlined that the principle of self-assumed obligation is at the heart of the politics of ‘rational freedom,’ the idea that human beings are politically obligated only by those laws in which they have had a hand in making. Internalization is therefore not a case of indoctrination but is an active and participatory process in which agents are conscious and develop a sense of ownership and responsibility.
‘Rational freedom’ is a species of the view that ‘freedom is the appreciation of necessity.’ The key term in this phrase is ‘appreciation,’ the active moral-intellectual process by which human agents come to understand the nature of objective reality and adjust their behaviours accordingly. Rational freedom therefore offers a view of ‘free necessity,’ freedom as the recognition of a truth greater than individual desire. In the words of the Psalm: "I will walk in freedom for I have sought out Your law." (Psalm 119: 45). The rabbis engaged in a little pun on words to read the inscription on the tablets brought from the mountain by Moses not as ‘the writing was the writing of God, engraved (harui) on the tablets,’ but as ‘freedom (heruf) was on the tablets.’ That pun expresses the idea of rational freedom concisely. The moral and educative purpose of law is to engrave the terms, conditions, and qualities of freedom into the hearts of individuals so as raise them as citizens of a public realm who experience personal freedom collectively. I refuse to surrender that conception, for whatever reason, however urgent a crisis. The last thing to do in a crisis is adopt panic measures. Had we built a public life on that rational-moral notion of freedom instead of the libertarian view, then we would not have come so close to catastrophe as to be finding it necessary to resort to alarm and be embroiled in the self-cancelling conflict of authoritarian command and libertarian resistance (with identities here forever changing round). Necessity bluntly asserted as unarguable truth is not an argument. Identifying the appropriate and effective media by which the appreciation of reality is attained is crucial to the reconciliation that secures the grounds of freedom and happiness.
the whole point of the conception of ‘rational freedom’ has been to restore law and order in the true senses of those words to a world that has been driven to extremes through the annexation, parceling out, and hollowing of the common ground. Human beings have been robbed of their political and ethical commons as well as their physical commons.
To reject authoritarianism is not to reject authority, and to establish the case for authority is not to embrace authoritarianism - it is to seek to secure the conditions of a true liberty as against licence. The way out of crisis is a rational freedom that emphasizes the need for communities of legitimate self-constraint. There are no libertarian fantasies of freedom to be had here, the very opposite. Aristotle rejected an atomistic freedom as involving the licence of an individualism which is 'divorced from law and justice' (Aristotle, Politics I.ii 1981: 59/60). That individualism is also divorced from Nature and works to undermine the social and ecological conditions of human existence. The definition of authority in this tradition of rational freedom will no doubt be condemned as authoritarian by the defenders of ‘liberal democracy,’ not least those whose who are most concerned with individual rights and democracy only when it delivers a result they favour. Aristotle’s response is to argue that living in accordance with the constitution is not 'slavery' but 'self-preservation’ and ‘salvation’ (Politics V. ix 1981:332; Politics trans Barker 1958:1310a). Aristotle follows Plato in identifying an excessive personal liberty estranged from connections with public life, community, and nature with license. The roots of authoritarianism lie in this liberty as license. Such liberty, Aristotle argues, ensures a large body of support for demagogues (P 1981: 373/5).
My work on ‘rational freedom’ is all about establishing the relation between transcendent standards of truth and justice and their incarnation in the institutions and practices of the human social world. The appreciation of truth in politics is always and inherently a matter of mediation. Miss that mediation, and you have missed everything. Stating truth and ends is the easy bit, which is no doubt why so many do it so often. But you cannot just keep repeating the end, and repeating the reasons as to why that that is the end, and then demand action to realize the end. What action? It is determining and deciding the ways of getting to the end that matter. The problem we face, in other words, is not simply an ecological problem in the sense of the natural metabolism, but first and foremost a problem of social ecology and a problem of the human moral ecology within public life.
This essay thus seeks to elaborate on the overarching commitment to ‘rational freedom’ in my work, indicating the extent to which it entails a republicanism that transcends the alienating separations and dualisms of liberal thought, institutions, and practices.
This view of ‘rational freedom’ seeks to transcend modernity, capitalism, and liberalism, not turn the clock back against them. This is in line with the way that Marx sought to extend political emancipation into human emancipation in general by realizing the universal emancipatory potentials of the citoyen beyond the atomistic conceptions of the bourgeois. The view is post-liberal rather than illiberal, although it does recognize some of the greatest values of liberalism actually pre-date liberalism, particularly natural rights as rooted in natural law.
I incorporate the work of modernist philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, noting at the same time the cogency of Nietzsche’s critique. That critique has led me back to Aristotelianism and Thomism, as it did with MacIntyre. But I still consider the emancipatory potentialities of modernity to be far from exhausted. I like the way that Rousseau sought to reconcile ancient and modern conceptions in a genuine public community. Rousseau is a much misunderstood philosopher. His view that human beings are born free but are everywhere in chains is often understood as an argument for human beings to return to a nature free from chains. This view is not merely mistaken, it completely inverts Rousseau’s philosophy. Rousseau is concerned to replace the illegitimate chains of political and civil oppression in an unequal society with the legitimate chains of a public community resting on self-assumed obligation. I argue against demands for environmental action levelled on an untransformed government by way of extra-parliamentary popular pressure, precisely because I am committed to a republican view of the polity. A ‘green’ government is more than the mobilization of protest to force existing governments to act, but denotes a Green Republic and republicanism. An aggregate of radicalised/traumatised numbers does not constitute a public.
One of the key philosophers whose work I have explored at length is Immanuel Kant. Kant defined the philosophical problem of politics as being how to convert lawless conflict into a moral ideal of peace (Saner 1973:310 313). This task is a struggle for the rule of law and persists until the realization of the ideal of the republican state ensuring the greatest possible freedom for all.
For Kant, the chaos that conflict between the freedom of the individual and that of all others produces can be avoided only with the imposition of a lawful framework regulating individuals in a universally binding manner. This ensures that the free actions of one individual 'can be reconciled with the freedom of the other in accordance with a universal law,’ individuals remaining free to pursue private ends within the constraint of an objective freedom defined by the 'Universal Principle of Right':
Every action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each individual's will to coexist with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law is right.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals 1991: 133
This Universal Principle of Right defines the principle of ‘rational freedom’ succinctly.
In 1795, Kant proclaimed that the peoples of the earth have entered into a "universal community.” For Kant, the rational ideal of human community which he developed throughout his writings assumed its final form in the Idea of a peaceful universal community of all nations (MM 352). These are the ‘rational’ ideas of Kant (and other philosophers) that I sought to bring into the environmental movement in order to ensure the philosophical grounding of the Ecopolis, defining a Green Republicanism in which the universal law serves to secure the equality of freedom for each and all. I make these points to make clear that my sustained critique of the liberal order is steeped in a deep understanding law, rights, and civil order. Kant affirms the principle of innate freedom to be the source of all rights (MM 237). As the innate right to external freedom under universal laws, the principle of innate freedom contains the right to equality, independence from others, sovereignty over oneself, and liberty to do anything without harming others. That’s the liberal freedom that I have sought to deepen and enrich, to ‘abolish’ in the Hegelian sense of realizing, preserving, raising up (Aufgehoben and Aufhebung). Public law is an expression of the collective will of the people and therefore belongs to a civil society (MM 311). The constitution of a civil society is the product of collective action on the part of a community. Here is where ‘rational’ precepts or transcendent truths come to be fleshed out socially, in the interactions that take place between social individuals. In the ‘rational’ ethic I therefore seek to integrate autonomy and solidarity within a social ethic and practical philosophy. This is the ‘centre ground’ which has been hollowed out and lost in the contemporary world. ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ wrote Marx, protesting the reduction of warm human relations to icy calculation and the callous nexus of cash payment and demanding that community resolidify around proper relations. Marx’s immediate antecedents here are Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. I believe Rousseau made use of the device of the social contract but isn’t quite a contractarian thinker; the contract does not do the heavy lifting in Rousseau’s philosophy. Rousseau resolidifies human bonds in other ways, even if he did title his most substantial work in political philosophy The Social Contract. Hegel is explicitly anti-contractarian but his doctrine of Sittlichkeit, proposing a tripartite structure integrating civil society, the economic ‘system of needs,’ and the state as ethical agency securing the universal interest very much gives us a Rousseau for the era of the nation-state. Kant does something similar himself in taking Rousseau’s concept of social contract to identify the Republican state as the united general will, thus rendering Rousseau's important concept of the general will the foundation of public law (MM 313-15). Rousseau’s idea of the general will is of huge significance. With this concept, Rousseau made it clear that the truth cannot just be passively stated but has to be actively willed on the part of the citizens. If only a radical movement concerned with getting government and citizens to recognize the truth equipped itself with a practical philosophy along these lines, we could be spared so much wasted time and effort.
The ultimate end of such a community is the embodiment of ‘rational freedom’ by way of securing equality and justice for each and all citizens. For Kant, the justice of a state is synonymous with its well-being (MM 318). Kant thus develops the Platonic Idea of Justice in his Idea of a Republican Constitution. As such an ideal, the republic of ends exists as a criterion by which to evaluate the existing political order. And Kant does indeed use the ideal in this way.
A constitution of the greatest human freedom in accordance with laws .. is at least a necessary Idea, which one must place at the foundation, not only in the first project of a state constitution, but also with regard to all laws... Though a [perfectly constituted society] may never come to pass, the Idea itself remains completely correct, which posits this maximum as an archetype, in order to bring the legal constitution of man ever closer to the greatest possible perfection, in accordance with the archetype. What the highest level may be at which man must stop, and how great therefore is the gap which necessarily remains open between the Idea and its realization - that is a matter which no-one can or should determine [in advance] precisely because it is Freedom which can transgress any assigned limit.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith trans 1965: B 372-74
The parade of Ideas that Kant presents before us in the Metaphysics of Morals is an explicit affirmation of ethical Platonism. This should come as no surprise. As David Lay Williams argues in Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (2007), Rousseau himself was the greatest Platonist of the modern age in affirming transcendent norms and values against the conventionalism of the age. Kant called Rousseau ‘the Newton of the moral world,’ praising Rousseau for having done for ethics what Newton had done for science. Kant continuously appeals to the Ideas of pure reason.
Since the concept of the general will is an Idea of reason, the concept of civil society that constrains the individual will in accordance with the general will is also an Idea (MM 306). The Idea thus serves as a regulative ideal and internal standard by which to judge every actual union of individuals in a commonwealth (MM 313). The concept of the civil state is the Idea of what a ‘rational’ state ought to be when conceived in accordance with the pure principles of justice. The contract by which individuals leave the state of nature for the civil state is also an Idea of reason, and not a historical or empirical concept (MM 315). So, too, is the concept of an ideal state, which for Kant is the republican constitution (MM 341). Everywhere, transcendent truths are affirmed against conventionalism, relativism, and sophism.
I recovered Marx, released from his Communist prison, as someone who worked within this 'rational' tradition.
Marx made an explicit identification of the ‘true state’ with the realization of the principle of rational freedom in one of his early contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung:
‘A state which is not the realization of rational freedom is a bad state.’
Marx and Engels Historische Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt, Berlin and Moscow 1927, vol. I, i (i), p. 247-248
That view comes with the implication that Marx adhered to some idea of the ‘good state’ as one that accords with the state’s true purpose and mission as the ethical agency of universality and commonality. Putting the two ideas together, Marx conceived the creative human essence as crucial in unfolding and giving substance to the conception of the 'true' public life, the 'true state' to which he refers in Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State being constituted by a ‘true’ democracy, individuality, and community (Marx CHDS 1975: 112). In Marx’s work, this ‘true state’ took the form of a social public beyond the alienated institutional expression of the state, a public which vested the bonds of universality and commonality in the associational space of civil society. Marx uproots the public-private and reason-nature dualisms central to capitalist modernity to develop a rich and expansive conception of public life as the 'true community' of 'life itself, physical and spiritual life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, human nature,' affirming this community on account of being ‘of quite different reality and scope than the political community,’ i.e., than the state as an abstracted public (CN 1975:418/9). Arguing that ‘the man is greater than the citizen and human life than political life’ (CN 1975:419), Marx develops what may be called a council republicanism which embeds a genuinely universal citizenship and commonality in social relations. The intersubjective community of ends which exists as rational freedom’s ideal is thus achieved as a democratic community of everyday life in Marx. My work on Marx, therefore, developed what may be called a council republicanism, the ‘true state’ as a new republic composed of three constituent elements - 'true democracy', 'true community' and ‘true individuality' (references to these terms are to be found throughout Marx's texts, e.g. CHDS 1975:87/8; OJQ 1975:223; JM 1975:265/7 277; EPM 1975:347 348 351; CN 1975:418; GI 1999:117/8).
In developing these views I was confronted by critics working within a Foucauldian or postmodernist critique, for whom the notion of ‘truth’ involved illicit claims to objectivity and betrayed a totalitarian intent inimical to liberty and repressive of otherness and difference. That critique implied that there were no objective grounds and standards and that all attempts to claim such grounds were ideological and potentially repressive. I was particularly struck by how often critics referred to the existence of a metaphysics in Marx, and how this was a ‘very bad thing’ in presenting evidence of a hidden God lurking somewhere in the background. Rather than take such criticisms as a warning, I took them as a clue to the very thing I was searching for – an explicit reference to and defence of transcendent standards of justice and the norms and values which come with them, as against the arbitrariness of positions based on conventionalism and constructivism. I developed the view that whilst Marx did not make any explicit commitment to transcendent standards, such standards are implicit in his work and are required to actualize his emancipatory commitments. This opened up a whole new dimension in my work. I began to see the limitations of the view of human self-creation in history. In particular, I saw notions of a praxis-based truth and reality as not only limited but potentially very dangerous to the extent that it sought to enclose the world in a totalizing reason/labour.
The contemporary state is not a true state. We can assert that it ought to be, and work towards bringing the real into as close a conformity with the ideal as we can. But there is no point in levelling demand after demand upon the untransformed state in the belief that this alone will make a surrogate real and true. It won’t.
And here is the key point. Neither Rousseau nor Kant simply take these Ideas out of the Platonic Heaven and bring them down to Earth. These Ideas may well be transcendent truths, but neither Rousseau nor Kant simply asserted them against empirical reality from the outside. These truths come with a practical philosophy that serves to bridge the gap between contemplation and action, theory and practice. The Ideas of social institution are incarnated and embedded in the phenomenal world and are therefore immanent as well as transcendent. The point is that practical reason – the field of ethics and politics – animates these Ideas in the way they articulate the transcendent Idea of Justice.
John Rawls is widely recognized as one of the greatest of modern moral philosophers. His greatness lay in his critical appropriation of Kant. But, as I have argued, he presented a Kant shorn of his metaphysical commitments to fit modern liberal institutions. Writing of Kant’s formula of the universal law, Rawls wrote:
It is a mistake, I believe, to emphasize the place of generality and universality in Kant's ethics. That moral principles are general and universal is hardly new with him; and as we have seen these conditions do not in any case take us very far. It is impossible to construct a moral theory on so slender a basis, and therefore to limit the discussion of Kant's doctrine to these notions is to reduce it to triviality. The real force of his view lies elsewhere.
John Rawls, Theory of Justice, 1971: 251
Rawls took his inspiration in Kant's theory of justice and in doing so became one of the greatest of modern liberal political philosophers. But he didn’t quite appreciate the true character of Kant the liberal’s ‘elsewhere.’
‘This was his secret for becoming one of the most productive Kantians in the past century, while the loyal followers of Kant were blithely advocating his ethical formalism. But even Rawls failed to realize that Kant's theory of justice was not his own invention but his adaptation of Plato's theory for the liberal ethos of modern Europe. So Rawls never recognized the ultimate source of inspiration for his own theory of justice. Thus he mistook himself for a Kantian because he never came around to appreciate the Platonic legacy in Kant's normative theory, probably the only thing worth saving in his entire philosophy.’
T.K. Seung, Kant A Guide for the Perplexed 2007: 142-143
In fine, the Platonic legacy in Kant's normative theory, which Rawls absorbed without knowing into his own theory of justice, is probably the only thing worth saving in Rawls’ entire philosophy. Rawls supplanted the ‘rational’ dimensions of Kant’s thought and replaced them with an explicitly political, as in conventional and constructed, doctrine. Such a doctrine cannot be sustained but, in time, comes to curve in on and consume itself – you cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too, once it is gone it is gone for good, leaving only self-created, self-defeating arbitrary ‘standards.’ Ponder those lines at length, and then understand precisely the depth of my ‘rational’ critique of liberalism and liberal democracy.
The rational ideal of human community espoused by Kant assumed its final form in the Idea of the peaceful universal community of all nations (MM 352). That sounds eminently reasonable, a genuine alternative to the war and disorder of present political and social arrangements. That’s the ‘rational freedom’ I have developed, and whose implications I have explored at length as a political theory and practice concerned to develop the rational integration of autonomy and solidarity against the limitations of liberal institutions that realize neither and frustrate both.
Since Kant presented his idea of ‘universal community,’ the inter-connection of the peoples of the Earth has proceeded apace, unifying the planet to such an extent as to make the idea of a Green republicanism as a “biospheric cosmopolitics" entirely conceivable. Such a notion seems most appropriate for the coming Age of Ecology and its transnational synergies.
The greatest modern representative and exponent of the ‘rational freedom’ I espouse is the social philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who argues explicitly for ‘the Rational Society.’ I have drawn on Habermas extensively in my own work. Ultimately, however, I am critical of the way that Habermas’ view tends to be ‘thin,’ mirroring the conceptions of the liberal order, and so I consider MacIntyre or Arendt to offer more in this respect. I nevertheless think Habermas is important in drawing attention to the emancipatory potentialities that still exist in the project of Enlightenment modernity. This allows me to link Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx to the moral traditions of pre-modern society that I seek to revalue and reclaim.
Habermas seeks to reconcile autonomy and solidarity in a way that points beyond the alienating separations of liberal society. But Habermas’ position itself is quite unusual in that it combines both liberal and Marxist elements. He understands the paradoxes of this position:
“I have been a reformist all my life, and maybe I have been a bit more so in recent years. Nevertheless, I mostly feel that I am the last Marxist.”
I once considered those who described themselves to be ‘Post-Marxist’ to be ex-marxists pure and simple. Since criticizing and, ultimately, rejecting Marx’s critique of God and religion to reinstate the necessity of transcendent standards, I am much less insistent on doctrinal fidelity, encouraging people to go wherever critical enquiry takes them. I continue to argue for the cogency of much of what Marx wrote. I am just now sceptical of a rationalist humanism which, in the hands of those seeking a total transformation on the understanding of human perfectionism, can become the very opposite of what is intended.
I emphasize the way in which Marx’s critical method needs to be applied independently of the nineteenth century determinations and categories of Marx’s writing. The critical spirit of Marxism as a philosophy of revolutionary-critical practice needs to be emphasized over the dead letter of the text. (In passing, I shall note that that is precisely how Gerrard Winstanley read the Bible, something that placed the emphasis on live spirit, reason, and experimentation in practice. That’s my view of the world in which we live, our relation to it, and knowledge of it).
Many, reading my criticisms of Marx motivated by a religious ethic and commitment could consider me to be not merely a ‘post’ or ‘ex’ Marxist but an anti-marxist. I would suggest that they read my work on Marx again until they appreciate that I have a claim to be, with Habermas, one of the last Marxists. Like Habermas, I have been concerned to counter the Nietzschean assault on Enlightenment rationalism on the part of post-structuralist and post-modern thinkers. At the same time, I have also emphasized Marx as a post-Enlightenment critical thinker who possessed a nuanced view of reason in relation to specific social forms. I read Marx as anticipating and countering the repressive turn of reason in the later Weberian form of rationalization.
Over time, I have had no qualms in broadening out Marx’s emancipatory project, in relation to ecology and religion. The recent publication of Marx’s ecological notebooks indicate the extent to which Marx was a pioneer in social ecology, incorporating natural scientific researches into his critical viewpoint. My work on religion, on the other hand, could be taken to indicate the extent to which I have sought to bring something extraneous into conventional Marxism. I don’t know whether than makes me ‘post’ or ‘ex’ or even ‘anti’ Marx. I know I continue to be critical and emancipatory in relation to specific social forms and relations, and that seems to me to be the very essence of Marx’s method. In the above quote, Habermas sees himself as a Marxist with a ‘reformist’ dimension, engaging with elements outside of Marxism in order to overcome certain historical limitations and theoretical deficits that may exist in Marx’s work. I seek to overcome the religious and spiritual deficits in order to deepen possibilities for profound social transformation.
The ‘motivating thought’ which Habermas claims to have driven his work is one that I would also apply to my own work. Habermas defines his ‘motivational thought’ as ‘the reconciliation of a modernity which has fallen apart’:
“the idea that without surrendering the differentiation that modernity has made possible in the cultural, the social, and economic spheres, one can find forms of living together in which autonomy and dependency can truly enter into a non-antagonistic relation, that one can walk tall in a collectivity that does not have the dubious quality of backward-looking substantial forms of community.”
Habermas Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jurgen Habermas 1992: 125
I have worked hard to conceive this reconciliation of autonomy and solidarity, involving me in immense reading and writing, weaving various theoretical sources together to form a coherent whole. I have drawn on various political traditions and theories, socialism, conservatism, anarchism, and liberalism. If my views are critical of liberalism, then they also demonstrate a positive evaluation of the work of, say, John Stuart Mill. I also appraise the libertarian conception of rational freedom in William Godwin’s Political Justice. I have also sought a democratic constitution of authority with respect to viable forms of anarchism and anarchist society. I have examined a range of philosophers in depth to extract key elements making for a deep and rich conception of rational freedom: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx. I have studied Max Weber and Lewis Mumford in depth and written extensively on them. I draw on a range of subject disciplines to develop notions of structure and agency, community, differentiation, solidarity, individuality, process and adaptation, action and behaviour, steering media and institutional and psychic mechanisms, the motivational economy, moral motives, economic incentives. The work is unfinished, not least because it is unfinishable in being abreast of the ceaselessly creative and participatory universe in which we live.
I cite Habermas and praise Habermas for the reason he emphasizes the extent to which Marx’s emancipatory project is post-liberal and not illiberal. My critique of liberalism is grounded very firmly in this understanding, eschewing reactionary visions and ‘back to nature’ fantasies. I reject the stark antithesis between the civic realm as artificial and bad and nature as natural and therefore good. This is the plainest romanticism that is neither true to human beings nor nature – human beings create culture quite naturally and are immersed in their creations naturally. Notions that human beings are ‘only a small part’ of nature as a greater entity merely restate an ancient theological truth with respect to God. That truth has been lost in an era in which morality has dissolved into irreducible subjective choice and self-created values. That is the real source of error here, and it is one that I consistently target.
The whole notion of rights is in some way anthropocentric. Nature is indifferent to all such notions. The struggle for human rights, applying to each and all equally, without regard to station, has been one of humanity’s greatest achievements and is an ongoing struggle. Denigrate this at your peril. Civil rights concern precisely the terms by which human beings, as social beings, come together to order their existence in common. Again, it has been an immense struggle to ensure that the egalitarian perspective here should come to prevail over perspectives restricting citizenship to property-based entitlement. This, too, is an ongoing struggle, and it is always a struggle against partial, one-sided, that is to say, ignorant conceptions. As for ‘reality,’ philosophers write entire books on this subject. Nature is reality, you and I are reality, God is ultimate reality. But be clear that we know reality through our cognitive apparatus and conceptual ordering. There is always, therefore, a degree of contrivance with respect to our views of reality. The reality of rights, natural or otherwise, is of another order. I follow philosophers like John Finnis, for whom natural rights are rooted in natural law. There is nothing, in other words, remotely new about these assertions of ‘nature.’ We can go right back to the early sophists who debated the relation between nature and convention, arguing which one merits primacy.
My concern here, however, is not with such philosophical debates. I’ll just state in passing that the ontological status of anything is uncertain, leaving us having to find a way of living that is less assertive and more faithful with respect to all that cannot be proven. I shall leave that there. My concern is with the denigration of rights in favour of something called ‘Nature.’ Read Einstein’s positive embrace of what he calls Spinoza’s God, and understand that Nature is entirely indifferent to human concerns. It is a short step from calling ‘human rights,’ and by implication human beings, arrogant to a fully-fledged misanthropy that is careless, not to say callous, with respect to freedom, equality, and justice.
I am a critic of liberalism and of ‘bourgeois’ democracy, for the reasons Marx gave. It is worth emphasising at the same time that Marx scorned ‘back to nature’ pre-modern fantasies for being the reactionary delusions they are. Marx looked to ‘go beyond’ liberalism, not in the sense of transcending human arrogance, but in transcending atomistic conceptions of rights in order to realize their universal and emancipatory citizen qualities. Habermas is crystal clear that ‘bourgeois’ democracy is infinitely superior to having no democracy at all, and that democracy is a tender plant that needs constant watering. Ideologies that diminish the achievements of modernity, or scorn them as arrogant, starve the plant and risk spreading a desert. As Habermas writes, ‘we know just how important bourgeois freedoms are. For when things go wrong it is those on the Left who become the first victims’ (Habermas Autonomy and Solidarity 1992: 50). But as I make abundantly clear in my writings on Marx, these freedoms are not simply and inherently ‘bourgeois’ but contain universal emancipatory and egalitarian implications that can be released from and realized beyond their ‘bourgeois’ social forms. In short, my critique is motivated by a concern that the modern impulse for equality, justice, and cooperation ceases to be merely formal and instead becomes universal in a substantive sense, rather than particular and class-bound. It is precisely that particularism within asymmetrical relations that compels freedom to be projected upwards to the abstract heaven of the state, surviving as a formal existence precisely on account of being denied substantively.
Habermas does precisely what I seek to do, which is to establish a via media between the ideal and the real that proceeds intellectually, morally, institutionally, and practically. Without that bridge, visions split between ideals shorn of their means of realization and realities which are also increasingly impossibilities. In Between Facts and Norms (1996), Habermas continues in the footsteps of the ‘rational’ tradition to make the ‘real’ rational and the ‘rational’ real. That view is located in Hegel and Marx, but also goes back to the way that Aristotle related the ‘is’ of his scientific studies with the ‘ought’ of his politics and ethics. Habermas does indeed present a reformist view of this rational tradition. As Anthony Giddens commented, Habermas thinks we can facilitate ‘reason without revolution.’ (Giddens ‘Labour and Interaction,’ in J.B. Thompson and D. Held Habermas: The Critical Debates 1982: 95-121). A deep transformation with as little disturbance and unpleasantness as possible would suit me fine. I am far from making a fetish of revolution, not least because such things tend to get out of control and backfire spectacularly. My argument remains eminently rational, arguing that human beings as rational beings come to embrace voluntarily the collective restraints and freedoms of common living according to reality rather than having to submit involuntarily to external necessities and constraints arising as a consequence of unreason. This involves a deep institutional, structural, and moral analysis of who ‘we’ are, as individuals and as societies, where ‘we’ are, where ‘we’ ought to go (and not merely want to go), and how ‘we’ may get their without thereby losing modernity’s emancipatory achievements, its material conquest of necessity, and its concern to locate political action and legislation in a democratically organized consensus. All of these things are themselves insufficiently or inadequately realized and stand in need of further advance in various ways (governments are subject to corporate capture and constraint by private economic forces, material resources are inadequately distributed etc).
I shall have to bring this discussion to a quick end now, lest it turn into an extended essay on Jurgen Habermas. I’ll declare myself a reformist and rationalist in line of descent from Jurgen Habermas. I am a very reluctant revolutionary. I argue for deep social transformation, but possess an optimistic philosophical anthropology which holds that human beings may, one day, come to see reason and establish the rational constraints in an authentic public community upon which freedom and happiness depend. That involves communication and consensus, it also involves transformations with respect to social forms and relations, and it is in the latter where conflict can be expected. Power concedes nothing without demands. It is worth noting, then, that Habermas’ reformism entails no wishful thinking with respect to mass persuasion. The radical implications of Habermas’ arguments are clear:
“Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus. Taken together, autonomy and responsibility constitute the only Idea that we possess a priori … only in an emancipated society, whose members’ autonomy and responsibility has been realized, would communication have developed into the non-authoritarian and universally practical dialogue from which both our model of reciprocally constituted ego identity and our idea of true consensus are always implicitly derived. To this extent the truth of statements is based on anticipating the realization of the good life.”
Habermas Knowledge and Human Interests 1978: 314
Such a view is characterized by the ‘immanent critique’ which constitutes Marx’s approach. Such a critique always looks to ‘go beyond’ or transcend current social forms, not merely reject them. ‘Bourgeois’ democracy is not to be rejected and extirpated but positively transcended/realized in the Hegelian sense. We retain the achievements of a differentiated modernity as we seek to reunify what has been rent asunder.
I shall end by declaring that Habermas’ concept of learning is precisely mine, involving: ‘moral insight, practical knowledge, communicative action, and consensual regulation of action conflicts … that in turn first make possible the introduction of new productive forces.’ (Habermas Communication and the Evolution of Society 1984: 97-98). And more, it entails a commitment to the rational society and public life.
Without the social and structural transformation which restores the notion of a substantive good, those seeking to press such a good on the terrain of liberal individualism and pluralism will be accused of breaking their liberal premises – of absolutizing their relative good or goods and using the force of government and law to impose it on others. That is precisely the position that results when seeking socialist solutions on liberal premises. Hence my point at the beginning to move to a post-liberal society and politics, see the limitations of liberalism in falsely separating individual and society, and for environmentalism to openly embrace ethics, politics, and socialism, instead of pressing science and technology against political society as substantive, unanswerable truth. That recourse to a governmental and legislative agenda to impose a substantive good contradicts the notion of ethics as subjective choice and contradicts the basic premise of conflict pluralism. I say this not to criticize environmentalism here, but to make it conscious of its full political and ethical implications with respect to substantive notions of the true and the good. Ultimately, those notions imply a move beyond the liberal order. That is the view I have sought to impress on people with my work on ‘rational freedom.’ But once you start to press these substantive notions through the abstract communities of state and law, you no longer seeking to persuade others in a plural society and political life open to alternate platforms, but forcing them into conformity with a one-note righteousness. This is a coercive liberalism, the result of liberals seeking to impose their ends despite their democratic rejection, in violation of liberal means and values. The case may be right. I most certainly do think that we are living within a long crisis which possesses transformative potential. My concern is for radicals to see that we have reached the limits of the liberal market society, see that society as a systematic ethical and political devaluation, and understand precisely why I argue for socialism as the recovery of public life and substantive notions of the good. With that understanding in place we can seek to rebuild communities, orienting them within via social practices, modes of conduct, character forms. I am well aware that such notions of the common good and community will be rejected by liberals on account of their repressive implications with respect to being prescriptive. I have seen views of the common good rejected on account of being oppressive with respect to otherness and difference. Such a view fates us to fight it out between ourselves in a zero-sum politics, until nothing of public life remains. The crisis in the climate system is forcing liberals in a very practical and immediate sense to discover that ‘the good’ is something substantive, something much more than subjective choice, and that there is a reality beyond human will and projection. We will not get out of this crisis by individualism and pluralism; on the contrary, individualism and pluralism locks society into an endless mutual antagonism, a self-cancellation that, in time, will become a self-annihilation.
I don’t remotely trust the "we are right regardless of the law" approach of extremists, not least because the self-righteous have been among the most deluded, destructive, and vicious people in history. The critical issue is that human beings are different from animals, for good or ill:
‘Man creates symbols and bases his culture upon them; the flag and patriotism are examples, as are status, religion, and language. The capacity to create and deal with symbols, actually a superb achievement, also accounts for the fact that we are the cruellest species on the planet. We kill not out of necessity but out of allegiance to such symbols as the flag and fatherland; we kill on principle. Thus our aggression occurs on a different level from that of animals, and not much can be learned from animals about this distinctively human form of aggression.’
Rollo May, Power and Innocence 1976: 147
If you don’t come off the barricades to engage in a politics that is constitutive of a genuine public community now, then you are condemned to a future forever on the barricades in the futile attempt to stave off the civilisational catastrophe that is sure to come.
‘Rational freedom’ still lights the way.
Will the future belong to ‘rational freedom?’ Only if we are lucky.
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