Ejecting but not Rejecting Liberalism
This piece is in response to Steven Tucker's essay
150 years on from the death of JS Mill, has the philosopher really just beamed humanity up forcibly into a new, alien world of infinite ‘freedom’? https://mercatornet.com/the-cult-of-progress-john-stuart-mills-prison-of-compulsory-eccentricity/84191/
Patrick Deneen writes this in response:
'Heartening to play a role in ejecting J.S. Mill from the conservative pantheon. Once you understand that conservatism is the antithesis of liberalism, then you can more easily identify its foes.'
OK, but …
The neoliberalism embraced so enthusiastically by conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s can now be seen for what it was – a deliberate strategy of counter-revolution designed to break, fragment, disorient and destroy the burgeoining socialist challenge. It was naked class war and conservatives fearing the democratic inroads being made by labour into the power of capital supported it wholeheartedly. In the process, the neoliberal revolution also came to fracture and atomize social and moral supports, loyalties, and commitments central to conservatism. The revolution does indeed devour its own children.
There are conservatives, there are socialists, and there are liberals; and then there are conservatives and socialists who are not conservative or socialist at all but really liberals. Many people believe that liberalism is an integral part of conservatism, especially in the form of 'classical liberalism' of limited government, low taxes, and individual self-possession and self-interest. In reality, most modern conservatives are not conservative at all but libertarian, rejecting any common social or collective entity that stands above the freely choosing individual. The Left, too, have gone down the libertarian route. Hence the reason for our moral, social, and cultural decay.
There are signs that conservatives are engaging in the hard work of moral, philosophical, and political reconstruction, taking care to distinguish conservatism from a liberalism that, shorn of its metaphysical assumptions, is mired in antinomies it is unable to resolve. As conservatives pull clear, supposed leftists are standing firm. They need to read the room.
Many contemporary 'progressives' perform the awkward political and psychological feat of being anti-establishment whilst actually being parts of it. They were out in force again during the Coronation, ranting and raving away as if we were still in the eighteenth century and free markets and free trade were just good ideas in preparation to bring down the aristocracy and the remnants of the feudal regime. There is a techno-feudalism under the corporate form in emergence, but liberals, being liberals, busy themselves in fighting long won battles, unwinnable battles, or battles not worthy of being won. The power is elsewhere, and liberals won't go anywhere near it, except in subservience. Liberalism has been the dominant political culture of the modern world since the nineteenth century, which means that the problems liberal contest in the contempoary age are self-made (if it can at all be claimed that they do indeed contest the concentration and centralisation of capital, corporate power, the emergence of 'new aristocracies' based on money, power/knowledge, the unravelling ecology, social, moral, and natural, the unprecedented transfer of wealth to the rich, now superrich). Liberals will never own the messes of a world in implosion, for the reason that that would mean facing the antinomies of liberalism and making the effort to move on to a post-liberalism, presuming that they are sincere about their normative commitment to values of freedom, liberty, autonomy, creativity, etc. In my PhD thesis I made a big point about forcing liberals to face the autonomy-impairing and denying consequences of liberalism, forcing liberals to make the choice between liberal institutions (private property, the 'neutral' state etc) which are implicated in generating inequality and undermining liberty and cherished liberal values such as liberty and autonomy. I did this not only to make the case for socialism, but to ensure that the socialism I advocated preserved and enhanced those key liberal values that were worthy of being realized in a substantive sense. Socialism has too often taken an illiberal form, so I am concerned to define it as a post-liberalism, a positive transcendence of liberalism rather than its negation.
Conservatives are on the case, too. Conservative thinkers emphasise that many of the best values claimed to be liberal actually originate in the pre-liberal and pre-modern world, with natural rights having their roots in natural law and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. They are right. Liberalism at some point shed its metaphysical assumptions to become an overtly political doctrine as against a comprehensive doctrine, holding rights and liberties to be self-created and conferred politically. This assertion of self-creation was a huge error, which ensured that liberalism would come to devour itself. To paraphrase Thomas Babington Macaulay, liberalism is all sail and no anchor. I quite like John Stuart Mill. When I discovered the Reid's of Liverpool bookshop in 1990, I embarked on a radical book-buying spree, purchasing a thousand books or more from the shop over the next five years. Among the first four books I bought was Mill's Autobiography. I bought a dozen or more books by and on Mill, including collections that had three or more of his works in one. I even have an old copy of Mill's Principles of Political Economy from 1859! I am steeped in English liberalism, but if I know its strengths, I also know its limitations. Mill's Principles was the key text of political economy in the second half of the nineteenth century,and it sums up the confusions and limitations of liberalism. Mill sought the stationary state beyond endless growth, and lamented the fact that the advance of machinery had failed to lighten the day's toil for the worker. Marx in Capital explained the reason why – machinery (technological innovation) is absorbed into the competition of capitals, with capitalists innovating in search of an advantage over their rivals, lowering costs and earning more money for the same number of hours. Liberals still refer to capital as a thing, thus failing to appreciate Marx's point that capital is a process and a relation. Unfortunately, socialists consistently make precisely the same mistake, leading them to believe that the institutional expropriation of capital and its use to 'build socialism' would indeed issue in socialism. It couldn't and it hasn't; it could only issue in a bureaucratised state capitalism. The same with respect to Mill's proposals in later life for a cooperative socialism. Cooperatives may indeed be integral to a socialism of the freely associated producers (remembering issues of distribution, too), but without a transformation of capitalist relations they are mere 'dwarfish experiments' that are inevitably drawn back into capitalist competition and accumulation. (Marx's critique at the First International). There has to be a turning away from the captured and corrupted institutions of the corporate capitalist age and an attempt to create new and alternative way of transacting our social and economic affairs. Liberals at their best, in their younger days, did precisely this, challenging corrupt authorities and pioneering an alternative politics and economics; they have become incredibly reactionary in their older age. Realising deep down that liberalism has long been realized and is now beset with crises and contradictions, there is a resistance to change, demanding instead the full realisation of the promise of Enlightenment, modernity, and liberalism, showing little awareness that the ideals are impossible and destined to go off half-cock. That reactionary attempt to maintain decaying modes of thought, action and organisation turns its face against the future.
Leftists make an enormous mistake in following liberals down that route, 'defending the Enlightenment' etc. The tradition is exhausted and turning into its opposite in defence of new aristocracies. It's amazing how hidebound in their conservativism some liberal leftists are. That attitude won't resolve the crises and contradictions we face, only intensify them, making authoritarianism inevitable – Weber's iron cage will become a digital cage based upon the surrender of control and autonomy in a surveillance society. I mapped out a post-liberal socialism in the 1990s. Here and there, a few academics paid attention and offered praise. PhD students, too, responded positively and incorporated my arguments into their work. That work has yet to feed into a practical politics, though. Instead, the 'post' whatever crowd won and took the Left in the direction of inanity, insanity, and unreality. Just as what's left of the Left has taken a cultural and linguistic turn, forming the cultural wing of economic neoliberalism in corporate capitalism, there is evidence that conservatives are making progress in detaching conservatism from 'free market' economic libertarianism. This conservatism describes itself as post-liberal but, on closer inspection, can be very illiberal. Which makes my point – without the positive resolution of problems, their negative and repressive resolution becomes well-nigh inevitable. Self-created values and identities result in self-authored problems that few want to face: self-made man and his undoing is the story of the age of liberalism. The lost unity and common purpose can only be recovered and imposed in authoritarian terms on liberal premises. The liberal ontology falsely separates two essential aspects of human nature, individuality and sociality. The problem is the notion of the discrete, self-choosing self which is free to choose to contract in or contract out of society and any collective purpse according to whether it defends and advances self-interest or not. The problem of the age is that it is attempting to resolve the collective consequences of liberal agency without the collective mechanisms enabling effective action. Contemporary 'progressives' continue to think that common goods can issue from individualist premises - they cannot. Hence the impasse. I'll put it this way - there are people who persist in thinking that socialist conclusions can be drawn from (individualist) liberal premises. Not only are they wrong, they seem congenitally incapable of learning the lesson, either by logic or by experience. Marx in the Grundrisse portrayed the 'bourgeois mind' as stuck in an antithesis between yearning for a pre-modern fullness and a belief that history has ended in the competitive capitalism of the present. It has no conception of a future beyond present relations, only idle lamentations for a lost and irrevocable past. Thinkers like David Harvey raise the issue as to why some people find it easier to contemplate the end of civilisation than the end of capitalism. Here is the reason: it is the bourgeois mind at work, unable to see the future as anything more than the present enlarged (and an enlarged version of capitalist rapine is indeed the end of civilisation).
"It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end." Marx Grundrisse 1973, p. 162
I have read John Stuart Mill deeply and have a decent collection of books on him and by him. I'm not sure about the cogency of the criticisms in this article. I am aware of long-standing criticisms of Mill as a 'moral totalitarian' who had very definite views of what constituted moral progress and the proper character of the free individual. Deneen refers to the 'cult of progress.' I would refer to the paradox of process and the progress trap. Mill, I would argue, sought to spring that trap to bring us to a state beyond restless, relentless competition and consumption. I have felt all along, though, that his ideal of the stationary state and full realisation of rich and rounded human potentials beyond economic competition was only possible through the supplanting of key liberal-capitalist forms and institutions. It's called socialism, properly understood. Basically, conservatism is recovering its foundations and reorienting its politics, discarding its attachment to a failing liberalism. Socialists should do the same, but in a post-liberal as opposed to an illiberal sense - preserving all that is of value, which is plenty, and discarding the antinomies that block the realisation of peace, freedom, and democacy.
My paper on John Stuart Mill The Stationary State of John Stuart Mill (2004) https://www.academia.edu/705421/The_Stationary_State_of_John_Stuart_Mill
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