The Critique of Enlightened Self-Interest
I am reading theorists working in the field of the commons advancing 'enlightened self-interest' as the solution to social and ecological problems. The view is implausible and for a number of reasons: a) it is not a new view but the bedrock of liberal capitalist modernity: in which case, it is a mode of thinking that is complicit in generating the very problem it is now being called upon to solve; b) the view purports to be a 'third way,' a workaround which, not inconveniently for some, avoids the need to confront power and engage in politics; c) its roots are in liberal modes of thinking, particularly the false antitheses between individual and society, egoism and altruism, short-term and long-term, its 'third way' resolution gaining its rationale only in the context of those false premises. I can understand apologists and ideologues seeking system preservation embracing such views. The lack of a critique of political economy, class analysis, and politics makes perfect sense as an ideological project. That people working in the field of the commons should promote such notions indicates a politically debilitating naivety that ensures that the radical moment will pass and leave present social relations unaltered. The socio-ecological crisis which now confronts the world is a crisis with radical potential. That is, it is a crisis which calls into question the core relations, forms, and institutions of the social system, not an accident to be addressed by incremental reforms. The realisation of that transformative potential requires appropriately radical thought and action. Notions of enlightened self-interest are not radical, merely a variant of prevailing modes.
I examine notions of natural reasonableness and sociability and of enlightened self-interest in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality. These notions are constantly being resurrected in 'new' forms, often involving natural selection, ruling out the need for any extraneous ethics or politics (religion and socialism, particularly, which involve confrontations with subjective choice and entrenched power). These views offer unity, community, and harmony without the need for conflict and opposition and hence are embraced by the conflict-averse. Such views dovetail very neatly with existing power-relations, or simply default to them in the absence of a commitment to create alternative relations. Natural reasonableness, sociability, and sympathy and enlightened self-interest were the principal theme of 'classical liberalism,' going back to David Hume, Adam Smith, Shaftesbury and others in the eighteenth century and emerging in the individualist thought of the nineteenth century. In the work of liberal thinkers and political economists like John Stuart Mill, these notions led to almighty struggles to reconcile individualist premises and cooperative values. The later Mill saw the deficiencies of individuals and tried to make the case for a socialism based on a cooperative ethic. But 'centrist liberalism' or social liberalism found itself mired in controversies over fair share, equality, equity, need, individual contribution, utility, social welfare, and such like. One of the key political problems of the twentieth century was the way that the socialist alternative was drawn back into bourgeois modes of thought and politics and hence became hamstrung by the irresolvable antinomies of bourgeois society. What is fair? Marx never couched his arguments in these terms – he knew them to be a snare. Socialism morphed into Social (parliamentary) Democracy via social liberalism and was thereby swallowed up. Such notions take a stand on a centre ground that does not exist. A radical politics has to transcend these antinomies or it ceases to be radical, merely conformist (and in short order cease to exist). There are good reasons for thinking that if natural reasonableness, sociability, sympathy, and enlightened self-interest haven't generated unity, equality, and harmony between people in society and between human society and nature by now, then it never will. There is a gap somewhere between just exchange and sustainability that can only be bridged by social forms of mediation that do not arise spontaneously. Instead, there has been what Marx identified as a metabolic rift between society and nature, something which arises from within the alienative and exploitative social relations that arose in the eighteenth century. There are no good reasons – philosophical, moral, empirical, or historical – to believe that these notions are capable of supplying the mediations or motivations required for the realisation of a more just, equitable, and sustainable world. The appeal of such thinking seems to rest entirely on the conveniently apolitical view that the rich can be persuaded to share the commons with the poor since, and the poor will agree, since as reasonable beings all, 'we' all come to see that, whatever our social divisions, all lose when the system fails. Such thinking is sociologically illiterate and presumes a social identity that does not exist, an identity in which short-term self-interest and long-term common interest coincide. The creation – and denial – of that identity is not a matter of natural predispositions and calculations of self-interest but of social relations. The problem with calculations of rational self-interest is that they presume the very things that need to be changed – motivations within prevailing social relations. The idea that the universal crisis in the planetary ecology will unite human beings is delusional; instead, crisis will entrench divisions, not least because its causes lie in the way that the commons have been enclosed for commodification and exploitation. Terms such as rich and poor are also utterly inadequate in grasping the division of society into classes with distinct and often divergent social interests.
Neither cooperation nor collaboration are virtues in themselves. It matters a great deal with whom we cooperate and collaborate and to which ends. The problem is that the dominant class have succeeded in entrenching and institutionalising their power in the social and political fabric.
Appeals to self-interest here fail to appreciate the nature of the capital system as an alienated system of production. The people 'in power' are mere personifications of economic categories and are as subject to accumulative imperatives as is the rest of society. Society is being charged with cracking the logic of collective action in a condition of alienated control and mediation. Whilst it is true, at the level of pure reason, that all fail when the system fails (as a result of economic and/or ecological collapse), it pays some within that system to pursue a private gain or advantage in the short-run over against their immediate rivals, even if the unintended long-term consequence of that action is common ruination. Further, the capital system, as a competition of capitals, impels the pursuit of short-term private gain at long-term public expense – neither the public nor the long-term exist in calculations of self-interest within the competitive system. Hence the need for either extraneous force – government, law, and regulation – or the supplanting of accumulative drivers by way of system change, creating new forms of social mediation that enable a connection to be established between the individual good and the long-term common good. Instead of enlightened self-interest, then, there is a need for a social self-mediation.
The sharing of the commons is not a question of enlightened self-interest when these commons have been annexed and commodified for private gain. The task before society is one of reclaiming the commons, the physical commons but also the political and ethical commons. In the context of class division, appeals to enlightened self-interest tend to be made by economic libertarians and political despots as well as by 'third way' centrist liberals who are seeking a pain-free road to unity and harmony, without the need to confront power and uproot class division. Either way, the argument is plainly ideological in the critical sense of concealing and rationalising asymmetrical power relations in order to ensure their preservation. After all, notions of a natural reasonableness, sociability, and sympathy as well as enlightened self-interest were the origins of the atomisation of society, the rise of individualism, and the sundering of people from the commons characterising capitalist modernity, and is of the same species as the neo-liberalism that has blighted global society this past half century.
Such thinking is all of a piece with methodological individualism. The solution is not to embrace a methodological collectivism in response but to transcend the false dualisms established by a liberal ontology that falsely separates the individual and the social. Liberalism is premises on the moral and ontological ultimacy of the pre-social and pre-political 'individual,' an abstract figure of homo economicus that exists nowhere except in textbooks of liberal rationalisation and self-justification. Hobbes read the competitive bourgeois society emerging in his day back into nature and, through a process of reification, read that 'nature' back as justification for the atomised bourgeois order. Hobbes was writing at the end of one epoch of social control and the beginning of another, one in which ties of personal dependence under feudalism came to be replaced by the objective dependence of all upon the tyranny and violence of capitalist abstraction.
The planetary ecology is now unravelling because of alienative and exploitative relations parcelling out the commons for private gain and because of modes of thought and politics adapted to them. Capital is most of all a diagram of alien power, the compelling nature of which is systemic. An indication of the depth and reach of that power is the extent to which those purporting to seek solutions will go to avoid confronting such entrenched power. Hence the appeal of liberal centrism and variants of a 'third way' that boast of being neither left nor right. In practice, such 'third way' thinking repudiates the future proposed by the left only to fall into the iniquitous present defended by the right. The world is now facing a looming ecological catastrophe precisely because of alienated forms of mediation and concomitant modes of thought which systemically and psychically repress and extinguish cooperation for the common good, leaving debate fractured between two abstract and, in their abstraction and their antithesis, equally false poles – self-interest and collective interest.
There is a need to be sceptical and critical whenever we are confronted with notions of natural reasonableness, sociability, and sympathy and enlightened self-interest, as if these notions alone are sufficient to achieve harmony, unity, and commonality. Such a view scotomizes politics and power in a suspiciously uncritical way. Human beings and societies have always had those qualities, which begs the question as to why global society is so divided and humanity is on suicide watch. Where is the natural reasonableness, sociability, and sympathy? Why, despite those natural endowments, is there disharmony instead of harmony?
It is possible to come across many variants of these views. The free market views of Hayek and von Mises, for instance, affirm the existence of a natural order which, if liberated from 'artificial' institutions and interventions, such as trade unions, government and government laws and regulations, safety standards, environmental protections, minimum wages, social welfare … brings about the most optimal allocation of resources through the proper functioning of the free-market. The neo-liberalism that has blighted the planet for half a century is not some alien invasion but arises from within the very terrain of the liberal social order. Each crisis and crash issues in the demand for more liberation. The problem is that human beings, being social beings and not self-interested, self-maximising atoms, do keep insisting on 'interfering' with the spontaneously emerging natural order in order to secure their ends. The view, in other words, presumes that human beings cease to be social and instead come to conform to their textbook pre-social, pre-political character. In practice, such beings are anti-social and anti-political, hence the obsession with 'government' as some alien force. It is liberal theory and practice that renders government extraneous in this way, rather than the public life that human beings as social beings create quite naturally and which they require in order to flourish.
The latest variants of this kind of thinking are often backed by science and references to natural selection. Again, the appealing argument is made that the unity and harmony of the positive-sum, win-win society is possible without the intervention of the extraneous forces of politics and ethics (still less, heaven forfend, God and religion); the liberation of self-interest serves to do the job. It is as though Karl Marx never existed. In his critical historical analyses, Marx showed how the interplay of individual self-interest in a competitive market society brought about not the harmony its proponents promised but a self-cancellation, individual freedom thus generating a collective unfreedom. (Marx Gr 1973:163/6). (This was the critical theme of my thesis Marx and Rational Freedom, and I refer people to that).
The avoidance of power, politics, and the need to supplant alien forms of external mediation by forms of social self-mediation lead inexorably to neo-liberalism, whether dressed up in terms of 'classical liberalism,' enlightened self-interest, or natural selection. Harmony, unity, and commonality are indeed worthy goals to pursue, but their attainment is a matter of appropriate and effective mediation – a social intervention to check and subvert systemic imperatives – and not a rehashing, reheating, and rebranding of tired old terms.
I trace the questions in greater analytical and historical depth in:
I also look closely at the relations between virtue, character, ethics, and self-interest in the thought of Adam Smith in chapter 3 of The Economics of the Good. The book also contains closely reasoned arguments on markets and morality.
When I first began to study Marx in depth in 1992, the academic and political world was exciting itself over notions of 'rational choice.' The extent to which bourgeois modes of thoughts can come to pervade even the opposition to the bourgeois order can be gleaned from the way that analytic and rational choice marxism set up shop within marxism, re-imagining it as the very thing it purported to criticize – a society of self-interested, self-maximising, rationally calculating, self-choosing individuals (Elster 1985; Cohen 1978; Roemer 1981). I read Jon Elster's Making Sense of Marx. It made a nonsense of Marx. The radical moment is upon is. It will be lost if people who present them as radical thinkers settle for rehashes and reheats of ideas whose time has passed. Been there and done it – that is why we are where we are – on the brink of self-destruction in the midst of divided societies.