Why I Am Not A Liberal

 

Those of us in the contemporary academy who are not liberals ought given an account of why not. This asymmetric burden falls on us because the presumption is so strongly that one does fit within the broad confines of liberalism that if one does not explicitly identify out, and explain why one has done so, then two things are may occur. First, people may reasonably presume on statistical grounds that your politics are as such and engage with you with this in mind. This will make intellectual back and forth, the lifeblood of our profession, frustratingly congealed — always having to go back and check unstated presuppositions half way through a conversation, never getting to the meat of things. Second, one allows whatever thinking one does to accrue to the greater glory of an ideology you reject. Since the natural presupposition is that whatever insights you achieve have been achieved through the lens of liberal ideology, it will seem that whatever is good in your work is evidence that liberalism can sustain that good. 

I think it’s fair to say that in one form or another liberalism is the dominant ideology among contemporary academic philosophers. However, it’s actually slightly harder than one might think to provide straightforward targeted evidence for the claim. It is not, for instance, easy to find evidence of this as the explicit self conception of philosophers. The best evidence I know of on contemporary philosophers political views is this survey which was largely (but not entirely) carried out on European and North American philosophers. It found that a plurality of philosophers identify as “left leaning”. Given that most of the left parties of Europe and North America are very much in the liberal tradition this is a sort of evidence of that they are liberal. But only weakly so, and the paper itself discusses the problems with that inference. And in fact the next best source is this Phil-Papers survey which found that a plurality of the faculty at prestigious Anglophone institutions preferred socialism to capitalism. Now no follow up questions were available on how people understand “socialism” so this is perhaps compatible with identifying as a liberal. But it is not obviously so; caution is required. Another purpose in writing this blog post then is to explain the sense in which I think liberalism is dominant — it is not necessarily so in terms of self-identification.

Finally this blog post has a couple of issues specific to the left I wish to address. First, at some level it is clear that identifying as a liberal is just to identify as uncool and mainstream-in-a-boring-clueless-way among left cohorts. I don’t mind liberalism having a bad name, why would I?, but a result of this is I think people often miss the affinities of their thought with the liberal tradition and neglect its insights. A proper rejection of liberalism ought to involve understanding it as more than just a loser thing boring normies do — there is a reason it has won out in modernity. That reason may not (indeed I think should not) lead you to endorse liberalism; but you will get nowhere if you do not understand it, what liberalism responds to and addresses, and what of it one may wish to carry forward. Second, I think if we are being real with ourselves, a great many leftists in the academy who consider ourselves left of the Overton window should admit that we are de facto small-c conservatives — and in at least my society, to uphold the status quo just is to uphold a liberal social order. We are de facto conservatives in the sense that the modern university has clearly slotted into an important credentialing role for the approximation to meritocracy that dominates our economic, political, and ideological order. Materially speaking then just by going in to work and doing our job, however we may feel about it, we are playing the role of functionaries helping this system perpetuate itself. I think we ought be precise about the sense in which we are not liberals if only to self-acknowledge the many senses in which we are, and thereby cut out the bad faith pretences of pseudo-radicalism that so tiresomely dominate many academic spaces.

Ok, on to characterising liberalism and what I mean by saying it is dominant. I see contemporary liberal ideology as the confluence of three factors that led us to where we are today. First, there is the strand emphasised by Rawls in his famous lecture series on the history of liberalism. Here we see liberal political thought gradually emerge as a response to the civil wars in England and the wars of religion on the European continent. The diagnosis the intelligentsia of the day came up with was something along the lines of — these disastrous wars were caused by making control of the state a zero sum conflict over the ability to realise the most important goods and avoid the most disastrous evils. As such, we should reconceive the role of government to avoid its capture being so high stakes. Rather than a means of securing the good, it should exist to keep the peace between potentially fractious citizens and groups thereof. Part of doing so involves dividing up matters into those of private conscience versus those of public reason. Matters of private conscience are for the individual to freely decide and for others to respect in their wishes. Matters of public reason are those for which we need some way of deciding on social action that does not override what is for properly for the individual — initially and usually conceived, to be clear, as the propertied male head of a household. Privately we ought develop virtues of tolerance and mutual respect to enable the “live and let live” required for this to work. And publicly notions of private property and a sphere of action and protected rights that should be relatively free of state or other- imposition are developed. This goes well with notions of democracy (among the people who really count) as embodying the commitment to public reason delivering results that treated all perspectives equally, not a priori favouring one religious subset over another.

Obviously this is a very Rawls inflected way of describing the historical development, but I do believe it captures something important about the post-Westphalia social order. One can see something like this notion of a private conscience worthy of public respect coming to be in Montaigne and his ironical detachment from religious wars, likewise in Joseph Butler’s moralised theories of human nature, and of Locke on religious toleration; one can see the idea of government as keeping the peace very explicitly in Hobbes, of it existing to respect individual freedoms while still enabling collective action in Rousseau and Montesquieu. None of these are quite the full Rawlsian picture of Political Liberalism (surely Hobbes would seriously dissent!), but I think it is right to say that they all gradually set the scene for what we now think of as liberalism, and they are recognisably responses to a cogent diagnosis of what went wrong for Europe during the turbulent years after the emergence of Protestant theology.

The second stream of influence involved the rise of the commercial bourgeois made possible by an influx of wealth from New World conquests, plunder, and plantation economies, combined with technological advances making the returns on owning the means of production and hiring proletariat labour to work one’s capital suddenly much higher. These processes were thoroughly intertwined, as is documented in this fascinating (no, really!) discussion of the political economy of wood and timber in early modern England and its colonies.. This newly wealthy bourgeois faced threats to its dominance from multiple directions — on the one hand the king and the nobility, with the ancient duties of obedience they felt entitled to and which were thought to bind bourgeois to lower social status and less power. On the other hand, the peasants and slaves and conquered people of the new world did not seem to benefit from this new arrangement, to put the point mildly. If they were to occupy a social position befitting their newfound wealth and economic importance, the bourgeois needed an ideology that would rally people to their cause while making it natural that they should reap the benefits of these social changes. Under such selection pressures did liberalism develop many of its distinctive features.

Gradually what developed to meet this need is something like the following view of society: society is best when it is organised along the lines of being something like a fair playing field, where rational and thrifty subjects may thrive and benefit the common good if they display the appropriate mercantile virtues in pursuit of their enlightened self interest. Aristocrats are a wasteful and vain bunch who totally lack the virtue of thrift (Adam Smith’s damning explanation of how they lost their social position is representative here), and it just so happens that the inhabitants of the New World, the peasants of Ireland and Poland, anyone African — all lack the capability to be rational in the required fashion and so cannot reasonably be expected to benefit from any social system, at best being capable of enjoying the benevolent oversight of their rational betters (Montesquieu for instance considers this the only serious justification of slavery, but conveniently it works well enough). So emerges an ideology that encourages the bourgeois to band together to create the conditions of that fair playing ground and drive the wasteful decadent aristocrats from their thrones, the peasantry from their common lands, and the blacks to the fields. Many of liberalisms’ best theorists like Locke, Kant, and Mill spent their time refining the theoretical elements of this herronvolk meritocracy. Contemporary liberals don’t tend to be so keen to advertise this aspect of their intellectual history, but it is nowadays the subject of much historical philosophical work. This is the liberalism of the ascendent bourgeois.

Third and finally, there was the continuation of Occamite and nominalist tendencies from scholastic medieval thought. Already battles between the Papacy and secular powers had led to development of the bases of the idea that Church and State should be divided and private property respected. Nominalist thinking seems to have influenced Calvin, which not only indirectly therefore leads to the wars of religion and thus the first stream, but it is famously argued that Calvinism encouraged habits of saving and reinvestment over consumption that made liberal capitalist societies able to successfully replicate themselves and expand. More generally, there is the nominalist vibe. A nominalist picture of the individual person paints us as in some sense constructing our own worldview from our experiences rather than receiving the set concepts of a pre-ordered world. It thus kind of encourages a sense of individual primacy. It centres the individual will and reasoning capacity in a way that other views of the human person do not, and this notion of the person is vital for both the previous two streams above. Or so, at least, argue cranky mid 20th century conservatives.

So we are left with a worldview and practice that attempts to allocate some powers and responsibilities to individuals, or at least heads of propertied families, conceived of as rights-bearing rational and thrifty subjects pursuing their own vision of salvation and proper social order. Meanwhile the state is conceived of as a way of protecting those rights and the ability of those persons to engage in the kind of market activities that would allow them to thrive and get the resources they need to pursue those projects, with each standing equally before the law to ensure the outcome of their competitive acquisition reflects their mercantile virtues rather than the phoney notions of privilege by which the Aristocracy swindled the world out of their bread. Our norms, laws, and institutions - including that of the nation state itself but at lower levels of bureaucracy too - exist to carve out and protect that space of action, with the personal property and constitutional liberties it requires. Each full person therein may thus pursue their vision of the good, and the rest (initially being the vast majority of human kind — women, children, workers, the disabled, non-whites, certain backwards peasant groups, and so on) are enriched by the creation and spread of wealth this allows for. 

Now I hope this looks familiar as a vision of liberalism. I neither intend it to be charitable nor polemical, but (allowing for a certain degree of sweepingness and generalisation befitting an already over-long blog post) accurate - liberalism warts and all. And the two things I want to say about it are, firstly, that what it means for this to be dominant is that all of our political squabblings still recognisably take place within this framework. We still debate who exactly gets to count in the full person category with liberal rights attendant — can liberal democracy properly work for children given the role of the state in their education and parental control of their activity? (As Bruenig points out their odd fit with the liberal story are why children come up in so many debates — reflected in debates about trans or other LGBT youth, in debates about COVID policy and other medical exemptions, in debates about sex education and religious freedom.) What about refugees or people seeking entry into the nation state — should they more or less be granted access to this system by default, or does it only work if we limit access? Forms of state assistance to the poor and marginalised are defended as a means of ensuring people have the minimum necessary to act as free persons pursuing their vision of the good, or attacked as discouraging the sort of rational and thrifty behaviour that liberalism thrives upon. Even when defended in more welfarist terms, these schemes are often framed as correcting market failings; i.e. smoothing out the rough edges of a society basically committed to organising things along the lines of private competitors in a market system. Classic academic works wrestle with how to square the incongruent elements of the above story, especially where individual right and common good come apart. What sort of speech can count in as part of reasonable public discourse versus what is disqualifying? These are our debates, this is the stuff of our political sphere; we are essentially arguing about where to set the dials of the liberal machine, where exactly the public/private line goes, who exactly gets the benefits of liberal citizenship. The dominance of liberalism consists not in our self-conception, but in the structuring of our entire political lives.

Second, even the supposed left-challenges to this in the Anglosphere, Bernie Sanders and Corbyn’s Labour Party, in fact never stepped outside this framework even slightly. I think a lot of people who are on the left would do well to think about whether they really object to the above picture. I think in many cases really what is happening is they believe a left liberal state could be great, but unfortunately we have not historically had a liberal state which set all the dials leftwards at once. Even the Nords, through highly restrictive immigration policies, do not tend to really offer the benefits of the liberal state to all. As such they think they are advocating something not liberal, when really it is just a version of liberalism that has not yet been tried. So it’s a perfectly respectable political viewpoint to just be a left liberal, perhaps on the lines of Mills’ Black Radical Liberalism. Here one would want to count as many people (or maybe more generally: sentient beings) into the fold of liberal rights bearers, argue for an expansive system of support to ensure that everyone has a genuinely fair opportunity to participate in society (this can include reparations to redress past causes of disadvantage), favour actions that protect the common good and so have a more restrained notion of what counts as the private sphere, and so on. I think lots of people are in fact left liberals, this is nothing to be ashamed of, and they would be better off trying to grapple with how to make that plausible and workable than simultaneously adopting an oppositional stance to liberalism while in fact having it set your agenda. 

None the less, I am not a liberal, and the final element of this blog post is me explaining why in virtue of the account above. There are three elements where it is not just that I think liberalism needs to be reformed but that it is fundamentally unworkable. First, I do not believe that anything like the public reason/private sphere of activity can be made to work. I think the state has to in fact take a side on contentious issues, there is no neutral position or viable overlapping consensus or anything of the sort (and nor does the liberal historical compromise just so happen to constitute the ideal moral position, as perfectionists bizarrely convince themselves). What made it seem plausible that this was a solution to the problem of the wars of religion was that in fact very substantive consensus did exist among the various dominant Christian sects, and where that agreement wasn’t there they didn’t really feel the need to respect the rights of outsiders (go back and reread Locke’s letters on toleration if you don’t believe me). Or, at least, substantive consensus existed among the restrained class of people that liberalism was willing to consider full persons worthy of consideration. Now we have expanded that class massively, as we surely must, and perhaps with broader social changes bringing more diversity, it is simply no longer tenable to seek to govern in light of a minimalist neutrality. What I think it leads to are just bad faith illusory politics where people must pretend procedural objections when really substantive objections are at stake. Hence lots of absurd claims that bigoted opinions somehow aren’t really opinions and so not covered by free speech protections. Or indeed the constant temptation on the political centre to make any debate into a metadeabte about the free speech right to engage in the debate itself, rather than just having the argument they wish have against some point of left-liberal consensus. 

This simply isn’t viable, it has led our public discourse and political culture to grind to a halt, and if anything is leading to the recreation of the competition for control of the state as zero-sum as rather than adopting an attitude of tolerance people simply persuade themselves that their preferred vision of the good is a procedural pre-condition for any decent politics to occur, and so the other side’s claims must be ruled out at that level. Better, by far, to simply drop this core tenet of liberalism, admit that common life must be organised around a notion of the common good, and try to work out how we can do this without raising the stakes of political disagreement too high. (Contemporary religious right “common good illiberals” I view to be mostly useful idiots for plutocrats, but in so far as it is worth critiquing their ideology I would say it is that they do not seriously have a plan for avoiding capture of the state becoming a zero sum forever war. They are just arrogantly confident that they would win the fights, and enjoy the comfy facade of hard nosedness from the armchair of “owning up” to the violence thus required.) This is very difficult obviously - I suspect it involves much more devolution of decision making power, a highly democratised to the point of maybe even being consensus based decision making procedure, and freedom of movement in a way that ultimately also speaks against the nation state and border controls. But I do not have time to go into what I think the alternative is here, just state that I think one is needed.

Second, I think this political vision is self-undermining. The notion of private property used to undergird the notions of self-governance and a private sphere, as well as ground the activities of the rational and thrifty subject in the market, contains within itself the seeds of the destruction of the liberal order. For the market society was only ever a compromise - no one merchant was powerful enough to overthrow the old order, so a social vision that gave them all a chance was selected for as it allowed the bourgeoise to overthrow the nobility as a class. However, once market societies are allowed to develop I think they tend towards the concentration of wealth and capital, and so ultimately the ability to buy the state and shut down competition. Actually existing liberal capitalism ends up being very different from the theoretical market society with its attendant advantages of competition and efficiency. It is much more like a neo-feudal oligopoly, except without any notions of hegemonic Christian charity or noblesse oblige to at least soften the blow. But for the brief digression of the thirty years post-world-war-two (which I think Piketty well explained) I think this increasing concentration of wealth along with tendencies to entrenched hierarchy and the arbitrary power of the rich is plainly visible in the history of liberalism and proving disastrous today. It interferes with our ability to resolve our worst social problems, to direct resources to fighting climate change, or generally to generating faith in public life as actually a site wherein we can get things done together. Liberal attempts to regulate and reform away this problem, I think, can only ever slow it down or temporarily arrest one branch of the oligopoly. Because I think the fundamental problem is private ownership of the means of production, and this is simply not eliminable from liberalism as I understand it. 

Finally, I think it is at least an open question whether liberalism can truly dispense with its herronvolk aspects while retaining its desirable aspects. Surely at least some of what has made liberalism attractive as a social philosophy has been the plain fact that it generates relatively materially comfortable lives for many, and does so better than a great many other social systems that have been devised. So far, however, that has always existed along an imperial-core vs brutally proletarianised outer periphery model. Now, the claim of liberalism is that it can raise standards of living by, basically, converting those outer periphery nations into versions of the imperial core, with their own specialised comparative advantages and cetera. So it’s not zero sum, liberalism creates a bigger pie through encouraging development, and in the medium to long run we all win. There are some success cases for this! But also lots of cases where I suspect that really what is happening is we just shifted the location of ultra exploitation under the global rug, eternally seeking out new more vulnerable populations to exploit surplus value from, and leaving the messy business of suppressing unions and workers movements in those countries to death squads that we’d really rather not think about. 

Maybe maybe maybe it is true that one day this process will end in a world without sweat shops, galamsey miners having to eke out a living by polluting their own waters, or oil companies running spy networks to maintain terror state fiefdoms. But I will believe it when I see it, and right now I rather suspect that high-income-lifestyle liberalism will either always be reliant on shifting the ultra-exploitation elsewhere or shall have caused ecological collapse well before it has time to transition out of this. (I should say this last is a bit less fundamental, as maybe we could by some sort of leviathan compact agree to all limit our consumption. I suspect that might also be impossible though for reason of my second concern discussed above.)

So there we have it. I do not think we just need to do left liberalism. I believe core elements of liberalism, derived from the central historical missions it is meant to fulfil, are untenable. We cannot have a neutral public sphere and nor would the greater good just so happen to coincide with what liberals say the neutral public sphere looks like. As such we cannot make liberal tolerance norms work. What is more, the notion of private property used to make that tolerance concrete by giving each a sphere of action over which they have control, in fact tends towards undermining what is elsewise best in liberalism, and prevents collective action that might stop its reliance on imperialist exploitation. I hence think a system which did not rely on the public/private division, or anything akin to private ownership of the means of production in a market society, is required if we are to make good on the promise of Enlightenment.

A final coda: note that I mentioned but then did not dispute the Occamite legacy of liberalism. This is because I actually like that, I self-consciously want to maintain the nominalist view of mind and concepts. I think many of my fellow non-liberals in philosophy want to target that in particular, and if anything when they reject liberalism it is often very much this and its specific legacies they wish to challenge. So this also sets me apart from many of my comrades.

Update: I will link responses to this post here as I see them! First is this fascinating piece which basically argues that a consistent liberal could take all the things I view to be critiques and ponens where I tollens. Owen thinks if you really wanna get at the core you gotta attack the nominalism!

Next there is a piece in Digressions&Impressions wherein it's argued that part of liberalism's core mission is the fight against mercantalism, and in fact part of the means by which liberalism sustains itself in that eternal struggle is by means of critiques like this very blog post! Oh the irony.

Third up there's this piece. The interesting case made there is that I have under-estimated liberalism's scope, or ability to adapt itself. So my claims that it is reliant on self-undermining commitments to ownership rules in a basically market structure mean I mistake critiques of capitalism for critiques of liberalism. And there is a passionate defence of the settlement or compromise we have reached re neutrality norms. Great stuff, check it out!

Fourth is a nice piece here wherein it's argued that liberalism has done a better job resolving disagreements towards some points of consensus common good than I allowed for. This is illustrated and discussed with a look back at Locke on toleration (as I asked!) and an account of what he said and how we might want to update it. 

Fifth is this really lovely response piece by Alex Douglas. I see Douglas as making two points here -- first, the idea that toleration arose out of the wars of religion is just Protestant propaganda. In fact people accepted de facto neutrality on matters of state religion out of sheer stalemate and exhaustion, and it was theorists of Protestant nations who spun this in a way to make it seem like a virtue. The thing is... I agree with this! I also think that the idea of state neutrality is a post-hoc rationalisation of a situation that really just reflected an inability to decisively win the total war for Christendom. (I don't think I fully appreciated the Protestant propagandistic element though, so that was cool to read about!) But I just view this as a cunning of history sort of thing -- a material necessity was subsumed and beautified by the ideology, which worked because the decision makers in the status quo post bellum had enough in common ideologically that the rough edges didn't stand out to them.

The second point Douglas makes is that the neutrality doctrine did in fact end up tying liberalism to capitalism by serving as a way of undermining any notion of just price. This was not really neutral, it was hypocritical, and in general the liberal ideal of neutrality is an impossible lie in something like the manner I suggested here. Douglas worries, though (as do I!) that at last compelled to face with sober senses our real conditions of life we might find brute force becomes a more tempting instrument of state. I think the project for the illiberal left has to be finding a way of recapturing what was good in the liberal diffusion of zero-sum competition for the state, and avoid slipping into Melian cynicism.