Some reading I did today, although not feeling quite in tune with existence.
What are we to think of liberty? I still have on the back burner my paper on the Indiana constitution's natural rights, so liberty catches my eye and holds my attention.
Colin Kidd · Dangerous Chimera: What is liberty? (London Review of Books)
One prominent early critic, the American philosopher Gerald MacCallum, thought that Berlin had mistakenly reified two aspects of a single category, but a later commentator, the Cambridge historian Quentin Skinner, went in the opposite direction, arguing that Berlin had overlooked a highly distinctive version of liberty, which he labelled ‘neo-Roman’. He set out this position in various venues, but most poignantly when he delivered the Isaiah Berlin Lecture at the British Academy in 2001 on ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’ (a version of this essay appeared in the LRB of 4 April 2002). More precisely, Skinner thought he had identified a second type of negative liberty, of which there were ‘two rival and incommensurable theories’. He found in the Roman historians Livy, Sallust and Tacitus and in their early modern reception an emphasis on free citizenship, conceived as the absence of subjection to the will of another. Negative liberty, Skinner argued, can take the form of the liberal conception of non-interference or the Roman idea of non-dependence on the power of someone else.
In recovering this lost Roman concept of freedom, Skinner had, as he warmly acknowledged, an ally in the political theorist Philip Pettit. But there is a subtle distinction between their positions. Whereas Pettit emphasises non-domination as the leitmotif of a tradition of republican freedom, Skinner thinks that the primary feature of this strain of liberty was the absence of dependence, and that adherence to this way of thinking about liberty wasn’t confined to those with overtly republican political commitments. For Skinner, neo-Roman liberty was a kind of status rather than merely a freedom of action.
Roman philosophy underpins the thinking of our Founding Fathers' thinking. It feels me to me there should be a connection to our ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The review makes a point about a disjunction that buried this concept of liberty.
Despite this, its commanding position in English political culture crumbled with extraordinary rapidity between the 1770s and 1790s. Skinner has identified what must constitute a major turning point in modern history, yet one that has gone largely unnoticed. How can we have failed to spot something of this magnitude? The embarrassing nakedness of the historiography here is disturbing in itself. But then comes a further shock. The reader casually assumes that the displacement of neo-Roman categories by a liberal understanding of freedom must have had something to do with the emergence of the market as the dominant trope in modern political language. But while Skinner thinks it plausible that the ‘new view of liberty’ held some attraction for champions of the market, he traces its provenance back before the 18th-century emergence of commercial society. What’s more, he identifies specific and immediate factors that caused liberty as non-interference to ‘ascend so suddenly to a position of ideological dominance’ from the late 1770s.
You want a conspiracy theory, there is one with meat for you.
Captives of Desire (The Hedgehog Review) poses a grimmer view:
6. This academic and yet highly politicized discourse on the role of desire—which became only more persuasive with the growth of consumer society, an increasingly narcissistic culture, and the spread of impulsive and addictive behavior—always contained a fundamental contradiction. While muted to the general public because of its detrimental political implications, impulses and motivations were not regarded by academics and researchers as wholly or even primarily distinctive or unique. Given individual suggestibility and malleability, particularly at early ages, desires were clearly subject to being externally influenced, directed, and even shaped. Liberal thinkers thus boldly and without fear of contradiction insisted that affirming an individual source of desire in the emerging age of vastly expanding mass production and organizational employment ladders would pose no threat to social order. Rather, given the growing demand for status and consumption, consumer behavior and social mobility—though defined as a matter of individual choice—could be effectively directed toward the systemic pursuit of available market options and priorities. Furthermore, supposedly self-interested and even self-serving behavior was structured to serve institutional goals as essentially private and disconnected from significant institutional participation or policy concerns. Such activity could thus be not merely permitted but directly and strenuously encouraged. Such a society, presumably composed of empowered individuals and further bolstered by the liberal inflation of consumer choice as the determining factor in the productive system, would be at once open and insulated from change.
7. This reframing of the individual and its relation to society represented a significant reconfiguration of the liberal paradigm. The result, a distinctive twentieth-century system called organizational liberalism, represented a dramatically attenuated connection to perduring liberal institutions and values. To begin with, this shift effectively reduced active democratic citizens to consumers and careerists subject to elite management and direction. Moreover, by reorienting individual priorities away from a religiously inflected mastering of desire in service of higher ends toward the fulfillment of easily accessible appetites, American liberalism was implicitly acknowledging a turn away from an innovative history of social change and cultural experimentation. The new emphasis on stability, social regularity, privatism, and political complacency directed people away from pursuing new personal and collective aspirations that might challenge the existing system.
8. By grounding the validity of the modern American project in access to personal gratification, liberalism would tether its case for individuality and freedom to continually expanding the pathways to acquisition and fulfillment. At the same time, such an accelerating pursuit of personal objectives, even if directed away from public involvement, was feared by many liberal thinkers and policymakers as an unstable and potentially hazardous foundation for an individualistic social order. Emphasized through the history of both political regimes and political thought—and reaffirmed by Federalist #10—was the threat of anarchy and chaos it posed to political stability. The limited apprehensions of pre–World War II liberalism, as sociologist Robert Nisbet later argued, derived in part from its assumption that earlier cultural norms of the Protestant social ethic remained durable sources of social regulation. A commitment to the larger social good, together with existing limits on material production, would, it was believed, continue to provide effective constraints on appetitive inclinations. Moreover, as the liberal framework grew in prominence during this period, and American intellectuals began to appropriate long-standing English liberal ideas, key thinkers such as John Dewey, in his classic Democracy and Education, emphasized the Lockean notion of the importance of early childhood formation in producing adaptive and regulated individuals.
9. Beset by ideological blinders, American liberalism could not have foreseen the disruptive impact of its turn to another secular English liberal assumption: the post-religious ideal of freedom embraced by Locke and Smith as well as Jefferson in the Declaration. In an increasingly competitive and production-based society, this emerging cultural ideal of freedom from external restraints would weaken the already fraying cultural and institutional disapproval of conspicuous consumption, acquisition, and status seeking. Faced with the boom economy and cultural experimentation of the 1920s, organizational liberals began to sense that more effective controls on individual behavior would be needed. At the same time, to preserve the liberal framework these controls had to appear consistent with not only the popular perception of reduced constraints but also the later organizational-liberal identification of freedom with both the satisfaction of desire and the opportunity to partake in expanding consumption and acquisition.
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19. Because society faces a great range of perspectives and deep divisions regarding these complex and troubling questions, a thoughtful assessment of these options lies beyond the scope of the present essay. Many liberal commentators, devoted to a credulous depiction of the United States as the final chapter in Western history, avoid—even while sensing collapse—addressing the crisis of social renewal. Yet as we wrestle with the great advances of the modern and late-modern age, solutions will emerge for humanizing these unprecedented opportunities. The challenge is to ask how society can restore belief in and support for forms of desire that promise genuine meaning for all. How do we achieve personal actualization and empowerment, interpersonal relatedness and communal connection, and equitable norms and facilitative institutions after a century of individual and citizen dispossession and social fragmentation?
In recent years, a different style of left-wing critique has gained a foothold in the academy. A group of mostly young scholars criticize the postwar liberal consensus, which they charge with propping up global inequality and sanctioning American hegemony abroad. But they are not Old Left holdouts: They recognize that, after Michel Foucault’s unmasking of modern disciplinary techniques, class politics and progressive social reform need new justifications, to the extent they can be salvaged at all. Foucault’s successors in an important sense, they are also critical of him, suggesting his Cold War-era opposition to the state was one form of a tendency that also came in neoliberal guise, underwriting marketization and austerity at home, human rights and the “rules-based order” abroad. The movement is led by historians whose preferred genre is the genealogy: a method of denaturalizing ideas and practices by excavating their contingent pasts. "Post-Foucauldian emancipatory genealogy" is a mouthful—easier to call this tendency “Moynism,” after Samuel Moyn, a leading force in the new critique. The Moynist project, in a nutshell, is to liberate left-liberalism from itself.If you have read a book by the prolific Yale law professor and historian, the structure of a Moynist argument is likely familiar. The postwar condition is characterized by an historical amnesia induced by a new collective mythology: The moral imperative of “never again” has bred a politics of “no alternatives.” Yet the just-so story of liberal triumph over totalitarianism misleads in presenting the postwar settlement as morally inescapable and politically incontestable. In fact, everything that matters in our common life has emerged from a contingent and controversial past, a history that could have been otherwise. Genealogy can awaken us to our freedom to live by the values we imagine for ourselves, here and now, without kowtowing to outdated precedents or repeating past mistakes. By piercing the veil of superstition that hangs over contemporary norms and institutions and lends them an aura of authority, genealogy opens new possibilities for action and reminds us that we have always been at liberty to create the world anew. Or so the argument goes.Moyn, his students, and fellow-travelers, are best known for applying these methods to contemporary human rights discourse in revisionist historical studies that assail its antipolitical, inegalitarian, Christian, and conservative assumptions. In recent years they have deployed similar arguments against everything from liberal humanitarianism and interventionism to the legalism of political life under the U.S. Constitution. More ambitiously, Moyn has turned his sights on liberalism itself. Drawing on recent historiography that privileges civic freedom over individual rights, Moyn depicts the “Cold War liberalism” of thinkers like Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin as a pessimistic aberration from liberalism’s historic norm. Here Moyn and his band of genealogists finally start to tell us what they like: Their liberalism is comprehensive, not procedural; perfectionist, not value-neutral; emancipatory, not conflict-averse; utopian, not chastened and resigned. Their heroes are neither Locke nor Rawls but Rousseau, Hegel, and the early Judith Shklar.
Well, I certainly prefer Locke and Rawls to Rousseau and Hegel.
What those of who think liberal democracy is the best of all possible governments must find ways to keep it alive. We will even need to make the demos understand what value democracy is to their lives. I think it will mean going back down the road to find out where we took the turn that brought us to Trump and illiberal democracy. The same Romans that inspired our Founders and Framers seem like a good place to start.
sch 5/10
