The cover story from this month’s Prospect offers an analysis of the present socio-economic climate in the United Kingdom with the aim of from it deducing a programme of action for David Cameron’s Conservative opposition (the author, Philip Blond, is an advisor to Cameron). There are lots of things that are worth talking about in this article, but I want to pick out just one which I think will probably speak to most of the contributors on this board - namely, its analysis of the development of liberal ideologies. Here is a quote from the article:
Leaving aside for the time being the solution which Blond argues for (maybe we will want to get onto that later), do you agree with the analysis of both “liberalism” and “modernity” that he offers above? (There is more analysis in the article should you choose to read it.) Of course, Blond’s comments relate to Britain, but it may be that you recognise trends that apply to contexts with which you are more familiar, and if so I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts on those.
I can pretty much agree with that analysis, but the trend is older than just the 20th century. Look back to the Wars of Religion on the Continent. States with religious tolerance were also often the most authoritarian whereas less centralized (though not necessarily more republican/democratic) were substantially less tolerant. I think a lot of that deals with the pressure between goods and rights that Sandel talks about. In a community where everyone partakes of more-or-less the same narrative, goods precede rights and you can have a public space (res publica) as well as civic engagement along broad lines. However, if you have a community engaged in a plurality of narratives (if the term ‘community’ can even be applied to such a state) there needs to be something keeping the peace and ensuring that groups within that community/amalgam don’t dominate the others. So the concept of ‘rights’ as applied to atomic individuals becomes very important – but in order for that to mean anything, there needs to be some sort of a ‘neutral’ core that enforces those rights so a procedural government is created. The larger the amalgam, the more groups it contains, the stronger the neutral core needs to be.
I disagree with it, but mostly in the tone. Blond seems to be lamenting liberalism, and the trends that he describes. The foundation of that tone, though, seems to be summed up well in the closing line of the excerpt: “the king is dead, long live the king”. As I understand it, Blond means to say that liberalism, which developed as an alternative to monarchical government, has led to another strong central government, and that that sort of government is the necessary outcome of a radical liberal position. But I would object that all strong central governments are not the same, and that the faults found with monarchy do not automatically apply to a strong central government that comes out of liberal ideals.
Although I sympathise with the initial premise, which I think is alluding to the concentration of power in the hands of a few, I find several points of the author’s analysis of the reasons behind this contentious.
Blond seems to understand liberalism only from a conservative viewpoint; he correctly identifies the roots of liberal thinking in the rejection of absolute monarchy and notes that the development of this idea has resulted in states far more controlling than the classical liberal thinkers would have advocated. However, as Carleas pointed out, there are important differences between a strong liberal government and an absolutist monarchy. A monarchy or dictatorship is an instrument of top down power, designed to impose the will of the despot at its top on the populace, whereas a liberal state, at least in theory, is constructed from the bottom up, in that it exists to prevent the imposition of any one persons will upon another.
In addition, possibly a more important objection is that pursuing liberal philosophy does not necessarily result in a large state. Blond’s conservative viewpoint shows through in his claim that any society based upon autonomous individuals would, unchecked by a powerful state, result in ‘perpetual conflict between self-interested individuals’. Obviously anarchists and a great many liberals would strongly disagree with this.
This is to say nothing of Blond’s assertion that in order to be liberal, a person must reject all exterior influences, and that such an autonomous individual is a ‘fiction’. I’m sure someone of a more philosophical bent will be along to tackle that shortly, but for now that’s enough from me.
I’m not so sure about this. Can you give examples? I could agree that a more stable political system tended to encourage greater toleration, but I’m not sure that those states should be seen as necessarily authoritarian. Perhaps it’s just the case that none of the states of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe conform to either of the potential models you posited.
Carleas and Sheep, I think you’re both right to suggest that any claim of equivalence between absolutist and liberal states is likely to be misleading, but does this realisation significantly dent Blond’s case? Is it not the case that, following on from the forced abdication (or at the very least domestication) of our monarchs, that we too have abdicated our own responsibilities, our sense of community? Was this simply inevitable?
I think it’s fair to say that Blond’s analysis here is pretty extreme, and there’s probably a reasonable case for arguing that he’s constructed something of a straw man, but do you not agree that the idea of an absolutely autonomous individual is a fallacy? If so, what do you think is the liberal approach to this potentially reduced sense of autonomy?
Community as it is classically understood is anti-liberal. Part of what classical communities did was to define non-community members, and to create an out-group that could be descriminated against, if only in the sense of not being favored as in-group members are. Liberalism entails the destruction of such communities, but not necessarily of warm-and-fuzzy global communities. Liberalism is the generalization of the sense of responsibility and community to include everyone. Blond’s ‘absolutely autonomous’ individual is still necessarily a member of the global community, and that’s Blond’s straw-person: No one can be totally isolated from all human contact, but one can shed proximate communities in favor of ultimate communities.
As I understand liberalism, it encourages treating all humans equally, and evaluating them on their merits rather than their nationality or other sub-global community membership. Liberalism favors free trade, free markets, general freedom from favor that isn’t well founded. Monarchies, then, are defeated by liberalism, because they don’t allow for the free allocation of resources; on the other hand, a large government that maintains market freedom, an international treaty that forbids favoring one’s own country, is a liberal measure despite being indicative of gargantuan governmental control.
The article in the Opening Posts is garbage because it starts by falsely characterizing economic history. The second time period which it labels “neoliberalism” was still state sponsored Keynesianism through and through.
Matty, I would argue that a liberal country requires the average citizen to accept more responsibility rather than less in comparison to the subjects of a monarch. Liberalism is ostensibly about individual rights, but these are matched by responsibilities under the law; the right to free speech, for example, carries with it a responsibility to show at least some semblance of tolerance to others practicing this right.
As to the matter of autonomous individuals, I agree with you that no-one can be completely self sufficient and that this detracts from the classical or neo-liberal view of society as being comprised solely of such self interested individuals. However, modern liberalism seems to be founded around an acceptance of the inter-reliability of humans, and an attempt to facilitate this through the structure of the civil society.
“Thatcher was a Keynesian? Pray explain how.”
Aye, I wouldn’t mind having that explained either.
I should point out I’m largely playing devil’s advocate here, I’m not necessarily espousing Blond’s view, I just wanted to pursue some of the ideas. For example, I don’t think that his point is that we should return to a monarchical system, rather that the liberal rebellion has led to a number of unforseen and undesirable consequences. His actual solution, as you both recognise of course, is a renewed communitarianism. To quote a bit further from the article itself and perhaps push the debate on a touch:
The four-part socio-economic plan which he then outlines includes: (1) “relocalising the banking system”; (2) establishing “local investment trusts”; (3) devolution of “procurement” to “local bodies” (ie. the aforementioned trusts); and (4) reversing “the old politics of class, by restoring capital to labour”, essentially by rejecting “social mobility, meritocracy and the statist and neoliberal language of opportunity, education and choice”. While I am not especially convinced by the potential effectiveness of the latter, I think the idea is that while liberal ideology has achieved a devolution of authority, it has taken that process too far towards an image of autonomy that requires the mediating power of the monolithic state. On the other hand, Blond’s sense of a “civic” communitarianism is designed to allow for a devolved autonomy where power and responsibility is expressed through group action, thereby dispensing with the need for the statist abstraction. It’s a kind of middle ground between statism and anarchy, if you like.
Which summarizes what all of those governments were doing. Read the rest of the wiki article and you will see that the distinction between those time periods does not exist in a Keynesian theoretic model.
That is not to say that they were the same. All of the various governments had different manners – different cronies to support? – of full-filling their economic strategies but they are all Keynesian interventions.