[p2p-research] The Dead End of Contemporary Liberalism

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: The Dead End of Contemporary
Liberalism via Cato Unbound by Patrick J. Deneen on 5/18/10

Phillip Blond’s diagnosis of the pathologies of our age is as
perceptive and piercing as any that I have yet encountered. He follows
in a long tradition of independent thinkers, willing to break with — or
at least to bend his relationship to — party and partisans with a
clear-sighted analysis of the failings of the contemporary political
alignments. Echoing earlier analyses that call attention to the unholy
alliance of State and Market such as those of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire
Belloc, Wilhelm Roepke, E.M. Schumacher, Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet,
Alasdair MacIntyre and Wendell Berry, Blond has captured the
centralizing logic of this alliance in our own time with clarity and
chilling insight. He calls to account the consistent core of radical
autonomous individualism that lies in the deepest commitments of many
on today’s Left and Right, noting that the seeming political battles
that are daily waged through shouting matches on the television or in
the pages of newspapers in fact obscure the deeper philosophic alliance
that underlies the degradation of the civic life in modern nations.

At base, Blond recognizes that the great error of the age lies in the
embrace of liberal anthropology, the theory of human nature advanced at
the advent of the early modern period that underlies many Left and
Right versions of liberty. The normative claim that human nature is to
be understood (through the conceit of “the State of Nature”) as
consisting of radically individuated selves motivated fundamentally by
appetite and fear is in fact based on a fundamental falsehood,
essentially denying the social and political nature of humans and
requiring active State intervention for its purported realization. In
Red Tory, Blond writes that

liberalism has promoted a radical individualism which, in trashing the
supposed despotism of custom and tradition concerning the nature of
true human flourishing, has produced a vacated, empty self that
believes in no common values or inherited creeds. But in creating this
purely subjective being, liberalism has also created a new and wholly
terrifying tyranny. For, in order to strip people of their cultural
legacy and eliminate the idea that people should enjoy degrees of
prestige according to their nature and capacity for virtue, and by
making everyone instead the same sort of individual with basic needs
and rights, an excess of centralized authority is required. The rule of
the virtuous person is displaced by the explicit control of the
centralized state.

Ironically, modern forms of collectivism are the result of this
radically individuated theory of the human self: “the extreme
individualism that underpins the liberal account of human nature in the
end demands collectivism as a means of preserving the sanctity of the
singular when confronted with the reality of others.”

Blond recognizes that it is this liberal anthropology that underlies
both the Left’s infatuation with the State as an agent of liberation,
as well as the Right’s embrace of the Market as the primary engine of
human liberty. While seemingly opposed, both agents are understood to
derive from, and ultimately support, the maintenance of the autonomous,
freely willing self. Both are curiously anti-social entities, relying
on impersonal mechanisms for the supply of human goods. Both ask little
of individuals by way of actual concern for, or deep involvement with,
the lives and fates of others. Our relationships, either through the
State and the Market, are rendered abstract and theoretical, with each
serving respectively as the impersonal replacement for actual human
relations and commitments. Each relieves selves of the burdens and
obligations of care, and instead derives from an understanding of
polity and society in which the self can be only truly liberated when
relations are rendered fungible, voluntary and contingent. To resort to
the taxonomy developed by Albert O. Hirschman, such anthropology
requires a society structured around “exit” over “loyalty,” and thus,
one in which “voice” is replaced by the sound of an exit door closing.

In his remarks at Georgetown University, at the invitation of the
program that I founded and direct — The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots
of American Democracy — Blond briefly offered a short intellectual
history of this tradition, attributing the origins of this radically
individuated autonomous self in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I
fear that this brief synopsis of Rousseau’s argument — in which he
suggested that it is Rousseau’s depiction of “society [as] primordial
imprisonment” that underlies a libertarian-collectivist axis — provides
too much comfort to Anglo-American thinkers who are accustomed to
thinking that the American constitutional order — based in the liberal
philosophy of Locke, Smith and the Founding Fathers — offers a bulwark
against the collectivizing spirit of subsequent progressive thinkers
like Rousseau, Marx, or the American progressives like Croly and Dewey.
A school of thought now popularized by Glen Beck has arisen to explain
that all of America’s woes lie in our betrayal of the Founder’s Lockean
vision for the Siren song of Progressivism.

While left underarticulated, Blond’s argument implicates the
anthropological assumptions of classical liberalism as well, indeed
suggesting that there is a profound continuity between the thought of
the likes of Hobbes, Locke and Smith and the apparently opposite
philosophies of Rousseau, Marx and Dewey — and that we are now reaping
the consequences this combination in the unfolding events of our time.
Blond’s insight is that both classical liberalism — beginning with an
anthropology of the radically individuated self — and progressive
liberalism — aspiring to the overcoming of alienation that such
anthropology fosters, aimed ultimately at the absorption of the
individuated self into a collective whole, whether as “species-being,”
“the religion of humanity,” or “the general will” — are both profoundly
hostile to and destructive of those intermediary institutions defined
as “civil society.”

The contemporary Right — most often the defenders of free market
capitalism — aid and abet the destruction of civil society by advancing
the liberal anthropology through its individualistic economic
assumptions, while the contemporary Left defends radical individualism
in its defense of “lifestyle” liberalism through an equally ferocious
defense of individual rights. In both guises, the defense of
anthropological liberalism in the economic or personal sphere requires
a corresponding displacement of inherited or cultivated loyalties and
commitments to intermediary commitments in the civic realm — family,
neighborhood, community, Church, fraternal order, guilds, unions, and
so on. Both require a re-education program that renders us mobile and
relatively uncommitted, regarding the ties of family and community as
obstacles to fulfillment of the self, whether economically or toward
the end of “autonomy” or “self-realization.” Both encourage the ethic
of “voluntarism” and “preference neutrality,” defining us most
fundamentally as individuated selves, and displacing the central role
of civil society in fostering a more expansive conception of the self,
one interpenetrated and defined by relationships and thereby fostering
an ethic of mutuality.

The other intellectual figure missing in (but friendly to) Blond’s
account is Tocqueville, who understood with prophetic clarity that this
form of individualism would lead not to a libertarian paradise, but a
collectivist nightmare. Conservatives (and libertarians) have long been
sympathetic with Tocqueville’s warnings about the rise of “democratic
despotism” (for instance, Paul Rahe’s recent book Soft Despotism,
Democracy’s Drift is the newest, post–Cold War iteration of this
embrace), yet have generally been remarkably willful in ignoring his
explicit analysis connecting individualism with collectivism. In Vol.
2, Book 4, Ch. 3 of Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote

As in periods of equality no man is compelled to lend his assistance to
his fellow men, and none has any right to expect much support from
them, everyone is at once independent and powerless. These two
conditions, which must never be either separately considered or
confounded together, inspire the citizen of a democratic country with
very contrary propensities. His independence fills him with
self-reliance and pride among his equals; his debility makes him feel
from time to time the want of some outward assistance, which he cannot
expect from any of them, because they are all impotent and
unsympathizing. In this predicament he naturally turns his eyes to that
imposing power which alone rises above the level of universal
depression. Of that power his wants and especially his desires
continually remind him, until he ultimately views it as the sole and
necessary support of his own weakness.

The contemporary conspiracy between State and Market — apparently
locked in battle, but more fundamentally consonant in their hostility
toward, and evisceration of, the institutions of civil society —
mutually reinforce each other, strengthening simultaneously commercial
and State concentrations of power that recent events reveal to have
been deeply intertwined. Both are based upon the radically individuated
anthropology of classical liberalism, an anthropology that both
necessarily precedes and ultimately succors the progressivist
liberalism that it purports to oppose. Blond’s analysis follows a line
of analyses that inferred the same deeper complicity, from that of
Tocqueville to Bertrand de Jouvenel, from Robert Nisbet to Pierre
Manent. Yet, for all the insight of this piercing recognition of the
deeper complicity between our two “parties,” we continue to engage in
the sound and fury of a shadowboxing match in which the only winner is
concentrated economic and State power and the only loser is liberty.
The only true locus of human liberty is to be found in the institutions
of civil society, yet our dominant philosophies both regard its
requirements for stability, self-sacrifice and generational continuity
as an obstacle to individual liberty. So long as we continue to define
liberty badly, we will continue to lose it.

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