[p2p-research] The Dead End of Contemporary Liberalism

Fri May 28 20:23:01 CEST 2010

this review is rather change coming from the ultra-libertarian cato
institute, who are even more staunch defenders of the so-called 'free
market' ... I'm not aware of them ever having a focus towards civil society
...

Michel

On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 12:26 AM, Ryan <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader:
>
>
>  The Dead End of Contemporary Liberalism<http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cato-unbound/~3/c08ofYR9i5Q/>
> via Cato Unbound <http://www.cato-unbound.org/> 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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