who will defend liberalism?

People will always round on 'liberalism' (in the European, not American, sense of the word) at times of perceived crisis. Opponents of liberalism will even seek to engineer crises in order to attack it. New Labour was blessed with one of those rare periods of human history, when military conflict is minimal and wealth seems to grow almost naturally. In response, Tony Blair and John Reid invented a fantasy of ubiquitous Arab terror, so as to advance their instinctive political assault on liberalism. This had the no-doubt-anticipated consequence of re-framing 'liberals' as a special interest group, obsessed with human rights law, magna carta, old men in grey wigs and Europe. Even the Liberal Democrats no longer want anything to do with that kind of liberalism.

That those in the executive branch of government like to hurl rocks at the judicial branch is not so surprising. Even in the US, Presidents simply have to refer to something as a 'war' (on terror, on drugs) to know that they are then virtually free from judicial interference. But it bothers me when the Left starts to beat up on liberalism. The leftwing New Statesman's editorial this week argues that "with its emphasis on abstract individualism, liberalism, the great driver of social emancipation and economic prosperity, now feels inadequate to this new age of insecurity." This repeats the line espoused by Blue Labour and Red Toryism, that both the 'social liberalism' of the 1960s and the 'economic liberalism' of the 1980s have now reached their limit, and some sort of more substantive, collectivist communitarianism is needed.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own definition of 'liberalism'. But allow me to offer my own interpretation of the term, and question what on earth the Left would be left with, if it became genuinely 'post-liberal', as for instance the think tank Demos has been recently proposing. Liberalism doesn't favour 'abstract individualism', because it doesn't want to get entangled in culture or history. What it favours is identifying a common and stable basis on which to judge people, actions, institutions and economic distributions, that is robust enough to survive inspite of cultural or historical contingency.

This is, admittedly, partly a search for principles, giving it a necessarily philosophical and discursive dimension. Certain ideas are at work, especially regarding what it means to be a human being. But this is an open philosophical or anthropological debate. 'Deontological' liberals, such as Kant and Rawls, view humans as reasoning creatures. But there are more materialist answers to this question, including those provided by Marxists, which represent human beings as productive creatures. Hayek, if he believed anything at all about humanity, probably believed that we're all equally prone to be wrong about the world. There is no reason whatsoever why liberal debates about common humanness couldn't now be entered by neuroscientists or neo-Darwinists, if they weren't so busy re-categorising details of the pope's religious affiliation or the sylvanian geography of bear's toilet habits.

But it is never only about principles. It is also about the material, technical and institutional means by which equal judgement on people is to be enacted. For neoliberals, this is some notion of price (often mutating into an audit of competitive performance). As Stuart White's fascinating article, Revolutionary Liberalism, details, liberals of the early 20th century saw worker ownership and profit-sharing as the institutional basis on which to ensure individuals could attain equality in the public and political realm. There is a long tradition of liberal socialism, now exemplified by people such as Robin Blackburn and Erik Olin Wright, who would view capitalism as the main enemy of liberalism.

There are multiple philosophical liberalisms, and even more technical or practical manifestations of liberalism. All that they essentially share is a vain Enlightenment hope, that there might be some basis on which to govern people, that does not discriminate according to contingency. Or rather, to flip that round, they are explicit about which element of contingency they are using as the basis for discrimination. For judges, it is the contingent fact that one is guilty of something. For neoliberals, it is the contingent fact of being able to pay for something. For republican liberals, it is the contingent fact of being a skilled orator. And so on. But there must be a criterion, it must be named in advance, and there must be some publicity surrounding how it is employed. That is all liberalism necessarily means.

Abandon this in favour of what? I can at least understand the catholic theological critique of liberalism, that underpins John Milbank's theological critique of modernity, Phillip Blond's Red Toryism, possibly John Cruddas's Blue Labourism, and Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor's communitarianism. The basis for political judgement ceases to be purely institutional and philosophical, and attains an element of divinity. Ordinary people may not understand how judgement is meted out, but they can believe that it is good nevertheless. But what do we secularists have? There are some answers to this question, and some of them are hideous.

The other question I would put to 'post-liberals' is this. Why do you automatically assume that liberalism is a watchword for elitism, technocracy and establishment, whereas post-liberalism will usher in community, organic relations and rekindled tradition? Isn't that the same lie that Karl Rove based George W Bush's political career on, whereby working class anger with judicial rule (in the US case, Roe v Wade) is channelled to facilitate a cynical extension of power by existing elites? Surely elites are often delighted to see liberalism diminished. Remove rule of law or rule of market, and elites - including technocratic ones - simply acquire new freedoms to meddle and rearrange institutions in their own interests.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre poses a horribly simple ethical question: do we side with Nietzsche or Aristotle? Or to put that another way, do we abandon morality altogether, or sign up to virtue ethics? MacIntyre opts for the latter. But when a choice is put this starkly, there is a dangerous tendency of people to flip from one to the other, or even dwell in both realms simultaneously. The only solution to nihilism is the church. The only freedom from moral repression is a form of hedonistic nihilism. MacIntyre's dilemma works very well for many cynical elites, who talk Aristotle, but act Nietzsche. The post-liberals are naive about politics, if they think that the rhetoric of 'faith, flag and family', as Maurice Glasman likes to put it, will actually install virtue ethics into modern public life. The abandonment of liberalism can create a polarity, in which some select substantively meaningful rituals (as Blue Labour and Red Tories hope), while others enjoy an even greater form of hedonism.

Neoliberalism, of a certain variety, is able to proceed without having much of a liberal component, other than a basic common recognition of money (but even money is now constantly propped up by the executive branch of government, via central banks). The neoliberal tradition had thrown off much of its 'liberal' heritage (such as the ordoliberals and Henry Simons) by the time it achieved its political takeover in the 1970s. The effect of the financial crisis on neoliberalism was to shed the remnants of its claim to treat all market actors equally. Today, the poor aren't even trusted with money...

I've written a couple of papers on what 'post-liberal' neoliberalism looks like, and I'm not convinced that it involves morris dancers swilling warm beer on the white cliffs of Dover. As I argued here, a version of technocratic communitarianism is now increasingly plausible, to replace technocratic liberalism. And as I argued here, a type of Schmittian market exception, in which the market is sustained only through periodic acts of extra-legal emergency measures, may be what we're left with, post-2008. These are examples of 'post-liberalism', in which the status quo is defended out of fear, but not on the basis that it serves the common good.

Maybe this is all a problem of definitions. If the issue is, how can secular, modern societies find a basis on which to sort 'good' from 'bad', then I'm sure that I would find far more common cause with a catholic communitarian like John Cruddas than with a neoliberal such as Larry Summers or a legal liberal such as Shami Chakrabarti. But why is liberalism the problem, and not, say, utilitarianism, with its brutal statistics, expert weightings and clinical interventions? Or why not defend democracy, with its specification of voice, rather than community, with its darker implications of exclusion and suppression? Somebody other than just the liberty 'lobby' needs to defend liberalism, and I don't see why that shouldn't be the secular left.

For what it's worth, I would view the present as the moment to do neoliberalism all over again, though this time with a sociologically coherent notion of what economic freedom (and domination) means, where it is likely to arise, and the types of institutions and public policies that are likely to support it. Thatcherite belief in 'enterprise' and 'entrepreneurship' was never liberal in the first place, because it treated some individuals (the 'talented', the 'leaders', the 'innovators') according to a different set of standards from everybody else. That's the opposite of liberalism. Real economic liberalism would be a monumental achievement. Whether it's compatible with capitalism is another question altogether.

Comments

[ProfDaveAndress]

Very glad I found this [via jderbyshire on twitter] and enjoyed reading some of your other work too. So good to see there are people out there on the left who aren't authoritarians of one stripe or another. More power to your elbow [in a decentralised, democratic and mutualist way, of course!]

[FromArseToElbow]

You define neoliberalism, if I may paraphrase, as the liberty of money. But surely what 2008+ did was lift the veil to reveal the fiction of money. What neoliberalism (or economically-biased liberalism) has always been about is property, a word curiously missing from your post.

There is nothing unusual in a socially illiberal turn when times are hard. What is different today is that we have simultaneously lost our illusions about economic liberalism. Instead, we are increasingly focused on defending property (what we have we hold) rather than expanding opportunity.

Paradoxically this means a return to a purer, Lockean liberalism, which entails less sympathy for the characteristics associated with "fuzzy" liberalism, such as generosity and tolerance. Of course, the latter were arguably always cover for the former.

Perhaps the current irritation with liberalism is the despondent realisation that the "stable basis on which to judge people" remains property. The combination of government subsidies for second-homes and a tax on council house spare bedrooms is telling us something.

[Ian C]

Very persuasive and interesting - thanks.

I'm with Cruddas, Taylor, Milbank et al, but see what they are offering not as a rejection of classical liberalism as liberality, but of actually existing liberalism as consumerism and the triumph of 'non-judgementalism': 'I'm ok, you're ok, or at least we are as long as we have enough money and cool stuff'. They'd also argue that the common public criteria of worth (equality of respect?) need a religiously transcendental basis, as attempts to come up with an earthly foundation (blood and soil, etc) tend to go horribly wrong, or generate the kind of deeply unequal and money-obsessed society we have had during the Long 1980s.

As for neoliberalism, I think it is fair to want to recover its true sense and find another term for the dominant ideology of the Long 1980s. We don't have the neoliberalism of Hayek as a governing philosophy. We have Oligarchy based on Plutocracy tempered by Media Exposure and Elections. I suppose 'neo-corporatism' fits the bill.

[Ralph Musgrave]

Labour MPs’ opposition to free speech is nicely illustrated by a survey done by Comres for the reform of Section 5 of the Public Order Act. The latter section made it illegal to insult anyone (i.e. it gave politicians and the police the right to arbitrary arrest). The proportion of Labour MPs in favour of retaining Section 5 was double the equivalent proportion for Tories and LibDems. See:

http://www.comres.co.uk/poll/674/reform-section-5-public-order-act-poll.htm

And Max Beloff (former professor of government at Oxford) described New Labour as fascist (Times Comment, February 9, 1999).

[Will Davies]

Fromarsetoelbow: you make a very important point, which I should have addressed. Yes, property rights become a form of a priori condition of participation under most forms of liberalism, and neoliberalism then extends these in all sorts of intangible directions via concepts of risk and intellectual property. The future itself then becomes 'ownable', via securitisation. However there are left-liberal approaches to this, which introduce common ownership, asset transfers and vigorous inheritance taxes, in order to maintain a more realistic notion of political equality.

Ian: Thanks. I guess another way of trying to get at this is that liberalism is a critique of arbitrariness in the exercise of power, wherever it is found.

[Ian C]

Thanks Will.
Yes, there is an indispensable critical liberalism that is all about identifying arbitrariness and remedying it; and a 'foucaldian' aspect to that is the exposure of alleged eternal verities as arbitrary exercises of special interests.
But we also need a positive liberalism, and that needs a foundation that can be presented as non-arbitrary. You don't get any more foundational than God, but although that is where Cruddas and Macintyre et al would ground their kinds of liberality, it can't work for everyone. The doctrine of human rights is the closest we can come, perhaps, in trying to identify a secular transcendental foundation for positive liberalism.
Neoliberalism can be seen as a deep claim that there is ultimately nothing arbitrary about the market and money: we get what we deserve when markets are correctly set up and incentives have been purified. Actually existing neoliberalism is the demonstration that this claim is simply a way to justify power and inequalities based on wealth and rank.

[Dick Pountain]

re FromArseToElbow's point, shifting the emphasis from money to property fits better with the growing shift toward rent extraction. In the IT world all the major players are moving rapidly to a rental model where you must pay them monthly for service rather than buy their products outright. The ferocious wars over patents and IP in telecomms, music, film etc point the same way.

[Dave Timoney]

@Dick Pountain, software suppliers have always been committed to a rental model. If you check a licence agreement from the 80s, you will find that you've only bought a "right to use".

Of course, exactly the same legal restriction existed with records, hence the need to pay extra for "performing rights" if you wanted to DJ at someone's wedding.

These restrictions were practically uneforceable and widely ignored, at least outside of the commercial domain. If you had physical control of a CD, you could pretty much do what you liked with it.

The irony of the Internet, which appeared to introduce "free" stuff and celebrate piracy, is that it has actually led to the ominous cloud in which we happily cede control of the physical asset for "convenience".

We now buy more but cheaper items, and we do so more impulsively, which is gradually preparing us for micropayments. We will have access to much more, but own much less, and the meter will be constantly running. The rentiers will inherit the Earth.

I expand on this here: http://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/shoegazing-and-cloud.html