A first-rate summary of why making individual autonomy the ultimate political standard doesn’t work: The Tyranny of Liberalism And Its Evil Root: Individual Autonomy as the End of the State. Sample quote:
“[N]o polity could be grounded in an ideology, which is nothing more than an aspect of a cultural inheritance about which one has become obsessive. Philosophical theorizing transmutes this aspect into the whole of experience: All history is the story of class struggle, or gender struggle, or race struggle, or a struggle for individual autonomy. In a country in the grip of an ideological style of politics, as the former Soviet Union was and America is today, a protracted cold war is necessarily waged against its own cultural inheritance.”
The piece is by paleoconservative philosophy professor Donald W. Livingstone. For a more sociologically-oriented piece, also very good, that touches on similar themes see Allan Carlson’s Individualism and Its Discontents.
I note that Carlson refers to
I note that Carlson refers to Barry Shain’s The Myth of American Individualism. That’s a great resource, too.
–KJJ
Implications for Libertarianism
Reading Dr. Livingston’s piece brings to mind one of my criticisms of libertarians: Most of them are 100% committed to the maximization of individual autonomy at the expense of all else. In a way, that is the definition of a libertarian. This puts them (unwittingly) on the wrong side of the long march towards modernist centralized government, which they decry.
My other primary criticisms of libertarianism are (2) it is overly rationalist, with no respect for transcendent wisdom; and (3) it is an ideology rather than a prudent philosophy.
As Russell Kirk pointed out, there are many goods in society: liberty, order, family strength, religious community, nationalism, patriotism, etc. A conservative seeks a healthy balance among all these goods, while an ideologue chooses one good and elevates it above all others. Libertarianism seems benign because it does not lead immediately to tyranny when one elevates liberty above all else, whereas the elevation of nationalism, for example, might lead immediately to a strongly militarist central government. The ideology of “individual liberty above all else” takes a while to lead to tyranny.
Russell,
Second wave liber
Russell,
Second wave libertarianism is an ideology for those with an IQ over 120 who, therefore, are able to self-define and self-delude to their heart’s content. It isn’t real politics.
Jim,
Livingston’s prescription, it seems to me, has some fundamental flaws. First there is an implicit assumption of a shared, historical dynamic among all those who have pressaged liberal politics. Differing in time and place and circumstance, they nonetheless have broadly similar motives and intent and a strikingly similar tendency to produce centralisation. Well, not all of them fit the profile. Albeit obliquely, I have suggested before on this blog that there is a disconnection between the modern form of left politics – most particularly cultural politics – and the broad thrust of liberalism. To put a sharper focus on that, for some the politics of culture are the politics of cosmopolitanism, by which I do NOT simply mean that this form of politics is predicated on the equality of the races. It is politics practised in the name of a predisposition against the Christian European and his sovereign possession of his own homelands.
Similarly, insomuch as cosmopolitanism necessarily weakens the nation state, liberalism is convenient to the elite which is arising from the global agencies, political and commercial. It can certainly be argued that this elite is part of “the centripetal forces of modernityâ€. But I doubt whether the CE’s of McDonalds and Halliburton sport a portrait of Thomas Hobbes above their mighty oak desks. Their motives and intent are not Hobbesian. Their lodestar is not a more just world of self-defined and autonomous individuals guaranteed from the centre against self-destruction. It is the garnering of power and wealth: essentially, the will to kingship. Liberalism is merely helpful to that end.
These forces have prostituted the liberal canon. They are neither its true adherents nor it’s intellectual heirs though they are set fair to be its beneficiaries. There is no indication in Livingston’s article that he understands this or, if he understands it, wants to admit it for analysis.
Beyond that, Livingston’s critique of the modern state as a political artifact of only 200 years standing ignores the fact that feudalism in England only really began to disappear in the late Middle Ages, less than 200 years before Hobbes published Leviathan (in 1651). It was a process of a century or more. So the period in which English society was neither feudal nor set upon the long path to the modern state – essentially the society that Hobbes knew and protested and which Livingston commends – was very brief indeed. I wonder whether Livingston isn’t injecting much wishful thinking into his historical portraiture. I am not saying I disagree with his conclusions. I don’t, really. I am merely saying that he arrives at them by a compression of the facts and perhaps by wilfully ignoring some.
Who cares what CEOs think
I don’t think the political theories of CEOs matter much, to the extent they have political theories. As Guessedworker points out, they mostly just want to make a buck. I don’t think they want kingship, their view of things just isn’t that comprehensive. So they mostly accept the system as it is although they naturally try to push one aspect or another in a direction that gives them an advantage.
Also, I don’t see why their interests are so much at odds with liberal theory.
1. Liberalism likes individualism and the abolition of inherited non-rational distinctions. CEOs like rationalized markets for labor and other resources in which the commodities on offer are fungible except with respect to to a rational system of graded distinctions relevant to the needs of production. The two go together.
2. Liberalism wants people to be free to pursue their self-defined goals. CEOs like consumers to indulge themselves. That’s consistent too.
3. Liberalism values security and prosperity, because those things give people what they want and enable them to pursue their goals. Classically that meant a universal regime of free contract. Today people think you can do better if government administrators get into the picture. So I don’t see the the distinction between the older and newer forms of liberalism as all that fundamental at bottom. It’s more a dispute as to techniques for achieving a settled goal.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Under normalness we’re also free to pursue self-defined goals
“2. Liberalism wants people to be free to pursue their self-defined goals.” (— Jim Kalb, today, 7:40am)
It’s important to understand that in a statement like this Mr. Kalb isn’t implying that anti-liberalism (i.e., normalness) doesn’t want “people to be free to pursue their self-defined goals”—not in the slightest. Under anti-liberalism (normalness) everyone is free to pursue his own self-defined goals, but pursuit of one-hundred-percent self-defined personal goals, goals not taking the surrounding society into account in any way, shape, or form, is not made into society’s highest good. Other things remain higher goods than that. That’s all. Anti-liberalism (normalness) merely provides for the protection of the social structure surrounding the individual—the matrix in which the individual is embedded and must always be embedded for goals and life itself to make any sense finally. Thus, anti-liberalism (normalness) says no one can tear down the institution of marriage in his quest to pursue his self-defined goals, or destroy a country’s traditional race in that pursuit whether that country be Uganda, Mexico, China, the United States, France, Iraq, or Israel, or turn the whole world into a single absolute Big-Brother-type nineteen-eighty-four-style Tranzi dicatorship just so that President Bush and people like him stand to make a few more bucks off the stock market or whatever. Those things and more, people are not free to do under normalness, thank you very much, but are under liberalism.
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
David Koresh’s self-defined goals were a no-no under liberalism
Of course the Branch Davidians found out the hard way that there are self-defined goals you can’t pursue under liberalism. As everyone knows, the order to kill the Branch Davidians was given secretly behind the scenes by arch-liberal Hillary—not, incidentally, by her husband( * )—and immediately and unquestioningly carried out by arch-liberal Janet Reno. That order could be carried out unquestioningly because every liberal knew what was at stake, and didn’t need to ask any questions. It turns out, you see, that under liberalism you can’t pursue goals that risk making the liberal power structure perceive, rightly or wrongly, a threat to its power coming from your direction. To do that under liberalism means one thing: certain death.
( * ) …if a man who behaves like that can be called a “husband”…a very big if…
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Just a note: the basic point
Just a note: the basic point of the Livingston piece, and a lot of things I’ve written, is not that freedom and autonomy are bad or worth nothing but that it makes no sense to treat them as final standards in politics because they can exist and become valuable only in a setting that includes things like substantive goods that limit them. If you try to make them absolute standards you destroy them, and that’s what’s happening with liberalism.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Raimondo: Transcendence will defeat modernity, not vice-versa
Clark Coleman writes (today, 10:28am),
“My other primary criticisms of libertarianism are (2) it is overly rationalist, with no respect for transcendent wisdom; […].”
A propos of this, libertarian pundit Justin Raimondo, in a new column up today at Antiwar.com, pays tribute (whether grudgingly or not, I can’t tell…) to religion, both Christian and Moslem, predicting religion will end up defeating certain forces of modernity:
“[…T]he real center of power in Iraq is not Allawi’s government, or the political parties that join it, but in the office of the Grand Ayatollah [Sistani]. Even the Americans must come to Sistani on bended knee. Having made implacable enemies of the Sunni minority, they cannot afford to alienate the Shi’ite majority.
“In 1935, when French Prime Minister Pierre Laval urged Joseph Stalin to go easy on the Church in Russia so as to enlist the Pope’s aid against the rising threat of Hitler, the Soviet dictator is said to have replied with derision: ‘The Pope? How many divisions has he got?’
“Today, the Pope’s divisions, having run the Red Army out of Poland, are rightly given much of the credit for destroying the Evil Empire that Stalin extended into Eastern Europe, and ultimately overthrowing his successors in the Kremlin.
“Will America’s Middle Eastern Empire suffer the same fate at the hands of a Muslim Pope? The power of religion has lately been underestimated in the West, enamored as it is with the alleged invincibility of ‘modernity.’ The Americans, already burdened with an unwillingness to learn from history, show every sign of repeating Stalin’s fatal error.”
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
There is no optimal size
Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, as well as contemporary experts from a variety of fields, have agreed that a polity has an optimal size beyond which it becomes dysfunctional.
That is bullocks of course. We’ve had a lot of theory on organisation in the last 50 years, and there is no optimum size. It’s more complex than that.
Note that in the last 50 years the government put a man on the moon, and build the internet. We can discuss if a private enterprise couldn’t have done this as well (yes), and better (hmmm), but you can’t argue that the US is dysfunctional. Or the Chinese with their 1.3 billion.
And note that for certain occupations you need a couple of million people to make it worthwhile. To make it worthwhile to have an expert for rare diseases or be able to perform certain operations, you need at least 5-6 million people in a state.
Also the article left me confused if the author was in favor of more or less individual autonomy.
Berend.
Optimal size and purpose
Has there really been much recent theory on organization that deals with the optimum size of a polity? That depends on what the purpose of politics is, so the research would have to go into issues academic social science doesn’t deal with easily. Putting a man on the moon is fine but it doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with being a good polity.
I don’t see why medicine shouldn’t be transnational with respect to its more minute specialities. And as for autonomy, it seems to me Livingston’s point is that autonomy is good in many settings and connections but you can’t coherently make it the final political standard, and if you try you’ll end up with tyranny. The existence of autonomy and what it amounts to depends on complicated social arrangements and understandings. You can’t just say “let’s have as much of it as possible.”
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Define “Functional”
The Soviet Union sent the first man into orbit and, I’ve heard, had a list of scientists to be shot if the mission failed. Is that functional? Maybe. Depends on how you define “functional”. But where would you rather have been born? There, or Switzerland? (I say Switzerland because if I said America you could just cite our own great accomplishments, but Switzerland had none and was still clearly the better place to live.) Or, more pointedly, where would you rather be conceived? America, or a backward country without internet access and malls, but no abortion?
The point isn’t who can do more mighty deeds, but where the best life is.
Aaron Armitage
Retirement brings liberal judge the freedom to expose his views
See the thought processes of the left, the cogwheels of the liberal machine actually turning right before your eyes: Mark Richardson
comments on how one of Australia’s top family-court jurists actually thinks—must be seen to be believed, folks! I mean, really and truly—how in the WORLD do these people’s minds get so TWISTED?
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Further views of the actual cogwheels of leftism in action
Here and here are important VFR log entries showing leftists in action attacking—what else?—Christianity, and—oh, yes, of course!—sexual differentiation into male and female. The entries don’t just show them at it but quote them admitting to the motivation which Mark Richardson, Jim Kalb, and others often remind us of: the leftist mind feels compelled to rebel against even the deepest realities of the world we were born into. Here’s Lawrence Auster in one of the log entries:
“Isn’t there something absurdly narcissistic in a national leader saying that his ‘rebellious streak is awakened’ by the entire history of his civilization—indeed, by the entire history of mankind? Yet that’s the left. This gnostic airhead might as well have said, ‘One thing that really awakens my rebellious streak is the existence of a universe in which there are different sexes.’ “
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
“All history is the story of … gender struggle …”
There’s more wisdom and sense in the short comment Thrasy dashes off here than in all liberalism since the world began. Check out his brief remarks’ opening paragraph:
“The modern way of evaluating women’s status in society by only looking at public, traditionally male, types of power held by a few, is mistaken. It ignores power in family and social life—far more important types of power for the majority of people. It ignores the possibility of separate realms of influence.”
To any young woman tempted by women’s lib: read that paragraph, understand it, and you’ll avoid years, decades, of the bitterest, most painful mistakes in your life, mistakes you see millions of clueless women making all around you thanks to such sad losers as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s saddest-loser-of-all girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir.
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Gender Struggle
Have women yet earned the right to own and control their own property, or has that too been a blow to tradition? MM
Could MM expand on the point he’s making? It’s not clear to me.
Could MM expand a bit on the point of the question he poses to me (today, 11:30am)? I’d reply if I understood it better.
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
The good people of Louisiana take their stand — against entropy
I just want to mention that last week I happened to hear on my car radio that voters in Louisiana had, in a referendum, just approved 80 to 20 ( ! ) a state constitutional amendment banning both homosexual marriage and homosexual “civil unions.”
So, the liberal juggernaut CAN be stopped! The pro-homosexual-“marriage” crowd are just (very well-organized) people, folks, not some irresistible force of nature. Before targeting Vermont they had targeted Hawaii and the Hawaiians fought them off. The People’s Republic of Taxxachusetts unfortunately was the second state to go down after Vermont but, as the good people of Louisiana just showed, it’s entirely possible to make Massachusetts the last state to ever again succumb. Backbone, everyone! Organize and fight them!
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
I just googled that Louisiana story: I didn’t hear wrong…
See here and here.
From the CNN.com article, dated Sept. 19th:
“NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP)—Louisiana voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment Saturday banning same-sex marriages and civil unions, one of up to 12 such measures on the ballot around the country this year. With 95 percent of precincts reporting, the amendment was winning approval with 79 percent of the vote and support for it was evident statewide.”
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“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
SPLC
Prof. Livingston, who teaches at Emory, is under “investigation” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his connections with League of the South, which SPLC considers a “neo-Confederate hate group”. So reports today’s Emory Wheel, which I take to be the student newspaper.
Let us all hope the catacombs are in good repair.
WW
link to story