Patrick J. Deneen, writing at Cato Unbound, offers up a brief but interesting article, The Dead End of Contemporary Liberalism. The argument is that the Western notion of human individuality - radical individualism - is fundamentally flawed, and as long as we base our notion of liberty on this idea, as do both political parties in different ways, we are doomed to repeat the same silly political pissing matches over and over.
More to the point, however, this premise allows the State (liberalism) and the Market (conservatism) - both of which rely on and promote self-interest - to dictate the cultural conversation and keep people from exploring and accepting our more interpersonal and communal natures.
The Dead End of Contemporary Liberalism
by Patrick J. Deneen
The Conversation
May 18th, 2010Phillip 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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