Club Troppo’s Don Arthur and I started a correspondence by email about some of the issues I raised in my post the other day about neo-liberalism and thinktanks, and the very rapid Blairisation of the Rudd/Gillard agenda (which has certainly become even more evident in the interim with the latest instalment in the “education revolution” and the momentum that some liberal and libertarian bloggers are correct to assume is building up towards vouchers in all forms of education). I don’t want to try to represent Don’s side of the discussion, but I did want to talk about a few things that I put to him, and thank him for the very stimulating opportunity to clarify my thoughts.
One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption – that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.
If you look at things over the long term, there are a range of secular trends common to most developed states (and part of the problem with less developed states and the process of post-colonial state formation is that there’s a sort of recipe for what a state does that might be very difficult to replicate in the absence of the conditions of its possibility). The British liberal state of the 19th century managed to govern with a tiny civil service – departments of state such as the Exchequer used to employ only around 20 or 30 people as recently as the 1860s. The vast amount of state employees were in the military, with the post office a distant second. Government – to the degree that there was government – was devolved to largely amateur institutions, and government didn’t do very much. Historically, European states spent almost all their revenue on war and defence. From the late 19th century onwards, there has been a constant trend upwards – and outwards into civil society – but even the “advanced liberalism” of Lloyd George in his guise as a reforming Chancellor only had a footprint, if you like, of around 15% of GDP. It’s also important to underline the fact that much of the increase in state expenditure was driven from below – from a more active and more enfranchised citizenry.
The significance of the “crisis of governability” of the 1970s was the conclusion drawn that the public sector had reached its limits. At around the same time, democratic socialists in Britain – and Australia though we didn’t really have the debate here in the same terms – began to lose their sense of forward momentum and any sense of socialism as transformative. Thatcher, as I’ve suggested, in many instances strengthened the reach and power of the state – “big state conservatism” or liberalism is no new thing. It didn’t spring into being with Bush or Howard, as an examination of the records of Reagan and Fraser would indicate.
But nevertheless it does make sense to talk about neoliberalism. If it’s true that there are strong secular forces shaping the size and the state in a certain direction, it’s also true that attempts to reorient the scope and direction of the state’s activity are important, even if they don’t actually practice the anti-statism they preach. After all the construction of a market economy – embodying the precepts of possessive individualism – was not just a victory of certain social formations and their ruling ideas over others but also a project which required a massive expansion of the reach if not initially the size of the state – in order to overturn notions of a moral economy and to facilitate the transformation of both work in the direction of free labour and of factors of production as tradeable, among other things. It’s what Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation”. Much of the trend from the mid 19th century onwards was to further expand the state’s reach and scope through transferring activities in the economy from private to public governance. The last few decades have been about turning that around – in a way. But this has also required both a further expansion in the reach of the state and a self-imposed restraint which has proceeded under the sign of globalisation.
Incidentally, my argument elsewhere has been that globalisation is horribly confused as a social scientific concept – it tends to conflate far too many processes, suggest a unilinear direction where things are a lot more complex, and mistake effects for causes. But the mistaking of effects for causes – a characteristic of neoliberal globalisation talk (“there is no alternative”) – is itself deeply ideological. What is clustered under the name of globalisation does, and is intended by at least some actors, to do work in the world. In short, it’s an ideological rather than an analytical concept, and its force is such that it attains facticity.
It’s wrong to think of any political ideology either as a “coherent system of ideas” (the polsci 101 definition) or as only oriented towards the size of the state or the degree to which the state dominates “the commanding heights of the economy” or seeks to set market forces free. That’s partly because political ideas are often parasitic on and subsequent to forms of rule and techniques of governing, as it were, and partly because, sociologically, I don’t think you can make a meaningful distinction between the ideas and the institutions and individuals who are their “carriers” – as Max Weber would say.
Just as the state is better understood as an assemblage of institutions embedded within society and reflecting many of the conflicts and tensions within the social body than as some sort of monolith confronting “civil society”, so too ideologies are woven from a whole variety of cloths for a whole range of reasons. They’re as much about weird and misguided shadow boxing in the op/ed pages over the fetish of Hayek as about any abstract theoretical wonkery. There’s no “essence” of liberalism, or of socialism for that matter. Some ideologies have a closer articulation to reason – because they’re understood in terms of reason not necessarily because they are reasonable – than others. The search for a coherent doctrine of fascism or of conservatism always fails because these movements are basically ones of affect and emotion which are hostile to reason. But it’s as unreasonable to compare “Soviet Marxism” to some ethereally pure and ideal Marx, whose texts are incredibly complex and often contradictory. But let’s be fair here – there’s no “classical liberalism” either which is entirely amenable to rational redaction.
In many instances, what we’re doing when we talk about ideologies is textual analysis. Modern political philosophy is far more akin to textual criticism and hermeneutics than it sometimes thinks. It’s a technique of ordering texts – confused, complex and intriguing texts – and giving them a shape and a coherence they lack. It’s also an atemporal and ahistorical enterprise – acting as if liberalism is The Two Treatises on Civil Government or communism is Capital or the Grundrisse. In actuality, these texts are inseparable from their contexts, both historical and in terms of the work they are made to do as lodestars or fetishes of subsequent or concurrent practices. An ideology is an imaginary formation, which cannot in fact close the field it seeks to delimit or circumscribe. It’s a set of dispositions and practices and norms which has only a relative and contingent relation to its supposed textual embodiments.
Ideologies, in short, are what ideologies do.
Ideology is also the will to govern, and how that will seeks to embody itself in steering the ship of state. It embodies a particular (ideal) relation between state and citizens.
It can be useful to use some of the ideas about and from ideologies and the arguments for political analysis, but only if we remember that at best what we’re talking about are ideal types. The world of politics is far far messier than any ideological prescription. As is policy.
Where we can reasonably argue that there is meaning in what we say is where we can identify a general orientation – and which forces have a sense of movement and momentum behind them. The big problem social democracy has is that it’s lost any sense that there is a coherent project. It’s lost any sense of working on the world to transform it.
Neoliberalism has both.
But neither has the coherence that their adherents – or many analysts – might think.
But what matters is that people think they do – it’s a truth effect in Foucault’s terms or a social fact in Durkheim’s. And there are still meaningful distinctions to be made – but they’re often to be found in the nature of the rhetoric and the framing of problems and the underlying assumptions rather than false propositions such as “if a state is bigger than x% of the economy it’s social democratic”. Most important are the effects ideologies create on thought and action, and people’s material circumstances, and in what they enable and what they constrain. All of those are somewhat artificial distinctions analytically, but they’re useful. What we should be looking at is how they frame that object called “society” and what principles they use to manipulate it and how they divide it up, how they create friends and enemies. It’s this sense in which concepts like “aspirationalism” and “social justice” – or “transparent information” – become imbued with both meaning and the capacity to be mobilised to do stuff.
And their ethical commitments are vital.
Elsewhere: Another segue from Jacques Chester at Troppo.
Social democracy can be distinguished from libertarian socialism by the litmus test of the state. And if democratic-socialism moves too far from libertarianism
( broadly defined) then it begins to flirt with authoritarian-socialism.
Everything for the state and everything in the state.
Now, yes there are two primary conceptions of the state. One militarist and reactionary and the other welfarist and progressive. One backward – one forward.
It follows from this rough and ready analysis that democratic-socialism has a great future as the default economic and political position PROVIDED that it doesn’t go to extremes. Either far too statist ( or Marxist) or far too libertarian in the sense that it neglects the commons or the safety net.
I’d tentatively suggest that the term “began to lose their sense of forward momentum” requires some clarification.
It seems from the context that you mean that in 1970s democratic socialists had a crisis of confidence about the desirability of their project.
Or perhaps, though less likely, you mean that democratic socialists ceased to be successful in convincing the electorate of their project.
It hardly needs to be stated that these two states of affairs are not mutually exclusive. Indeed one may strengthen the other.
Yet, to clarify your account of this important moment, it is perhaps necessary to explain the process by which the crisis of social democracy became manifest.
“Neoliberalism has both.”
On the contrary, I think neoliberalism as a transformative project has been dead for a decade or so in the English speaking world at least. What has replaced it has been a managerialist regime which is still inclined to a neoliberal view of the world, and to neoliberal policy innovations, but is stuck with the task of managing a social democratic state.
The bizarre resistance to any action on global warming we see on the right is in part an unwillingness to accept that the policy initiative has been lost. The idea that an emissions trading scheme is a stalking horse for socialism is silly of course, but climate change certainly doesn’t fit with the 1990 world view.
John, I disagree for the reasons given in the post. Basically I think you’re taking a too optimistic view of what constitutes a “social democratic state” and taking the neoliberals’ own statements too seriously, and also eliding neoliberalism with “the right”.
Katz – lack of faith in their own project. I’ll come back to both answers later when I have more time.
Is it just me or is this post just a high brow way of saying pure ideologies never work and we just cherry pick the best of each of them?
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Interesting post Mark. Have to say that this:
Might need a little elucidation. After all the laissez-faire approach that Adam Smith advocated actually began to be applied in real life from this time. Up until the 19th century Britain was protectionist.
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But anyway.
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I had a look thru Fukuyama’s book After the Neocons. I was amused to see that Fukuyama goe to great lengths to explain the intellectual heritage of the Neoconservative movement. It reminds me of Marxists who goes to great lengths to distance themselves from the nasty business of Communist states. In short both Fukuyama and Marxists are saying: we didn’t want it to be this way.
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If as you say ideologies are what ideologies do then some leather patched kindly old Marxist writing tomes about working class history in some English village is as responsible for the Ukrainian famine, the Cultural revolution, the killing fields and so forth as those who were there and did that. Is Nietzsche responsible for Hitler?
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I’d say no.
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Instead I’d argue that you must understand ideological architecture as, like conventional architecture, consisting of various parts: some applied, some theoretical. There’s a body of work – the theory – which says A,B and C and by the conventions of classification may be grouped from inside or without as Ideology X. Then there’s the actual political consequences of ideology X when it is taken up by political agents and applied in the real world.
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Political agents have to deal with whatever contingency they’re dealt and therefore must morph the theory to suit themselves. Hence Lenin decides that a few months of Capitalism is enough to begin the Socialist project. In doing this he both ignores one of the vital arguments that Marx deploys and condemns the Russian people to a century of autocracy which differs from the Tsarian tyranny only in that it is much worse in most ways and a bit better in others.
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Well done Vlad.
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Likewise the Nazis take up Nietzsche, already co-opted by anti-Semites via his sister, and basically get him wrong all the way down the line.
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What we see when political agents take up the work of writers is that, time and again, they are selective about what they use and what they don’t. How Pol Pot’s repatriation of city dwellers to the countryside, for example, is in any way compatible with Marxian economics is beyond me. But Pol Pot identified as Marxist. He just didn’t get it.
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The third step to the creation of ideology is propaganda. This is an over-simplistic articulation of various notions by professionals with a view to creating a secular ideology. The secular ideology then becomes in effect the ideology. So in respect to Hayek it’s devolved into this attitude that anyone advocating state regulation of any sort is a ‘socialist’ which is the the modern equivalent of ‘witch’. That is: inherently nefarious with no redeeming characteristics and nothing but evil intent.
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This misses the context of, say, The Road To Serfdom which was written in the context of widely endorsed state control. Hayek dedicated the book to socialists. It also allows people like George Bush to crap on about ‘freedom’ when in effect what he is doing is practicing a highly corrupt style of corporatism aimed at enriching the industrial groups with which he’s associated. It’s Tammany Hall Fascism – with elections sorta.
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Of course that doesn’t mean that those on the Left should feel exonerated. The Left is just as, if not more, prone to practice secular theology as the Right. What lies behind these secular theologies are vested interests. And these interests only advocate whatever suits them. It should be made clear that such vested interests are not restricted to the powerful but indeed are all over the place. They will use ideologies, think tanks, polemics and whatever else if it suits them.
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Mr Murdoch, for example, who praises laissez-faire economics might suddenly switch to a more ‘social democratic’ position if the government decided to actually foster an open media market and not just tailor legislation to suit News Ltd’s creeping monopoly.
¶¶¶, Adrien, for goodness’ sake.
Even if it’s true that as Mark says, social democratic thinkers have lost any sense of an achievable programme, at least few social democrats or democratic socialists spend time in angst over historical blame, the way you seem to, and the way the cultural warriors of the 1990s seem to.
History is for historians, public policy is for politicians. Let’s not cross the streams.
Speaking from personal experience, Liam?
Liam I am not angsting over historical blame. I’m simply augmenting MArk’s argument that ideologies are all about the results of the agency of said ideologies. Ideologies are as they do. The discourse of various cultural warriors is to win points against the opposition by representing them as ‘evil’. This social-democrats are to be tarred with the Commie brush just as conservatives have been tarred with the Nazi brush.
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The effect of this is to bolster up the faithful in their assured faith that the politically different are not humans with a different perspective. In fact they aren’t humans at all.
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As for conflating history and policy, was it Cicero who said that to ignore history is to remain perpetually a child. The Marxist adventures should at least tell us something about the possible consequences of all-encompassing ideological frameworks yes. A lesson that could be applied to, say, the Neocons as well. Lesson #1 for ideologues: You Are Wrong!
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The Social-Democrats ran aground in the 70s for exactly the same reason the laissez-faire advocates ran aground in the 30s. Please see Lesson #1 for explanation.
I think Pol Pot was largely unaware of Marx’s analysis, but was mightily impressed by the rigid, doctrinaire ideologues of the French CP he read while studying in France in the early 50s. A good biography by Philip Short, “Pol Pot – The History of a Nightmare” argues his convincingly. I think, possibly, earlier writers went looking for Marxism in Pol Pot – and his regime certainly spouted phrases that sounded a bit Marxish, or a bit commo. But Pol Pot was mainly into autocratic power; he wore his communism lightly, I think.
Lesson #2: an intricate exposition/analysis of a professed ideology may be as misleading as the person professing intended it to be, a red herring so to speak: official (state) ideology as a mask and cloak.
Fukuyama, Fuk u.
I’m with Liamista.
Liam, there is no alternative!
I reckon most Marxists are about as aware of what Marx said as most Christians are of what Jesus said, as in not very.
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The Communist movement stems from Marx’s writing and his activism (which in my opinion contradicts his thesis). Ergo Communism is a political agency of Marxian theory, no way around it. The fact that the practice varies from the theory is illustrative of human beings and the way we do things.
Naah, Adrien, you haven’t been reading the post.
Marx had all sorts of incompatible political prescriptions, analyses, and strategies, loosely interlinked. Not a “coherent system of ideas” or “Marxian theory”.
And he attached himself to existing movements, and didn’t found one.
I’m well aware that Marx regarded his work as a failure. He thought of it in terms of Balzac’s story “The Unfinished Masterpiece” in which an artist with a brilliant vision struggles and fails to render it, producing instead a mess. However, despite the contradictions and the failures of such theoretical positions as ‘surplus value’ or the notion that wages would keep falling, I don’t believe you can go so far as to say that Marx’s writings are only loosely linked.
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The contradiction between his thesis and his activism – which was limited but vital – is that Marx’s theory was essentially anti-humanist. He pointed out, I think correctly, that the political systems available to people are dependent on the economic mode of production which supports it. Hence a liberal-democracy would not be possible, say, in a society which requires the vast bulk of its population to remain on the land and to work it from a very early age until death. Similarly as I read him the emergence of socialism could only be made possible after capitalism has run its course. Therefore why would you, at the beginning of capitalist society, engage in any political activism when according to your own theories this is useless?
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History contradicts Marx’s monolithic views somewhat: Engels established the 2nd International after his death, Lenin took this a step further. The results we know did have an effect. However they did not put paid to capitalism.
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My original comment here tho’ is not about that so much as challenging the assertion that ideologies are as they do. There’s a procedure to ideology, this includes agency, theory and propaganda. The process can turn a theory into the living embodiment of its opposite. Having learned this lesson the hard way I don’t think its conscionable for us to make these sorts of mistakes again.
Marx anti-humanist, Adrien? Ever read the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844″?
No Kim. I haven’t. So?
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You can’t argue that Marx’s writings are “incompatible political prescriptions, analyses, and strategies, loosely interlinked” and not a “coherent system of ideas” on the one hand and then on the other try and challenge the conventional view of Marx as anti-humanist, along with Nietzsche and Freud – the anti-humanist, on the basis of one of his bits of esoterica.
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Anti-humanism of course is an hyperbolous nomenclature perhaps contrahumanism might be better.
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In any event it has no bearing on my point that Marx’s philosophy of economic and political evolution was apparently contradicted by his participation in socialist activity.
Marx’ early work was very humanist, Adrien. “Species being” and all that.
Sorry, too tired today to respond to the rest!
Now young Emma don’t trouble your pretty head with things you don’t understand.
Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General (his third Manuscript) clearly shows him to be an anti-humanist, or as Adrien prefers, a contrahumanist.
Best you stick with whatever Jane Austen novel is on your grade 12 english class curriculum.
We read Althusser in Grade 12 English, GregM, so we know there’s a counter argument to that! This will be on the final exam.
After all, the high schools r full of postmodern marxistz.
Marx as a humanist, and Marxist humanism:
http://www.uq.net.au/slsoc/manussa/MarxHum.htm
http://www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/index.htm
http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/
Reading Althusser in Year 12 English? Amazing.
Althusser didn’t write in English. His writings could not in any way be described as literature. He was insane.
Don’t get me wrong. I like the old bugger. My modest thesis on some text of his (the name of which is now lost in the mists of my memory) got me first class honours in politcal sociology. It also led me to the conclusion that Marxism is a religion with all the cults and controversies and heresies and poring over obscure texts in order to find revelation of the divine will that you would have found in third century Christianity.
Tell me though. Did your year 12 Science class give Creationism a run? They may as well have. That’s based on religion too.
That was a joke GregM. Of course I wasn’t taught Althusser in high school English.
It’s Tammany Hall Fascism – with elections sorta.
Excellent summary of republican government. It (the governance model adopted by the republicans) also clearly demonstrates just how corrupt, authoritarian and essentialy anti democratic, corporate dominated political movements really are, and why a strong state in a polity where an organised working class has been litigated and legislated out of existence, is a threat to democracy both at home and abroad.
I take it that your bit about reading Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 was a joke too. I have read them. What turgid garbage. Reading them left me wondering whether Marx was as crazy as Althusser. He probably was.
“An ideology is an imaginary formation, which cannot in fact close the field it seeks to delimit or circumscribe. It’s a set of dispositions and practices and norms which has only a relative and contingent relation to its supposed textual embodiments.”
What I think is being put forward here by Mark is a way of thinking about political ideologies in a sociological way – as these big assemblages that cross between texts and contexts, that can be registered as meaningful as such rather than being constantly evaluated on the basis of their adherence to the letter of their various texts. You’re kind of staking out a terrain for a political sociology, then?
So, when applied to the discussion about neoliberalism, to evaluate its prominence etc we can’t just make a check-list from the texts – a set of either/ors that would render this or that government ‘neoliberal’ – but have to think about it as this kind of assemblage. Am I following?
It sure sounds convincing.
Greg M -
Oooh nasty. Bitch bitch bitch
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Kim after grade 12 english class – We read Althusser in Grade 12 English
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N’uk.
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It’s good for you that’s a joke. Austen’s way more important than Althusser’s ever gonna be. He’s not useless but he’s over-rated. Probably didn’t read Austen either? I read Ionesco and Le Carre. Is that bad? Would the blue and green factions of the Great Culture Wars please confer and declare their policy. Please?
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Am I being dragged down by an irrelevant tradition performed by Dead White Males (well Cornwall’s not dead is he): Or – am I the victim of this nefarious postmodern Neo-Gramscian conspiracy to make everyone believe that Western Culture is inherently oppressive and meaningless.
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I’m so confused.
Klaus K, yes!
GregM, it might be “turgid garbage” to you but that’s a cop out when it comes to assessing the question of whether or not Marx’ early work has a humanist component, and there’s a very long lineage of work which suggests it does – from Lukacs and Korsch in the 1920s onwards. So we’re hardly talking “one bit of esoterica”.
Kim’s joke about Althusser I suspect refers to the fact that Althusser was notorious for suggesting that there was a “break” between early and later Marx and that the early humanist work needed to be discarded in the interests of “science”. Now very few people read Althusser on Marx these days, and perhaps with good reason, but probably largely because the “problematic” he was intervening in has disappeared with Eurocommunism. I’d suggest (tongue only half in cheek) that GregM and Adrien are still haunted by Althusser’s ghost in characterising Marx as an “anti-humanist”.
I think we’d need at least a working definition of “humanism” to make much sense out of these arguments. I don’t think it’s a particularly precise concept. Adrien’s reference to Nietzsche and Freud brings in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and here I suspect Foucault is the unspoken reference.
But if someone who wants to talk about “humanism” and “anti-humanism” could explain what they mean by those terms, then I think we might have the basis for a discussion.
Klaus please forgive but that perception is classic ivory tower.
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Politics involves a lot of people doing scores of mostly banal things in furtherance of winning and retaining office. Their talk is mostly viz getting things done. When they speak of politics in the abstract they focus on loyalty to the group, hatred for one’s opponents and forming alliances.
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Texts do come into it. Any effective political movement has its brain trust. These people hang out in the backroom. There’s an aliterate phrase for them that’s now out of date.
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But the strategic cog of a political organization will think mostly in terms of a competetive game: actually war. This game is particularly hot come election time but it never stops. The members of this cog will read texts but many of them will be of immediate utility to their lives – polemics on and by others such as themeselves – political agents.
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If you look up one of those ‘political test’ sites they all deploy a variation on the Pournelle chart. Most of the leaders of the world will appear in the top-right hand corner. As in economically liberal (sorta) yet firmly socially authoritarian. There are a few leaders in the hippie box (bottom-left hand) like Ghandi for example. The really bad guys – Mugabe, Stalin, Hitler are in the top left hand box, go figure.
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The point is mainstream leaders are usually authoritarian. Labor, Liberal, Democrat, Republican. Blair, Rudd, Clinton, Roosevelt, Reagan, Thatcher, Hawke – all of them. The people who will lead nations are of a very specific type no matter their variations in style or policy preference. They would rule and believe that it is good for them to do so. That they succeed is testimony to their success at the political game.
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Texts are optional. They’ve got people for texts. What they do is the rousing speech, the stern attitude to ‘injustice’, the warm handshake, the beguiling smile, the hand on the hilt of a blade you can’t see. The capacity to decide on behalf of millions. The political intelligentsia will be represented on any politician’s staff. Politicians don’t want their ignorance exposed, they’ll look the fool.
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But for such persons thinking too deeply is a liability. They see the angles and play them. That’s how they think. Their attitude to policy is: will it make me look good, and will it work (that is will I get re-elected).
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Political intellectuals play Concillieri. Every now and then one of them actually slips a good idea into the process. Sometimes it even gets up. Sorta.
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Interestingly enough the Ghandi box is crowded with the famously successful of a different profession – http://www.politicalcompass.org/composers
Adrien, but you’re missing the point here. The parsing of Hayek and so on is part of it all. It’s largely illusory but it’s part of the political game. That’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s got nothing to do with an “ivory tower” perspective – I regard a lot of the endless exegesis of the texts of the canon of the political philosphers as in great part a waste of time. But we have to think of what uses they’re put to – why do the UK Tories think, for instance, that they need some sort of coherent ideological doctrine?
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/08/31/have-the-tories-embraced-progressive-fusionism/
On Marx’s humanism and anti-humanism.
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Yes Marx was a humanist in his youth. But his important contribution was made later in life – post Darwin. Along with Freud and Nietzsche, Marx criticized the humanist project which took as its central ideal – the Rational Human. Each of these three showed that there are limits to this aspect of ourselves. Darwin made this very clear – we are animals. Many have known this, it’s obvious after all, but the 19th century had inherited centuries of self-deluding hooey designed to con us otherwise.
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Nietzsche reminded us that all we call higher culture is based on cruelty. Marx illustrated well that, despite the claims of humanists post-1789, higher culture is still based on such. He understood that our liberty is limited by our economic capabilities. That the political systems available to us will be limited and defined by our way of winning our daily bread, weekly videos and annual holidays.
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History deals us a hand and there’s only so much we can do. This thesis appears to me to be central. However ironically it was the Marxists who disregarded it. They, in Hobsbawm’s wistful words, attempted to leap-frog history.
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Marx, like Freud, wrote a a lot of hooey. He indulged in prophecy, he ignored inconvenient data (the wages are rising stupid), but his central theses is sound. Like the Marxists, Freud’s disciples for some reason disgarded the wheat and munched on the chaff. That’s the trouble with Great Thinkers. People worship them and totally fail to see the point.
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The humanist project assumed a certain rational, enlightened path to human improvement. Marx obviously believed in the betterment of Humanity. In that he was a humanist. But his criticism of Enlightenment assumptions makes him an Anti-Humanist as well. For want of a better phrase.
Mark -
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I’m not missing the point I’m reiterating it. You’ve been a politicakl agent you know what I’m talking about. As I’ve said the political intelligensia is necessary. They come in handy especially at times when you need something to believe in.
The classification is a little hyperbolous. Humanism is a movement that originated in the late-Middle Ages associated with a resurgence in interest in the antique Greco-Roman view of the Human Subject as an art object. In contradiction to Christian eschatologists they believed humans were ‘works of wonder’ and that human civilization could be improved towards perfection using reason.
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This view morphed over the next few centuries and by the late 18th century became almost cult-like. It was by then associated with science, the nobility of commerce, representative government and seperation of powers – bourgeois political philosophy – above all the Sovereign Individual.
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Anti-humanism criticizes the assumptions at play here. I prefer Contrahumanism because the aims and values of Humanism are actually endorsed by many so-called anti-Humanists. The Germanic Gang of Three all precipitated an avalanche of Enlightenment critiques. This has finally produced the confused, semantics-obsessed melange known spuriously as postmodernism.
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Ironically most ‘postmodernists’ are unaware that they’re simply hairsplitting the GGT. They’ve also missed the point that in each case the critique of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud is based on facing the fact that we are animals – post Darwin. Man is a rope strung twixt Ape and Superman n’ all that.
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Foucault does not bear on my argument at all, Mark. And it’s not in the least bit hermeneutical. Foucault mixed up Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. Unlike most of his contemporaries he didn’t entirely miss the point. Except for the one about us being animals.
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You’d think after 2 World Wars we’d a learnt that Roussaeu was full of shit. But no….
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If I wanna discuss the technocrat deployment of implicit power I’ll bring up Foucault. He’s good for speaking of bureaucracy in all its wonders. In The History of Ideas he’s a mere footnote, a paragraph at best.
Hmmm, Adrien, but you’re writing a genealogy of humanism not trying to specify it as a concept. From what you’ve written, it might be possible to conclude that Marx was a “contrahumanist” but not with any degree of precision. If you want to give it some analytical force, rather than tracing its use, then we can talk!
You’re being a bit too Foucauldian, dude!
And there’s an echo of his “death of Man”…
Size of the ‘state’ as %ge of GDP is a pretty bald measure.
Eg. If Howard churned lots of tax dollars into transfer payments to middle class families, that hardly represents big govt or social democracy. Nor in my books, does beefing up the nightwatchman arms of the state (eg fattening the military or Laura Norder).
“Klaus please forgive but that perception is classic ivory tower.”
I was restating what I understood to be the argument in Mark’s post. Personally, I need time to catch up and try to figure out what’s being said, and some of its implications, before arguing for or against the specific points, especially when it’s well outside of my area of expertise.
Klaus, I very much appreciate the effort taken to engage with the post itself.
Going way back up the thread, I’m still thinking about Katz’ question. I was interested to read a review of Bob Carr’s Great Books book, in which apparently he claims that social democracy is dead, and he wishes he’d been an FDR Democrat. This might say a lot more about Carr himself and the dessicated NSW right at least in its more pretentious incarnations than about any force that the ideologies of the left still have, but it actually put me in mind of Stalin – whether or not he believed the stuff he wrote in his “theoretical” work is perhaps unknowable, but it’s certainly true that from the purges and show trials on, there were no “Marxists” left in the hierarchy and apparat of the Soviet Union who had anything other than a nominal belief in their ostensible guiding ideas.
I think here a lot of the “ideologies do this” discussion is simply wrong. We’d have a much better chance of understanding what happened in the 20th century with all its horrors if we saw state violence and its social supports as the common denominator. Another review I was reading today referred to a German plan to kill 50 million people in the Ukraine and Russia during WW2. And “liberal” states aren’t innocent either. The futility of attempting to make political points out of horrors actually demonstrates that we’re on the wrong turf. State violence, I strongly suspect, is actually the independent variable, with ideological formations and various other social factors being intervening variables.
Hence, Adrien, I’m just not convinced by the analytical schema that tries to extrapolate from something in Marx’ texts to a particular form of rule. There’s a lot more that’s very contingent, and there are a lot more continuities in terms of state forms with other historical regimes that were not “Marxist”.
Btw, on the point about Smith, I’d suggest reading Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. The British state had to do an awful lot of work to bring about “property rights” and all the other antecedents of economic liberalism.
Mark, I hate to be impolite* but Marx was a nutter. There is no merit in scouring through his works to find their true meaning. That’s what my study of Althusser taught me. And in fairness to Althusser I didn’t know that he was barking mad when I studied him.
* The exception is on Germaine Greer. I will be as impolite to her as I want to be .But I understand that I have been censored on that, whatever my strongly held and justified feelings. However it’s your site so I resspect that.
I agree with Saloth Sar STF on Aug 29th:
“Lesson #2: an intricate exposition/analysis of a professed ideology may be as misleading as the person professing intended it to be, a red herring so to speak: official (state) ideology as a mask and cloak.”
Pol Pot was mainly about exercising power. Mark discusses this factor on Aug 31st at 10.41pm; though the form of the “state” under Khmer Rouge rule was eccentric to say the least. I think Mark hits a nail squarely on the head to suggest that “professed ideoloogy” is a minor factor for many political regimes. “1984″ is grotesque, but isn’t that one of its themes?
Picking over the details and nuances of an officuial state ideology may be uninfirmative. What then, analysts? Actual policies and practices. But how to discover them? Pol Pot’s Kampuchea was closed off, but did broadcast incessant official statements. North Korea, relatively closed off. Peru’s Shining Path areas – closed off. Eastern Europe under Soviet rule – more open, but generally operated misleading official sources.
For Khmer Rouge Kampuchea, a lone Catholic priest Ponchaud nailed the main factual outline, by i) speaking Khmer, ii) analysing the tone of official broadcasts, iii) being aware of stories from refugees fleeing Khmer Rouge ‘liberated zones’ long before the fall of Phnomh Penh in April 1975; noting the desperation of refugees in the capital in the final months before its fall, not to be captured by KR, iv) interviewing refugees after KR rule began.
And Noam Chomsky, in his typical dismissive, quibbling, credulous manner cast doubt on Ponchaud’s methodology and cast far less doubt on the KR view. To his discredit. I think Chomsky’s main error was to be blinkered by ideology. It’s not uncommon. Marx didn’t spawn Pol Pot, though Mao’s legacy may have had a direct influence.
cheerio
Mark says:
I made the same point more than five years ago, although Alan Kohler beat me to it and put it much better than I ever could.
Those on the other side of the political spectrum (eg Kevin Rudd) will try to the same tactic in negative image ie talk Left but tack Right, particularly on cultural matters.
This is an example of what Mickey Kaus calls cross-wired politics, when parties steal each others ideological clothes in a duplicitous form of me-tooism.
We see it in AUS too. Keating outflanked the LN/P to the liberal Right on deregulating markets. Then Howard outflanked the ALP to the “corporal” Left on gun control. Thats telling median voters that “Hey, I am not a puppet to the special interests in my own party”.
This leads to both major parties converging to the populist Centre, albeit from opposite directions. That is the psepho-logic behind my Great Convergence theory (shameless plug).
I’m reminded of accounts in Christopher Clark’s history of Prussia of atrocities performed by Christian forces for example the Swedes during the Thirty Years War.
mark says:
A tendency towards populist statism in both emerging and mature states l?oks almost inevitable. The main problem is the transparency and equity of such institutional moves.
THe imperatives of both political demand and exigencies of policy supply are driving this, as Schumpeter & Downs brilliantly predicted so long ago.
In part the statist trend is due to populist politics. The Left supports the low-status, whether workers, poor, women, gays, trees etc. The populace are, by definition, (S-E) lower-status than the elite. So the extension of franchise will tend to shift the psephological spectrum to the statist (not culturalist!) Left.
But a very large part of the statist trend is simply the secular tendency to bigger, wealthier jurisdictions. Statist community service provision benefits from economies of scale, esp relating to monopsonistic purchasing power.
Public goods relating to human capital accumulation, such as health and higher education, also tend to be superior goods. The demand for them shows significant income elasticity.
So richer, older boomers and their spawn will want Bigger Government to dig into someone elses pockets to provide services keeping their minds and bodies in working order.
Also, less developed nations may often tend to ramp up the state provisioning sector in order to super-charge economic development. Gerschenkron’s famous relative backwardness thesis still has some merit, properly adjusted for native intellectual capacities:
This is almost the reverse of Marx’s thesis. Marx believed it was the rich countries which would tend towards statism.
In fact both Gerschenkrohn and Marx had good points. Poorer countries tend to minimise their publicly-distributed welfare state and maximise their publicly-owned wealthfare state. Richer countries reverse the signs for that formula. Lots of welfare handouts to noisy special interests whilst the family silver gets flogged off.
That is the Strocchiverse take on economic evolution, FWIW.
I don’t know about that. When we think of genocide, the standout thread linking them all is the ideology of socialism. True, state power is crucial, by definition. But without socialist ideology, most probably would not have taken place.
But that’s completely untrue, Roger. How was “socialism” implicated in Rwanda, for instance? Or the Armenian genocide? In many instances that was the prototypical 20th century atrocity.
I’ve already referred to Nazi genocide, but since I suspect you’re about to make some silly point about National Socialism, I’ll throw a few other instances into the mix.
You’d have a lot more luck in finding nationalism as a common denominator, regardless of the ostensible ideology of those committing genocide.
I bet Roger Bacon = John Greenfield
mark says:
THe statist project hit the wall in the seventies when the bolshie Old Left and the hippie New Left both started to shakedown the Big End of Town bosses and the suburban b?urgeois at the same time. The combination of industrial socialism and cultural socialism was too much for the ruling elites to bear.
The problem for post-modern statists is that everyone wants to get the government to do their bidding but no one wants to pick up the tab. This problem gets 10X worse when everyone starts to celebrate their multicultural diversity or indulge their sub-cultural perversity which leads to a collapse or splintering of community values.
Neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism were both aimed at restoring accountability to the state and constraining the run-away tendencies of state expenditure in an era of lower economic growth. SOmething had to be done to stop the advanced political economies from turning into union feather-beds and welfare roll pads.
A number of ideological lessons have been learned.
Socialism requires more, not less, institutional transparency and accountability. That is why such things as HECS are a good form of socialist institution.
Socialism requires more, not less, communitarian sentiment. The more diverse and mutable the preference function the less possibility for socialism. So jiggery-pokery with politically correct special interests should be mercilessly crushed. Karl Marx would have supported the intervention.
Democratic statism makes some forms of regimentation inevitable, as the coming ecological public goods delivery will show. Bottom line: if you want communal statism then people have to pull their heads in and fit in with the majority.
mark says:
Yes, a whiff of the Gulag will do that to ya. More generally, socialism and capitalism are both institutional forms of modernity. But they have to work with the individual substance of pre-modernity. In short, social structure must fit with our special natures.
Capitalism must not be too libertarian or else our pleasure-seeking instincts will get the better of us. Conversely, socialism must not be too egalitarian or else our status-seeking instincts will find mischief to get up to. Both capitalism and socialism must conform to communalism, our need to have a proper institutional structure that constrains our individual nature.
I will not take your bet Zarquon, at odds of less than 100:1
Where’s the challenge?
Greenfield lacks the intelligence to even disguise himself on a blog FFS!
Mark -
Anti-humanism is a concept in currency. It means what I’ve said it means. I find it preposterous that I have to justify it.
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It says: there’s a limit to the scope of human perfectibility because we are entrapped by forces that are larger than us.
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I was not being Foucauldian. Maybe you think that because you’ve read Foucault and ignored Nietzsche. That’s where he’s getting his ideas from and Nietszche’s gettin’ his from Schopenhauer and so on. But I was discussing Marx.
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But now that you mention The Order of Things – yes it’s pertinent. I assert that Kuhn’s paradigm concept is useful here. the Humanities is now stuck in a cloud produced by Humanist-Anti-Humanist conflict. This has produced certain doctrines of Truth at war with one another.
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On the one hand: supreme confidence in the scientific method. utterly disregarding the inevitable extenuating distortions that human hierarchies have always (necessarilly?) imposed on those subject to them. On the other: the doctrine that Truth is a creation of ‘language’ a word used, like discourse and others, far beyond its connotative designation to signify the apparatus of some underlying , hidden structure that makes objectivity impossible.
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The result? It’s impossible to make the Intellectual Right see that one needs to factor difference into policy. It’s impossible to engage with the Intellectual Left about anything that threatens their own Realm of Discursive Truth without spiralling off into semantic arguments about fairly straightforward terms to the benefit of no-one.
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It is however a strategically advantageous game for the insider. Criticism can always be dismissed by the condescending dismissal of its bearer on the basis that they haven’t done adequate amounts of research into the psychadelic variety in new definitions for old words.
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My Argument: the activities of the political intelligensia are subordinate and periferal to the political game. The political game is a monkey game. Ape politics.
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Subvert the dominant paradigm? Nah! Change the syntagm man. This one’s giving me a headache.
Ay Carumba! Here’s something. Everyone who doesn’t know it already get it tatooed on your forehead: THE FRENCH ARE OVER-RATED – SERIOUSLY!!!!
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You wanna know what Marx said, read him – Marx not Althusser. Read Freud not Lacan. Read Nietzsche not fuckin’ Foucault.
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It’s not like no-one ever had a thought before the 20th century. They were better at thinking than we are. They didn’t have TV.
Adrien, I’m not trying to be too demanding – it just that “we are entrapped by forces that are larger than us” seems to me to encompass just about every variety of social and political thought – maybe other than Nietzsche’s as you say. But even then… It just doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly useful distinction analytically in the way you’re employing it. What would a humanist political theory look like?
# 44 Mark Sep 1st, 2008 at 1:18 pm
The Rawandan and Armenian genocides were pogroms caused by unfortunate accidents of geography and ancestry. These things happen.
THe killing fields of Flanders were really the “prototypical 20th century atrocity”.
Nationalism was fundamental in triggering the war. THat was its ideological principle.
But socialism was instrumental in waging the war. That was its logistical practice.
Rathenau used autarchic central planning to run the German war economy during WWI. Both Hitler and Lenin learned their economic practices off Rathenau, not Gobineau or Marx.
National Socialism is merely putting the whole nation onto a war economy footing forever. It was a bastard hybrid of nationalism and socialism brought to perfection by the Nazis during WWII in the extermination of the Jews.
mark says:
No. “Nationalism” is not the “common denominator” in the 20th century’s worst examples of genocide. State socialism, whether fascist or communist, is though.
Nationalism has been pretty much pervasive and perpetual since the onset of modernity. It reflects the natural human preference for community. THe overwhelming majority of nationalist movements and nationalist governments have not been genocidal (c’mon now, the National Party genocidal?)
The Communist party that has been fingered in most of the worlds bloodiest acts of genocide during the 20th century. THey were, even Mark would agree, state socialists alright. With a vengeance.
State socialism of the totalist kind is usually a necessary condition for the really big genocidal crimes, along the lines of Hitler, Stalin or Mao. That is the grain of truth in the Hayek-Friedman thesis.
To do any kind of crime – including crimes against humanity – you need motive, means and opportunity. THe motive for genocide is usually economic class or ethnic clan, both of which were present in National Socialism. The opportunity for genocide is usually some kind of civil disturbance such as war, revolution or depression. State socialism gives a committed cadre the most effective means of oppression (public monopoly ownership of the means of destruction, one might say).
Genocide usually requires both substantial institutional and logistical capacity. So it is state socialism’s capability that is crucial “regardless of the ostensible ideology of those committing genocide”.
State socialism is not, however, a sufficient condition for totalitarian genocide. Evidently the British and Scandinavians have had forms of socialism in the past and managed to avoid tyranny by maintaining a competitive party system.
So representative government – based on a thriving party system – is the most effective bulwark against totalitarian tendencies inherent in state socialism.
On topic:
Having said the French are over-rated let’s have a little Jacques Ellul:
As Ellul has written, the apparatus of the modern media makes available to sections of the political population (those who bother) an outlet of ‘news’ and views that fits in with their opinions. The goal isn’t to confront the reader with criticial information but to reassure that reader that they’re correct, true – right.
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Thus the communist is unaware of Communist iniquity because s/he reads L’Humanite which only lists bourgeois injustices. The conservative is unaware of these because s/he’s reading about the crimes and follies of the commies in Le Figaro. If you want to read harsh criticism of neoliberalism don’t look in The Economist. Likewise you won’t find much by way of the explication of Cuban corruption in Green Left Weekly.
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The purpose is to organize and bolster up a political faith: friends and enemies. That’s why Andrew Bolt is successful. John Pilger oft repeats that political contests in the West are between parties that essentially support identical ideologies. It’s a nowadays common American polemic that ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ bear unprecedented mutual emnity whilst at the same time being politically almost homogenous.
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In The Atlantic Monthly last year Andrew Sullivan argued that the current bitterness is due to the legacy of the Vietnam War. That it’s between those boomers who smoked pot and demonstrated and those who viewed that behaviour as appalling. For Sullivan, the bitter and irrational partisan games that characterize present American political debate is simply the result of an ongoing Boomer shitfight.
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When Sullivan wrote the piece the favoured scenario was a Guiliani v Clinton election. Obama was an outsider, close to being dismissed. Sullivan describes Clinton and Guiliani as “conscripts in their generation’s war….war heroes.”. Sullivan advocates Obama as a way out of that – http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama/1
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I’m not sure however.
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It’s obvious, for example, that any prospective government willing to go ‘too far’ in opposition to Mr Murdoch’s wishes will have a tougher time getting elected. But I think more than that we have to remember that there’s a certain amount of vertical integration between folks in the political game and their corporate counterparts. And that it might be in the interest of these people to keep any serious criticism of what’s actually going on at bay.
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Hence an artificial battle which results in people being completely unaware that their representatives are in fact just as bad or worse than ‘the other side’. Those who should realize this are those who most stubbornly refuse to. This will not change anytime soon. As Ellul says intellectuals are more susceptible to propoganda than anyone.
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French Christian radicals – check ‘em out. Especially this one: she’s a nice Jewish girl.
Jack, no, you’re confusing bureaucratic rationality with “state socialism”. The same harnessing of productive forces by the state was what Lloyd George tried to do in Britain to win the Great War – which destroyed the historic Liberal party for good reason.
Take a look at any modern non-Fascist political philosophy and you’ll encounter servings of Humanism. Almost all politicians aspire to Humanism except f course Fascists and notably certain segments of the Religious Right.
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Humanism is characterized by the rejection of the theological as a means to human salvation in favour of the deployment of scientific skepticism as a means of social progress. At the centre of this field is the regard for the perfectable subject and faith in forward human progress. Anti-Humanists express criticisms of this view for a variety of reasons.
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The so-called anti-Humanists are not against humanism per se. Instead they question the Humanist assumption that humans can be reasonable and progress past theological, doctrinaire modes of being.
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Marx points out that society is inherited by each generation from history, that social organization is hierarchical and we can only do so much about this as individuals. Freud points out that we are animals, instinctive creatures, who repress these instincts in furtherance of creating and maintaining complex society. Nietzsche points out that there are certain human truths related to this instinct of which Freud speaks: fundamentally morality is herd instinct. He argues that in dispensing with the patrician moral system associated with the ancien regime we will not obtain a society based on Reason so much as a herd-driven ultimate inhumanity.
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In relation to the topic. Humanism from Erasmus and Descartes to Voltaire and Hume was a political philosophy that finally realized itself in the Modern State. The ideology of this state has been called ‘bourgeois’. A set of ideas extolling the virtues of the sovereign individual, of rationally organized society and so forth. The ‘anti-Humanists’ from Marx to Foucault and beyond criticize this as an ideological mythology.
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In his The Art of the Novel Milan Kundera summarizes this ‘anti-Humanist’ skepticism beautifully:
Jack -
The Nazis were socialists thesis has limited utility (imho) Jack. Many of those contemporary to the phenomena used the word medieval to describe them. Of course they practiced economic corporatism. But if Hayek was right about the inherent correlations between this type of economic management and tyranny then the Scandinavian states would be tyrannies. Obviously they aren’t.
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Of course the apparatus of the modern state comes in handy if you want to kill millions of people. And naturally such a state without a limits on governmental power or the institutional separation of such is likewise useful.
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However this does not mean that all the tenets of ‘socialism’ like Medicare, for example, lead to serfdom. Nor does it mean that the advocates of laissez-faire capitalism necessarily have respect for democracy or civil liberty, (think Pinochet).
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And as Mark’s post argues, regardless the ‘ideology’ the State is actually growing anyway. The only difference is what are they spending our money on. Whatever side I think the answer is mostly Not Us.
Adrien. I read Marx, both as part of political sociology and political philosophy. My problem with Marx was that he took Hegel’s idea of the dialectic and inverted it, thus turning the Hegelian idea of the Ideal realising itself into the idea that there was a historical process in which the material world did the same thing. I just could not see that such a philosophical sleight of hand could be intellectually justified. Better if he had concluded that Hegel was plain wrong and moved on rather than trying to fit the evidence to his pre-conceived notions of historical determinism.
Notwithstanding his later protestations Marx remained wedded to his inverted Hegelian model. Hence the class struggle leading to the dictatorship of the prroletariat, and from that the socialist dictatorships of the twentieth century, which, with their premises of class enemies and class warfare, led to untold misery for millions.
Marx is an interesting historical figure but, because of his attachment to Hegel I see him more as a character of the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth, struggling to explain, through his eighteenth century perspective, a phenomenon of the nineteenth.
As for Althusser, he convinced me that Marxism had, by the time he was writing, become a religion, just in the same way as the Catholicism I had been brought up in and rejected. It had its prophets, saints, demons, heresies and dogmas; the whole panoply of religion. It even had a Divine Spark. In this case though it was the inverted Ideal, the driver of historical determinism, instead of God.
And that’s because of neoliberalism, Adrien!
But that reply to Jack is quite right. The Nazis actually purged those factions (associated with but not limited to the SA) who wanted to emphasise the socialism in National Socialism. Certainly what was going on was a sort of bastard military Keynesianism, but that was common to a number of very disparate political regimes at the time, as we’re able to see better now in retrospect – including the second New Deal under FDR. Or you can think about it in terms of corporatism – a duopolistic rather than tripartite variety, of course, because labour had no meaningful stake and no meaningful rights (which is quite similar to the situation in the Soviet Union and in China today – this is one point the Trotskyist theory of “state capitalism” has right).
Jack’s argument is another example of the category error I’m talking about – mistaking state form for some sort of ideological essence. And it’s kind of a nominalist fallacy as well.
Hegel wasn’t determinist, GregM?
… And I thought it was Engels who came up with that “inverted dialectic” notion. I’m open to correction on that.
Actually Machiavelli was probably the first writer to think in terms of class struggle as “the motor of history”. Or perhaps Livy, on whom he was commenting in the Discourses.
But the logic in that paragraph is precisely what I’m trying to counter (among other things). It ignores the complexity of Marx’ politics and its incoherence. It ignores the logical sophistry Lenin had to engage in to distort what Marx probably meant by “dictatorship of the proletariat” – indefinitely extending the limited time span and replacing the actual proletariat! Marx was thinking about the Roman Republican model, not some Caesaro-Socialism. A lot of the more insightful political thinkers of the 20th century right – such as Schmitt among others – picked that up.
More broadly, I’m questioning whether the “essence of socialism” is the culprit here. That’s partly because there is no such thing. And it’s partly, as I said above, because we could more productively analyse the reasons for the emergence of murderous regimes in terms of other dynamics than their ostensible ideological motivations which are best thought of as intervening variables and part of a justificatory and legitimating strategy rather than as prime causes. That’s if we want to do justice to the victims and to remain vigilant. If we want to score political points in 2008, of course, such a multi-faceted approach isn’t so useful.
greg M –
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Yes fitting facts to the theory rather than the reverse is a (not just) Marxian error. Not all Marxian intellectuals do this however – Hobsbawm for instance. Along with Hegel, Marx is trying to find a pattern in history. I assert that 19th century European intellectuals had an unprecedented vantage point. They understood this and attempted to make sense of the historical whole. To me that’s a worthwhile start.
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Unfortunately as you say it became religious – Marxism. Unbeknown to Marx it always was. He was kidding himself. Most of the aforementioned 19th century intelligentsia was. His idea of dictatorship of the proletariat, I believe, was a working-class dominated democracy. Marx’s error here was that he assumed that working people would cease to distinguish amongst themselves and increasingly be loyal to their ‘class’ rather than to their country, their religion and so forth. As Orwell knew full well the Fascists’ appeal was based on the fact that they rejected Bolshevism’s ‘liberal’ notions viz internationalism, sexual equality, anti-racism etc.
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Marx’s assumption of class-based fellow feeling was ivory tower idealism. Nietzsche knew full well that marching toward egalité could get you somewhere very unpleasant. As Kundera says: nothing is more repugnant …than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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Neoliberalism is a useful thing to contemplate Mark as it designates agency rather than theory. Obviously it stems from the resurgence in laissez-fair advocacy pioneered by Mises and Hayek and realized under the extensive contributions of Friedman. Friedman’s economics was not adopted in whole however. Drugs, for example, are still very much illegal. Likewise the ‘free trade’ world order that neoliberals have brought about is nothing of the kind. It’s simply the repeat of a casual version of British mercantilism.
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I imagine that its vogue will recede somewhat as there’s a certain amount of weariness with it. The Australian population for example have been through 25 years of it. And certain sections of the economy – agriculture for sure – are quite miffed that we must open our markets to subsidized products from, say, the EU whilst we compete fairly. And thus get screwed.
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The theory is too pure. When it’s dealing with developing economies it advocates the adoption of open markets without bothering to consider the fact that the world’s largest economies almost all went thru early protectionist/interventionist phases before they could compete. In their enthusiasm for laissez-fair and their increasingly embittered and moralistic crusade against various types of ‘socialism’ they fail to deal with that.
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In practice this suits the leaders of the powerful economies very well. The ‘openness’ ensures that they will remain where they are and not need to compete against too many newcomers.
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The lesson I think is that ideologically pure theories will probably be flawed because they posit some perfect mechanism that ignores inconvenient data and because the age-old game of political domination will always distort them somehow. If you would indulge in theory post20th century I’d suggest you realize that it will be wrong about something and that people are shits.
Adrien, does neoliberal mean being able to say ‘level playing field’ and keep a straight face?
National Socialism is “silly”?
No, the argument that National Socialism is socialism is silly!
Nick the playing field is level. And as long as our guys are ten times as big there’s no problem. It’s freedom.
There is NO doubt that Socialism – both Marxian and Nationalist – was/is the most evil and misanthropic religion that mankind has ever imagined. We all need to be ever-vigilant for the detritus – those who still adhere to Socialism – of these evils that still lurk among us!
All the genocides can be traced back to an ideological training in Marxism. In fact, genocide is unquestionably rooted in Socialism.
I’ve heard this one before. Please explain the Armenian massacre and the Holocaust in terms of Marxist indoctrination. I can assur you that neither the Ottomans nor Hitler had much time for Marx.
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Genocide is what happens when the monkeys get nasty and have lots of toys to get nasty with.
What nonsense! Are you joking? Doubtless neoliberalism like many such nomenclatures for political and economic movements is used mostly by opponents of same. However it is an empirically verifiable phenomena describing the drift back to a laissez-fair ideal beginning in the 70s as a response to the failure of Keynesean Economics.
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I always love people who think ideological declarations of the most boneheaded and reductionist kind pass for adult discussion.
Can someone please put Roger Bacon/John Greenfield out of his misery.
Mark, I think you’re a little too quick to wield the notion that there’s no “essence” behind the various ideologies.
Isn’t there a profound and lasting divide, for example, between the conceptions of mankind that animate liberalism as against the various collectivist ideologies?
The former springs from the belief that spontaneous order is a natural and generally constructive tendency inherent to men and that a relatively light framework of the right laws and mores is all that’s required to sustain a good society. Not premised on some conception of the ultimate perfectability of man, but an acceptance that the existing version, imperfect and messy though it is, will do just fine. Indeed, that frequent messiness is viewed as essential to its ongoing evolutionary success. In its political cosmos, the prime unit is the individual. (Just so as to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, I include social democrats under this grouping. It’s simply that the framework they see as necessary is a little more elaborate.)
At the other end of the spectrum, no such confidence underlies the collectivist conception, or at least not until some great transformative Rubicon has been crossed. In their varying ways, they all believe that things must be managed, and that individuals gain what status they have through their membership of society, be it class, race or nation. The “ideologies” based on these core convictions naturally enough take many forms, and the intensity of the underlying collectivist drive varies widely (both within and between) but none of this, it seems to me, alters the essential differentiating premise.
I’ve done no such thing.
*Yawns*
Greenfield is so tediously 2007. See you guys later, when he’s got bored and gone away again.
Klaus, there’s nothing wrong with being outdated, an oak of your generation. If you’re going to start dumping on people who pollute threads with wildly off-topic idiosycratic rubbish, well hell, we’ll unionise.
And to answer DK at #8
You’d be surprised how small the area on a Venn diagram of the two actually is. Maybe you could fit an historian, a political scientist and a senior bureaucrat in there, but you certainly wouldn’t have room for the bar or the punchline.
Ingolf -
I believe the various modern Isms (apart from Fascism) have their roots in a dream best expressed by Lord Tennyson:
One can place ‘collectivist’ ideologies together and say that the Social Democrats are just like the Nazis. Indeed. economically there’s similarities most definitely. However a cursory comparison of Sweden with Nazi Germany tends to demonstrate that there are differences as well. Significant ones.
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In any event most governments of modern States combine certain collective solutions with certain individualist ones. Generally, despite stated ideological preferences, there’s been a move toward Statist control freakery over the last little while. Funnilly enough a lot of people who should know better aren’t paying attention because they believe the branding more than the actual legislation.
Sorry, folks, there seems to have been a Greenfield outbreak while I’ve been at work. He’s now been expunged.
Ingolf, thanks for the comment. I’ll reply when I’m less tired.
Adrien, I don’t think classical liberals really partook of that dream. Their ambition seemed to me a far more modest one. Nor does it seem reasonable to lump Hayek into that category. At the risk of generalising a little too far, they strike me as realists about human nature and potential.
As for my view of Social Democrats, you missed the following, it seems: “Just so as to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, I include social democrats under this grouping [the liberals]. It’s simply that the framework they see as necessary is a little more elaborate.”
I think you’re right that there’s been a move towards centralisation of power and slipping constitutional safeguards, particularly in the US. So much so that some of what’s happening there could almost be termed a kind of soft fascism.
Mark, no rush at all. I’ve joined this discussion a little late anyway.
My short answer, Ingolf, would be that the focus on the individual is as much a result of the historical development of liberal practices of government and economy as an ideological core. That is to say – the emergent practices and habits of market capitalism come before the ideas which help disseminate those practices further such that they subsequently become the “common sense” which forms the background of the way we think about things. Liberty and freedom meant something quite different historically to what they mean now in liberal thought.
But I’ll try to flesh that out later on!
I would also want to emphasise what we might call ‘subjectivation’ or something similar – I’m not hung up on what term we might use. That would be the terrain upon which we could speak of a liberal (or neo-liberal) practice of management: ie in the creation of particular kinds of subjects, or the encouragement of particular ways of being individuals, and the discouragement of others (or in a neo-liberal context we might talk of punishment or pathologisation). So yes, liberalism (or neo-liberalism) assumes the individual at its centre, but I don’t think it escapes constant management and attempts to create and shape the individual. It is at this level that it is directly comparable to what we might call collectivist ideologies, which also assume and seek to shape kinds of subjectivity.
I think part of what Mark is talking about in saying that all of these practices and habits come about before how we think about them as such is also about this aspect of creating individuals of certain kinds. They begin to emerge before or as we begin to imagine and value them as such, sometimes in ways that their advocates don’t see as clearly linked to certain ideologies or agendas. We talk about the individual coming first, but the ground-work has been laid for those individuals to fail or succeed at being ‘at the centre’ of things.
Klaus K (and Mark), was there ever a time when the development of ideas wasn’t inextricably caught up in a complex dance with reality? I’m not sure I see why this commonplace is garnering quite so much attention while the question of whether any useful and lasting distinctions arise out of a given dance receives so little.
On your first point, Klaus, it isn’t clear to me what you’re trying to say. If you mean any society, even the most “free”, will tend to shape the individuals of which it’s comprised, then I’d of course agree, even though its capacity to do so is a matter of debate. If, as seems more likely, you mean such activity as an explicit project of the state, then isn’t the relevant question (in terms of this discussion) at what point such attempts mean that state can no longer reasonably be called liberal?
The answer is rarely going to be simple (although I doubt anyone would have had much difficulty in determining roughly when the Weimar Republic slid into something entirely different) but nor do I think it need be intolerably difficult at a practical level. Perhaps it bears comparison with the well known response of a US Supreme Court judge when required to define pornography. The full relevant quote (which, prompted by curiosity, I stumbled upon on the net) was: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it . . . . “.
Not entirely unrelated is this opinion piece by A C Grayling in which he takes the British Government to task over its latest proposed “security” move. Our first proper Panopticon, it seems, is just around the corner.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there are useful and lasting distinctions, but I’m not convinced that they are at the level of the difference between assuming the individual or assuming the collective have priority in any fundamental way. I think in both cases, we’re talking about the creation and management of different kinds of subjects. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think the liberal humanist assumption that the human precedes in some way its entanglement in the world amounts to a fundamental point of distinction with other ideologies, because I think liberalism (or neoliberalism) is still about producing subjects through collective processes – this is how it acts upon the world as an ideology. They just have the explanation of that production upside down.
Klaus, yes, I’d endorse what you’re saying at 80, though I’d use the term “subjectification”…
Ingolf, the point I’m making – in line with the post – is what happens over the very long term. I don’t want to get into the argument about differences in kinship patterns and the early emergence of individualism in England, because the evidence is highly contested, but there’s no doubt that there’s a tendential relationship between the original equation of liberty and urbanism stemming from the 12th century in Northern Italy – in part a revival of Greek and Roman concepts via both Byzantium and Arabic scholars. This took place at the same time as Mediterranean trade began to revive (in the West – it never went away in the East) and the creation of a merchant class, later equipped with various financial techniques (bills of sale, modern book keeping etc) who began to articulate an ideology which equated their practices with civic freedom. I’m following Braudel rather than Marx as seeing the distinctive feature of capitalism as being the money exchange relationship and commoditification rather than the labour relation. Anyway, it’s a very long story, but once you have things like the Reformation, you have the emergence of political philosophies – of the social contract variety – which explicitly put the individual before the political community.
You’re right to say that there’s a philosophical anthropology at least assumed in particular ideological formations, but it’s an artefact of a particular historical conjuncture rather than some essential distinction.
I don’t agree that the collectivist/individualist distinction is as important as you think because all modern ideologies claim to aim at an end state of individual freedom – social democracy and Marxism as much as liberalism. There are a complex set of tensions and compromises and ideas around the three terms “liberty”, “equality” and “solidarity”, but there’s a common core to all socialisms and liberalism which makes them quite distinct from anything that came before – because they all share a similar conception of the modern subject or self.
Ingolf -
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I’m not certain I agree with your assessment of classic liberals there. To quote one – Emerson – the purpose of the State is to produce the Wise Man, with the appearance of the Wise Man the State, to use Marx’s terms ‘withers away’. I believe the idea of that the State could be made redundant was a common theme of liberals and socialists. There was of course the standard spectrum from idealists to pragmatists.
Klaus -
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Indeed there was sometime a bit of discussion of the difference between ‘individuality’ and ‘individualism’. The former connotes people dressing, living, working in accordance with their idiosyncratic tastes, the latter a viscious competition between virtually identical beings. That’s a caricature.
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Mary Harron’s great adaptation of a mediocre book contains a scence which lampoons individualism sans individuality here.
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I do however feel compelled to remind both those who oppose neo-liberalism and those who support it and bear contempt for ‘individuality’ that von Hayek extolled persons to make use of the market economy in furtherance of more experimental living.
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In art one can see corporate conformity in the various CGI braindead blockbusters that plague the screen and bemoan the market as the mother of a million fascist robots. Sometimes it enables very high originality however.
Mark –
Interesting replacement of ‘fraternity’ with ‘solidarity’ there. Perhaps apt as well for reasons other than non-gender’d specificity. I reckon the solidarity thing underpins Fascist ideology. I also think that socialists and liberals prioritize equality and liberty respectively. Often you must choose you can’t have both.
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Whilst I agree that modern ideology does to a certain extent enscapulate the modern subject there are great disgreements as to the origin, the nature and the importance of such. For liberals and anarchists the individual comes first necessarily . For Marxists and other socialists the individual is subordinate to the group and is a product of historical forces. The most powerful critique of the notion of Sovereign Individuality so dear to classic liberalism comes from Marxian analysis.
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This is more than an intellectual exercise as the disregard for individual rights and feelings in ‘collectivist’ states like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia show well. Ironically the Cult of Personality reigns supreme in precisely those places where it is categorically denied to most people.
Adrien, as well as the gendered dimension, “fraternity” also has a weird sort of horizontal dimension – the brothers instead of the father (patriarch) – it still suggests a family and racial analogy and I think alludes to the people as an ethnos. You can have solidarity among strangers too, I reckon.
With fascism, what you’re seeing imho is a modern attempt to do anti-modernism. It replaces the empty space left by the absent sovereign with an attempt to fill the space with a unified people. In a democracy, the sovereign space is formally empty.
It should be noted as well that there’s a very powerful conservative critique of liberal individualism as well which often overlaps with a socialist one, particularly of the more Romantic stripe. That’s actually where I’d ping Clive Hamilton.
I’m not sure what you say about the priority of the individual subject is true of many types of anarchism. It is true of liberalism, but there’s a strong ahistorical dimension to liberalism which is at work here as well.
No, I’m more and more coming to think that both prioritise both equally. They just disagree very much about the meaning of each term.
Klaus, I’m afraid I’m more puzzled than enlightened by your reply.
“I think in both cases” you say, “we’re talking about the creation and management of different kinds of subjects.” Creation and management by whom? By what means? To what ends? And what do you mean by “different kinds of subjects”? I can see that at least the first three of these questions probably have useful answers within the context of a collectivist state, but for the life of me can’t see how they do in any meaningful sense in a small “l” liberal polity. As I suggested above, when a state engages in actively molding its citizens, it can’t travel very far along that road before it effectively ceases to be liberal.
Liberalism, you go on to say “is still about producing subjects through collective processes — this is how it acts upon the world as an ideology. They just have the explanation of that production upside down.” Unless you simply mean the inevitable symbiotic processes between individual and society, I’m utterly mystified by this statement. After all, one of the defining characteristics of liberalism is precisely that it allows individuals to choose their own path, whether wisely or not. I grant you the more modern social democratic version does a fair bit of nannying, but we’re each of us still pretty free to make our own way. Certainly I feel that way. So how are you and I being “produced as subjects”?
Mark -
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Indeed. But pervasive solidarity as in not just viz one issue but all-encompassing I think is more fascist. Fascism, as you say, is mostly anti-modernist. Orwell oft repeated that liberals and socialists failed to understand the irrational forces at work in human beings, and that fascists didn’t have that problem. The one modern phenomena they did embrace is nationalism which is what the word fraternité, I think, originally refers to.
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As Hobsbawm has explicated fascism may have been anti-democratic in all senses of the term but it did, like socialism and liberal-democracy, and, unlike ancien regime societies, depend on ‘the people’.
You know how many types of anarchisms there are? How many anarchists are there? Many anarchists are boneheads and/or hypocrites. They tend to be hyper-individualists however.
Yes. Those advocates of classical liberalism who’re also inclined to be personally conservative tend to fail to understand that the so-called breakdown of tradition post WWII is not a product of leftist agitation but one of the ability of individuals to forego obligations to kin, to religion, to tradition due pretty much to markets and liberal-democracy.
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I expect a reorganization of the political spectrum where certain eco-leftists like Hamilton and McKnight move closer to conservatives who’ve decided capitalism’s gone too far.
Maybe, Adrien. But that’s part of the thing I’m trying to put my finger on – people don’t necessarily go where neat ideological boxes might place them. I’m sure McKnight in particular – given his background – would be reluctant to ever identify himself as a conservative.
Disclosure: I’ve met David McKnight twice.
Ps re – anarchists, maybe if I rephrase that “libertarian socialists”…
Absolutely. And given his background most conservatives would be reluctant to associate with him politically. But as can be seen the process of theory and practice is inter-generational. So, say, the ecologically minded may proceed to a place where they’re advocating ‘family values’. This would be something that today’s Greens would not be happy about but that sort of thing happens.
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How would John Curtin view Paul Keating? How would Eisenhower view George W. Bush? This is a game that moves as you play.
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Libertarian socialism can be regarded as a subset of anarchism. But anarchism can al;so be a right-wing phenomena albeit with shared attributes and goals. I’m constantly struck by the similarity between anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-syndicallists. Similarly deluded that is.
“As I suggested above, when a state engages in actively molding its citizens, it can’t travel very far along that road before it effectively ceases to be liberal.”
I would argue that there is no state anywhere that does not actively mold its citizens, even if it is in order that they be ‘autonomous’ individuals. The state (which is already fairly heterogeneous) does not act alone in doing so, of course, and we could meaningfully speak of and assess the reach of the state, which in most modern nations is almost total – although it acts in certain circumstances and not in others, and towards certain ends while being indifferent to others.
David McKnight taught me Australian politics at UTS a couple of years back. I was much more interested in anthropology and social theory at the time, so I’m sad to say I gave him less attention than he deserved.
Adrien, you’re right. My comment that classical liberals never really partook of the dream went too far. In their desire to sweep clean, some undoubtedly did.
Mark, surely there’s a crucial difference between systems which profess to seek some end state of individual freedom and those that accept and encourage its present reality. It’s that very distinction I’ve been trying to make.
As to capitalism, I think it’s most simply summed up as another term for the market economy with all that entails in terms of private ownership of the means of production, legally enforceable contracts, free trade, the division of labour, and savings (from both profits and income) which in turn enable the accumulation of capital goods and rising productivity. Money is certainly an essential component since barter is terribly inefficient and makes meaningful economic calculation difficult if not impossible. Commodification? I don’t know, but it seems to me a tricky term that may obscure as much as it illuminates.
Klaus, thanks for the lovely, clear reply. I now have a much better understanding of how you view these matters. Our differences, such as they are, appear to be more a matter of emphasis than kind with (as is so often the case) a touch of semantic murk thrown in for good measure. Your “active molding” is, it would seem, more akin to what I mean by “nannying” whereas my use of the term was intended to refer ro something a good deal more serious and intrusive.
“The search for a coherent doctrine of fascism or of conservatism always fails because these movements are basically ones of affect and emotion which are hostile to reason.”
Never was a truer word spoken. And this is why coherent argument with a conservative quicky descends into abuse.
Patrick B,
indeed, but some “leftists” too are drawn to doctrines through ‘affect and emotion’ rather than intellect (and reading) as has been referred to in several posts above.
Sadly that has a similar effect – the prevalence of abusive responses – when one attempts to engage such a person in civil discussion (perhaps gently questioning one of their assertions or apparent assumptions).
just sayin’
Yes, sure, there’s an affective dimension to all political orientations. But the point was that conservative and fascist ideologies are actually strongly antithetical to reason in their general tendencies. That’s not the case with teh left.
[Whatever teh left is - but the point here is that both conservatism and fascism have their starting point in opposition to the Enlightenment.]
Ingolf -
I think going too far is crossing a line that means you can no longer be classified as ‘liberal’. So when Robespierre et al try and impose the Enlightenment’s ideas of Reason on France they end up behaving very much like warring Puritans. They resemble Cromwell and Leninists resemble them.
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The liberal-left advocates ‘collectivist’ economic policies like welfare and industrial regulation but do so within the liberal framework of a public good. They are opposed to coercive force.
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I don’t think Emerson advocates violence or indeed wants the State to attempt to make people wise by decree. it just creates the environment for us to do that ourselves bit by bit. He’s acknowledging a process and articulating a goal. He doesn’t expect his “Wise Man” any time soon. Robespierre thought he was the Wise Man, so did Lenin.
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That wasn’t …wise, man.
Kim -
Patrick B -
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I went and dug this up viz fascism, conservatism and socialism:
Orwell
A Patriot After All
1941
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[My italics]
Kim – I don’t think its reasonable to describe conservatism as ‘strongly antithetical to reason’ in conjunction with fascism. Fascism’s reactionary radicalism is a pure State-based ideology which unlike Communism does not attempt to reform human nature in any ‘progressive’ way. It reasserts pre-Enlightenment realpolitik as Orwell describes it.
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but it’s worth remembering that Communism produces similar results and yet the originators of that ideology developed it ‘rationally’. All ideologies whether rational/progressive or traditional/reactionary have at their centre principled orthodoxies. This includes very much the Left of the present time.
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You see this at work when there is a reasoned critique of a concept dear to adherants of the ideology. Reaction here to recent criticism of a central concept precipitated a lot of opposition, most of it not reasoned rebutal but polemical vitriol.
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Not saying there’s no basis for reasoned rebutal you understand. Just saying that all political movements have an emotive core. Some conservatives are completely irrational, some are very carefully rational and most of ‘them’ like most of ‘us’ are both at the same time.
Adrien, maybe you’re right. But it’s still antithetical to reason in its origins – tradition, organic development, etc. rather than rational action.
Kim, I think it depends on how we choose to define reason. If we mean the full blooded enlightenment variety, brimming with confidence in its power to reorder society, then conservatives will certainly regard it with suspicion and even fear.
However, careful thought (and experience) can also lead to questions about how far reason’s remit should ideally run. Consider, for example, this quote from an article which considers the many parallels between Hayek and Burke:
Yes, Ingolf, fair points. And it should be noted that the “postmodern” suspicion of reason reflects something real even if it’s exaggerated.
Agreed, Kim. “Reason” can so easily become a symbol we shape and use for our own often less than rational ends. Outside pure science and mathematics (and not even there sometimes), it’s not easy for any of us to clearly recognise our emotional and intellectual biases. Doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as reason, of course, just that it’s damnably difficult to actually employ it well.
I read this years ago and just discovered all 700+ pages of it published online – Korzybski’s Science and Sanity.
Has anyone here read it and what do they make of it? From memory, it deals with a few of the general points raised, including your last comment Ingolf.
Thinking about neo-liberalism as the application of policy sourced in ideas coming from libertarians I think the history goes as follows:
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In the middle of the 20th century when even many conservatives thought that centralized planning available and democracy was perhaps a failed experiment Hayek publishes The Road To Serfdom. Over the next 30 years the laissez-fair economists write various minority reports including Milton Friedman who turns against Keynsian economics and predicts that it will lead to stagflation – it does.
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Meantime Friedman’s students have attempted to institute neoliberal policies in Chile. This contains the first contradiction. After all Chile is run by a military dictator who stole power via coup. Hardly democratic or free. And despite the neoliberal versions of history it can hardly be said that there’s irrevicable evidence that the Chicago Boys’ policies worked wonders. Chile had to nationalize its financial system in the 1980s after all.
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However the neoliberal cannon keeps firing. In the 1980s governments in the Anglosphere start to deregulate their economies, lower protection, privatize SOEs and all the rest. This leads to certain improvements but it also sees the return of extreme poverty amongst the lowest strata of developing nations.
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At the same time liberalism is selectively applied. Drugs remain illegal. Reagan bails out Chrysler and courts the Religious Right. Margaret Thatcher introduces section 28 to the Local Government Act rolling back gay rights. Previously both of these liberal conservatives had acted on behalf of, not so much gay rights, but the rights of homosexuals as citizens.
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This stems from political realities obviously. The American Right is a coalition of the religiously traditional, the patriotic-nationalists and economic liberals. These groups aren’t entirely cosy with one another but they are united in their opposition to post FDR social-liberalism. The thing is both Thatcher and Reagan have to break the Religious Right off some – traditional values and all that. Likewise patriotic fervour comes in very handy to political leaders. Hence the Falklands and Reagan’s anti-Soviet activism.
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In Australia the adoption of neoliberal ideas by a Labor govt leads to a fraying of the Left only recently healed (sorta) by a decade of Howard.
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Around the world neoliberal rejection of SOEs, government regulation, tariffs and the rest has arguably resulted, not in universal development and an open world economy, but in the re-establishment of a British Empire style mercantilism with new York as its new epicentre.
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Would Hayek be pleased with the way the application of ideas he asserted turned out? In some ways certainly. However given that many of those advocating neoliberalism are also advocating a revival of irrational and reactionary conservatism I’m not sure he’d be entirely thrilled.
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This would be true for every single political thinker whose notions have been taken up by the machine. At the end of the day the machine needs votes. That’s what it seeks and it will do things that contradict or even corrupt its principles to get them. Even in a non-democracy there is still a ‘get the numbers’ factor in political life. This ensures that no one set of ideas will ever be fully realized. I think it also means that there are limits to social perfectability.
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We might live in the 21st century but we’re still paleolithic in most ways.
Godel, Heisenberg, Newton.
Since the eighties we have had more liberalism* for the higher-status (financial deregulation) and more “corporalism”^ for the lower-status (mutual obligation). There is a certain self-evident logic in this since the more intelligent/responsible members of the community would need less state regulation than the less intelligent/responsible.
Unfortunately higher-status elites have somewhat abused their new found freedom eg GFC, so that freedom will have to be rolled back.
*individual autonomy
^institutional authority