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Liberalism and

individualism:The invention of the Util

and the way west

Rethinking liberal theory 7

 by John MacBeath Watkins

Liberalism started as a way to explain why

government was needed in a time when

governments were facing a crisis in

legitimacy.

 Now, we have people arguing that

government is the problem, not the solution, a

motto which directly contradicts the founding

thinkers of liberal thought. This can only be

true if they are thinking of a different problem

than Thomas Hobbes was thinking of when he wrote Leviathan.

The reason for this change is a tendency, as liberalism has developed, to place

increasing emphasis on the rights of the individual, and less on the social contract.

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The term liberal has quite a few meanings, and the most important founding

thinkers of liberalism were dead by the time the word started being used to describe their 

system of thought. In the sense of tending to favor freedom and democracy, its use began in

France in 1801, and it started to be used in England by its critics during the excesses of the

French Revolution. Prior to that, it had been used in 16th and 17th century England as a

term of reproach, referring to a lack of restraint on speech and action, a sense that is

retained in the word "libertine."

In our earlier ruminations on liberalism, we discussed its roots in social contract

theory. As the name "social contract" implies, Thomas Hobbes was importing the values of 

the marketplace into the public sphere to deal with the crisis in legitimacy that struck the

governments of Northern Europe in the wake of the 30 Years War and the English Civil

War. Mankind had been ruled through most of history by force and faith: The strong

 backed by the clergy demonstrated by their strength their fitness to rule, and by the backing

of God’s earthly representatives the rightness of their rule. In a time when religious rifts

meant that some large portion of the populations of Northern European states would regard

any ruler as belonging to the wrong church, making them apostates who could not possibly

rule by the mandate of heaven. The result was constant warfare.

Hobbes and John Locke both tended to emphasize how individuals made a contract

with each other to form a society, because to live in a society is far better than the war of 

each against all. Hobbes, in fact, insisted that the need for public order was so great that the

Leviathan was needed to protect citizens from violent death, and this was the motivation

for the social contract. Locke, rather strangely, made this protection of the individual's life

a consequence of the states' role in defending property, because you own your life.

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The rights of the individual could only exist in the context of the social contract,

 because without the sovereign to protect them, there was no guarantee that the individual

could enjoy life itself, let alone the rights Locke insisted we were born with and could not

sell, or in his quaint turn of phrase, alienate.

In modern day America, it seems that the right and left have a conversation that

stays largely within the bounds of liberalism. In matters related to property, conservatives

emphasize the rights of the individual and progressives emphasize the social contract,

while in the sphere of criminal law conservatives emphasize the social contract and liberals

emphasize individual rights. Both stay within the bounds of liberalism. Socialism, in the

sense of the state (representing the People) owning the means of production, is a

discredited economic philosophy, and fascism has been a discredited political philosophy

for even longer. Indeed, Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil's Dictionary, made this distinction:

Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the

Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. [Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary,

1911]

Perhaps this is what the end of history, in Hegel's sense, looks like: Brothers

 battling over small differences in their interpretations of a doctrine they both accept, in

which mankind has a natural right to liberty and the state exists to serve the governed.

Terms like "fascist" and "socialist" are still thrown about, but not with their original

meaning, instead referring to the poles of this smaller universe of acceptable debate.

The individual looms larger in this debate than it did for Hobbes and Locke, and the

values of the marketplace have become such a powerful force in our model of how the

world works that there are people -- libertarians -- who regard government's only legitimate

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role as being to protect property rights. The U.S. Constitution states that congress shall

 provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States, but there's a

virulent strain of thought that says that while defense is a legitimate role for government,

the welfare of its citizens is not.

How did we get from a philosophy based on the need for people to come together to

one that insists, in some cases literally, on the sovereignty of the individual? Certainly the

term "sovereign citizen" would have seemed incoherent to Hobbes; the sovereign in his

view was needed by the people to govern the society they had formed, so an individual

could only be a sovereign by ruling other people. But then, he was the tutor for a future

sovereign, Charles II.

It can be difficult to put ourselves in the minds of people who did not work with the

same concepts we do. It used to be that economics, then called "political economy," was

done not based on notions of how individuals would act, but based on the way classes of 

 people would act. Markets were understood by reference to how landowners as a class

would act and how workers as a class would act, regardless of whether the economist was a

liberal or a communist. This changed with the notion of marginal utility, a revolutionary

concept in economics that was developed most famously by Austrians.

But before we could have a marginal revolution, we had to have a concept of utility

as it related to a system of values. That was developed by the utilitarians, notably Jeremy

Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Just as Adam Smith became interested in markets because,

as a moral philosopher, he was interested in values, the utilitarians started with a system of 

moral values.

Utilitarianism maintains that to act ethically, we should consider the consequences

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of our actions, and the moral worth of an act can be calculated by how much happiness and

how little pain results from it. It is a logical and reductionist theory that would allow

someone with no moral sense -- a term which as used here means an emotional feeling

about what is right -- to calculate what action is morally acceptable. Psychologists relying

on ethics tests based on utilitarian ethics have found that psychopaths do better on them

than normal people. Presumably this is because psychopaths have a lack the empathy that

makes normal ethical responses inaccessible to them, so to pass as normal they learn to

make the logical calculation utilitarianism calls for.

But of course, it is the very calculating nature of utilitarianism that makes it

attractive to economists. It means that you can do math related to what people value. The

utility of a thing can be measured in dollars and cents, and because you can infer the value

from the financial figures, you can apply mathematics to a science of human values.

The Austrians made this concept more powerful by noting that there is such a thing

as diminishing marginal utility. If I am hungry, enough food to satisfy my hunger has a

certain value, and more food has a lesser value because I know it's going right to parts of 

my anatomy I wish were smaller, and at the extreme, if I eat too much I'll puke. You can

actually chart the extent of my value for food on a supply and demand curve to arrive at the

 proper price. Suddenly, a philosophy that was interesting to philosophers became essential

to bankers and businessmen. And since there was no unit of value called the Util, they

applied the value of money to the problem of turning this into mathematical equations.

And it didn't need to regard how classes interacted. You could make calculations

about how people would decide to spend their money while regarding them as an

aggregation of individuals rather than as members of a class.

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While this was happening in the intellectual world of liberalism, geographic

mobility was rapidly increases for people in general and Americans in particular. In all of 

 pre-modern Europe, as in most of the world, the vast majority of people lived and died in a

community, often going no more than 50 miles from the center of that world in their 

lifetime. The opening of the American West meant that people left their communities in

order to -- well, Firesign Theatre puts it better than I can:

WAGON BOSS: My fellow settlers! We stand here at the Edge O' Civilization, on the

 banks of the Mississippi River, lookin' West, at Our Destiny!

PIONEER: You can say that again!

WAGON BOSS: What may appear to the fainthearted as a limitless expanse of 

Godforsaken wilderness...

THIRD PIONEER: Sure is!

WAGON BOSS: ...is, in reality, a Golden Opportunity for humble, God-fearin' people like

ourselves, an' our families, an' our children, an' the generations a-comin', to carve a new

life - outta the American Indian!

Of course, they could only do this with the support of the U.S. Cavalry (and the

Buffalo soldiers) but in leaving their communities behind, they felt as if they were doing

this as individuals rather than relying on the community they had grown up in. The

conquest of a continent (some would say theft, but the words mean much the same) was an

enterprise that only a powerful community could accomplish, but the satisfaction was quite

often individual, and people therefore tended to assign credit to themselves.

The feeling of individualism in this country therefore tends to relate to our history,

 but the philosophy of individualism owes much to the way the values of the market have

 become more dominant in our society as time has gone on. As a philosophical stance,

libertarian and Objectivist ideas of how the world should work are attempts to find a

rational basis for society, which sounds fine to us children of the Enlightenment, until you

consider that the French Revolution produced the Terror, and the Marxist revolutions that

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also attempted to find a rational basis for society produced worse nightmares of reason.

Bierce had excellent reasons for his cynical observations of the difference between

conservatives and liberals.

The irony of our present situation is that two sorts of extremists have made

common cause, as conservatives who want to see the domination of traditional beliefs,

social institutions and prejudices have joined with libertarians whose dream is a rational,

individualist, disenchanted world that a psychopath might understand better than Edmund

Burke. Burke articulated the philosophy of conservatism and a spirited defense of prejudice

at a time when intellectuals like Hegel were claiming that the ideas of liberalism were

triumphant.

There is additional irony in the fact that Hobbes first applied the values of the

marketplace to restore legitimacy to government, and now, some people prefer to think that

only the market is legitimate. The ultimate expression of this is libertarian anarchism, in

which the claim is that the state is a forced monopoly, so the social contract is invalid.

Rodrick Long makes the argument here. It strikes me that he gives short shrift to Hobbe's

claim that a social contract was needed to protect the individual. Hobbes wrote at the end

of the 30 Years War, and certainly had some idea what the breakdown of society looked

like.

Libertarian anarchists are as utopian as Marxists. But whereas Marxists proposed

abolishing two of society's main ways of organizing itself, property and religion, leaving

only the state as an organizing principle, libertarian anarchists would remove the state,

leaving the market as the only organizing principle. It is as much based on reason to the

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exclusion of experience as Marxism, and if attempted, would probably produce its own

evils.