Rethinking Liberalism

76
Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 1 Rethinking Liberalism By John MacBeath Watkins Thomas Hobbes, blasphemer and patriot Liberal democracies like to think they are the envy people living under all other forms of government, for their wealth and their freedom, and yet they spend little time studying or thinking about the nature of liberalism. That is what I intend to do here. While democracy is a form of government that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, and the ideas behind it go back as far, I'm going to be dealing with the modern, Northern European idea of liberalism, since that's what the sort the civilization I grew up in is based upon.

description

Liberal political theory underpins the political, social, and economic order of some of the world's most successful countries, yet it tends to be studied superficially, and its assumptions about human nature have not been fundamentally revised since the 1600s. This is an attempt to understand its history and update its assumptions.

Transcript of Rethinking Liberalism

Page 1: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 1

Rethinking LiberalismBy John MacBeath Watkins

Thomas Hobbes, blasphemer and patriot

Liberal democracies like to think they are the envy people living under all other forms of

government, for their wealth and their freedom, and yet they spend little time studying or

thinking about the nature of liberalism. That is what I intend to do here.

While democracy is a form of government that goes back at least to the ancient

Greeks, and the ideas behind it go back as far, I'm going to be dealing with the modern,

Northern European idea of liberalism, since that's what the sort the civilization I grew up

in is based upon.

Thomas Hobbes was the first, and to my

way of thinking, the deepest, of the

liberal theorists, although he might not

have agreed that he was one, and in any

case the "liberal" tag is a 19th-century

invention. Hobbes wrote Leviathan, the

book that lays out the system of values

and the moral structure that underlies

modern liberal democracies.

Hobbes was a brilliant man, a scientist as well as a political theorist, and

Page 2: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 2

fortunately for him, the tutor of the child who would become Charles II, king of England.

I say fortunately, because during the reign of Charles II, parliament put some blasphemy

laws on the books that bear some resemblance to those which are currently controversial

in Pakistan, and Hobbes was one of the intended targets.

Hobbes was a dedicated materialist. The views that got him in trouble were

related to this. Hobbes claimed to believe in God, but believed that since only the

material universe existed, God must be a material being, just one with great powers, sort

of like Superman. It's well to keep this in mind when people tell us that we are in a

"Christian nation." Hobbes sought a legitimacy for government not founded in religion,

but not because his sort of religion wasn't what most Christians would regard as

Christianity. He also saw that a new source of legitimacy for the state was needed,

because kings and priests had been working very hard at destroying their own legitimacy.

He wrote Leviathan during the English Civil War, which he sat out in France

tutoring the heir to the throne while Charles I was losing his head, literally, because of the

Civil War (beheaded after a trial for treason in 1649.) In 1648, the Thirty Years War

ended, while the English Civil War started in 1642 and didn't really end until 1651, the

year Leviathan was published.

Both of these wars were about religion, and since the 30 Years War ended with

Germany's population about a third smaller than when it started, you can imagine the sort

of world Hobbes was writing about. In Chapter X of Leviathan, he lays out man's "state

of nature," which was really the sort of breakdown of society that Hobbes saw happening

throughout Europe:

Page 3: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 3

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

That was the world religious conflicts had given us, and in fact, much of the

conflict had been about which rulers could claim the divine right to rule. After all, if you

were an apostate, how could you have God's blessing?

Karl Marx looked at the misery ministry brought to man, and thought the solution

was to eliminate religion, but did not propose a working system of values to replace it.

Hobbes, instead of proposing the elimination of religion, simply showed what source of

government legitimacy might replace it, perhaps understanding that if the sovereign was

legitimate regardless of religion, that would mean religious conflict could be confined to

the civil sphere and not involve armies marching against each other. He saw that

somehow, we had to find a way for a government to legitimately govern a society as

divided by religion as England or Germany, a lesson nations split between Shia and

Sunni might benefit from.

But how could government be legitimate if the sovereign wasn't God's chosen?

Hobbes, being a materialist, decided that government must exist because it was

man's nature to have government. Man in the state of nature, he reasoned, must be like

man when government has broken down. And what happened in that circumstance? See

Page 4: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 4

the above quotation.

But a society must be based on the need for a society, and the devastation of the 

Thirty Year's War showed why it was needed. Without someone to adjudicate disputes

and enforce laws, chaos reigned instead. To be protected from violent death, therefore,

we needed a government. We valued government for what it could do for us, just as we

value people for what they can do for us. From Chapter X of Leviathan:

The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another. An able conductor of Souldiers, is of great Price in time of War present, or imminent; but in Peace not so. A learned and uncorrupt Judge, is much Worth in time of Peace; but not so much in War. And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price. For let a man (as most men do,) rate themselves as the highest Value they can; yet their true Value is no more than it is esteemed by others.

This sounds terribly philistine, but the remarkable thing here is that Hobbes was

describing a subjective system of value, "dependent on the need and judgment of

another," not on God as interpreted by His priests, not to be determined after your death,

but here and now and judged by your fellow man.

I find it ironic that certain modern libertarians think the system of value that

Hobbes described means that we don't need government. For Hobbes, it was why we

need government: The sovereign does us a service by ruling, because without the

sovereign, "...there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and

consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that

may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and

removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no

Page 5: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 5

account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall

feare, and danger of violent death..."

I can only think that libertarian anarchists have not read Hobbes, and do not

understand the history that caused him to write his book. Hobbes wanted the younger

Charles to return to rule England, not just for the sake of his student, but for the sake of

his country. Yet the very system of religious thought that helped justify the rule of

Charles II was a threat to his tutor.  In 1666, parliament passed a law against atheism and

profaneness, and, as Wikipedia notes:

That same year, on 17 October 1666, it was ordered that the committee to which the bill was referred "should be empowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness... in particular... the book of Mr. Hobbes called the Leviathan.”

Hobbes, in fear of his life, destroyed some incriminating papers. But he was also

protected by Charles II, by then sitting on the throne of England again. Eventually he

wrote some essays regarding the heresy laws, published in Amsterdam as appendices  the

Leviathan because he could not get a censors license to publish in England, and never

again was able to get such a license for any writing on the conduct of human affairs.

But he had managed to put his student on the throne, and he had devised a form of

legitimacy for British sovereigns that did not depend on the church. The trouble was, if it

is right for sovereigns to rule based on what they does for us, don’t we get to fire them if

they fail? Hobbes said no, but the logic of his system of thought said yes. In fact, the

logic of his system was quite compatible with the execution of Charles I, which he

Page 6: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 6

disapproved of. But the example of the 30 Years War was a strong argument for order at

all costs, which is what he chose to advocate.

I find his notion that society is formed in order that we may be free of violent

death a little unsatisfying. Wolves are really good at killing, and they manage to have a

society where they don't kill each other. Perhaps Hobbes would say that's the point, a

pack without a leader will have its participants struggling to establish social position, sort

of like high school red in tooth and claw.

And he would have a point. But it seems to me that human societies are different

from animal societies. They involve cooperation between humans who are not related to

one another by blood, which in the animal world would be very unusual. There must be

something more to human cooperation, and John Locke, another Englishman who wrote

in France because politics made it unhealthy for him to live in England, suggested the

answer we've been using as long as America has been a nation, which I also find

unsatisfying.

The outlaw John Locke

By the time the British government set out to

arrest John Locke, he'd set out for France,

fleeing his native country under suspicion of

conspiring to kill the British king, Charles II.

Yes, that's the same Charles II whose

Page 7: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 7

reign Thomas Hobbes went to so much trouble to legitimize. Hobbes wanted him to take

his father's throne, and Locke wanted him to leave it feet first. He faced arrest as one of

the conspirators involved in the Rye House Plot.

This was a plot to trap the king's carriage in a narrow street overlooked by Rye

House, a sturdy stone structure, and rain fire down on it with muskets until all within

died. Word got out, the king changed his route, and many of the conspirators were

rounded up and several executed.

Locke was the sort of fellow the Department of Homeland Security now calls a

terrorist.

Locke is remembered fondly as one of the giants of liberal theory, the man who

made freedom all about property. Students forced to study his Second Treatise on

Government (or even, more rarely, to actually read it) are not typically informed that the

pamphlet was so inflammatory that Locke never allowed it to be published under his own

name during his lifetime. Charles II might not be so sure Locke was trying to kill him that

he'd send agents to France to kill Locke for the Rye House Plot, but a pamphlet that said

the subjects had a right to remove their sovereign if he did not serve them well might

have sealed his fate.

To understand why property was so important in Locke's thinking, you must keep

in mind that at the time he was writing, the voting franchise in England was given only to

people who owned real property and paid tax on it.

During the English Civil War, the Levelers had argued for equality before the

law, for popular sovereignty (the idea that legitimacy of the state rests on the consent of

Page 8: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 8

the governed) and extending the franchise. They also advocated religious tolerance, a

principle that became dear to Thomas Hobbes when he was accused of blasphemy. One

way of saying that every man should have the vote (women's suffrage was far in the

future) was to claim that everyone owned property in the form of their own person.

This expresses a conflict inherent in the system of value Thomas Hobbes

proposed. Remember, he said:

The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power... 

…Which would seem to say that our values must be expressed in the marketplace, with

money. Thus, your work must not only be desired, there must be effective demand, that

is, demand backed by money. A starving pauper, then, would not be able to express what

bread meant to him, and would not have his needs met. But the sentence continues on,

...and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another.

Must need and judgment only be expressed through property? The New Model

Army, raised by parliament to oppose the royalist forces, had officers who were often

difficult to tell from the enlisted men, because they did not possess wealth and rich

clothing. The technology of the time relied heavily on foot soldiers with muskets and

teams of men working artillery pieces. The age was past in which a knight wearing armor

that cost more than most people would see in a lifetime was nearly invincible when faced

with foot soldiers (unless they carried bows and kept their distance.)

Page 9: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 9

The New Model Army was a force that relied on the infantryman for its victories,

and the people who carry the arms that are decisive in putting the government in power

are not to be denied a voice in what that government does, even if they lack property. If

the "need and judgment" of moneyed men is difficult to ignore, how much more difficult

is it to ignore the "need and judgment" of armed men?

Yet, in the end, Charles II was crowned. The property requirement for voting, far

from being eliminated, was retained and eventually strengthened. In 1712, the amount of

property that was required to vote was changed (it had been set at 40 shillings in 1430,

when that was a lot of money) to restrict the franchise more than it had been. In 1832,

when the franchise was given to men owning property worth at least £10, vastly

increasing the number of voters, only one man in five qualified to vote.

Locke's radical idea was that we are all born owning ourselves, therefore we all

should have the rights of citizens. Further, he asserted that these rights are inalienable,

meaning some rich fellow couldn't buy them off you, because you could not sell yourself.

That last bit caused a lot of trouble. Locke was aware of slavery, and in fact was

complicit in it. He was a stockholder in the Royal African Company, which was in the

business of purchasing slaves in Africa and selling them in the new world. He also helped

draft the constitution of the Carolinas, which established a feudal aristocracy and made a

slave owner the absolute master of his slaves. He did this while serving his great

benefactor, Lord Shaftsbury, a Whig who should have known better. Locke wrote the

Two Treatises of Government at Shaftsbury's prompting, and in the second, laid out his

theory that we are all born owning ourselves and cannot be owned by another.

Page 10: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 10

When the Civil War came, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the

Union, in its declaration of the causes of secession clearly stating that it had to leave the

union because the North was threatening to take away its citizens' property, the slaves,

and pointing out that the constitution recognized the legal status of slavery. Locke, by the

way, wrote a justification of slavery in the Second Treatise of Government, which if you

read it you'll find did not apply to the kind of slavery in which he was complicit.

But Locke's subversive notion that we all have some basic rights because we are

born owning ourselves resonated precisely because so many didn't have those rights. And

the progress toward greater liberty came because he understood that property was central

to our understanding of rights, yet strangely, while Locke wrote extensively about what

things and people might be regarded as property, he never defined what property is.

So let me have a stab at it.

Property is not objects, which exist whether they are owned or not. It is the rights,

privileges and obligations society assigns people in relation to objects, and a system for

expressing our values regarding objects. One might even say, it is the meaning of objects.

We are, after all creatures who create meaning -- it is the essence of human society.

Locke changed our understanding of human rights by addressing how humans fit into this

system of rights, privileges and obligations.

But we should not think this is the only system of value and define all human

action in the Procrustean bed of property. It is the essence of our political system that we

have more than one way of expressing our values. We can express them through property

interactions, directing our worldly goods toward some end, or we can express them

Page 11: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 11

outside the realm of property.

We express who we value as a political leader by voting, and consider it

corruption when votes are bought. Voting, in fact, is meant to be a counterbalance to

property rights, a way for the political sphere to correct the imbalances that can occur in

property relations. After all, we've accepted Locke's notion that we own ourselves and

cannot lose the rights we have as property to ourselves, but where is the effective demand

if we have no money? After all, we've seen famine areas exporting food in Ireland during

the potato famine and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. One man, one vote is a way of

giving effective demand to people who have no power to express their values in the

marketplace.

In the English Civil War, the Cavaliers supported the rights of the propertied

nobility. The Roundheads, of which the Levelers were a sub-category, supported the

rights of commoners. Our civil war was not so different, and we are still fighting those

wars, of the propertied and their supporters against the commoners.

A compact to protect property, or a conspiracy to create meaning?

Thanks to John Locke and Karl Marx, we've spent

hundred s of years arguing about how we can achieve

freedom and justice through perfecting our relationship

with property.

Locke was actually following Hobbs, who

realized that if kings ruled by divine right, Europe's

religious divisions would tear it apart: People would

Page 12: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 12

not accept the divine right of a king not of their faith. He looked to the value system

associated with property to shift the legitimacy of the state away from religious authority.

When he said, "The ‘value,’ or ‘worth,’ of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that

is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power; and therefore is not

absolute, but a thing dependent on the need and judgment of another," he was not just

applying this system of value to tradesmen, where it had been applied as long as money

or barter had existed. He was saying that sovereigns were to be valued because we

needed their services to prevent people from killing each other. It is significant that he

said this after the Thirty Years War, at the end of which Germany had about two-thirds

the population it had when the war started, and the German states were still divided into

Catholic and Protestant sects.

It's easy to see why Locke continued Hobbes' concern with property. You had to

have property to be a full citizen in Locke's England, so to argue for wider voting rights,

he had to argue that we all possess property in our persons. Even long after his death, it

was still quite normal for nations to restrict the voting franchise to those with sufficient

property. Hobbes used the value system of property to give us a secular way of

legitimizing government. Locke adopted the system of rights associated with property to

argue that we all have rights, and no one can buy them off you; that is, your property

right to yourself is inalienable.

Locke was radical enough to put his freedom and possibly his life in peril had he

stayed in England, but his philosophy was based on the ideas already existing in his

homeland's political culture. Even marriage and family could be viewed through the lens

Page 13: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 13

of property, with women as chattel and children as part of their parents' property until

they came of age. Thus, Abraham Lincoln's father could rent him out for labor, the

money going to his father as if Abraham Lincoln were a slave, leading to his statement, "I

have been a slave." It was the simple truth, and likely had a strong effect on how Lincoln

viewed slavery.

Locke was eager to expand our understanding of what qualified as property, but

he never really defined property. If you've ever tried to take a chew toy from a dog,

you've seen the instinct to possession that makes the institution of property necessary.

But that emotional need is not itself property, any more than love is marriage.

Property is the institution that regulates our emotional attachment to objects, and

defines the rights, privileges and obligations people have to things they possess or use.

And when I say defines, I'm using the term more literally than you might think.

Locke maintained that society was formed to protect property, but a moment's

reflection will reveal that such a system of rights can only exist once symbolic thought

exists. Language gives us the categories we use to think in the symbolic manner that

allows us to have such an abstract thing as a system of rights. And language, as Swiss

linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (whose picture adorns this chapter) pointed out in The

Course in General Linguistics about a century ago, is a social enterprise.

The categories of thought that I referred to earlier are what we wish to

communicate. They are, in Saussure's terms, the signified. We use words to signify them,

and the sounds we choose to represent the signified are arbitrary. Call it water if you are

English, call it eau if you are French, as long as your society agrees that the sound you

Page 14: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 14

use signs the meaning you intend, it doesn't matter what sound your society has chosen.

The fact that the signs are arbitrary, and must be agreed upon within a society, is

why we have different languages for different groups of people. In fact, changing the

signs so that only the "in" group understands them, as with slang, is a way of defining a

group. Should a language lose a word, if for example we were to lose the world "vast,"

the meaning that word signifies collapses into other, existing words and the meanings

they covey (so "vast" must be conveyed with terms such as "big" and "huge"), and our

thought would become a little more vague. Should a new meaning come into the world, it

must either have a new sign or adopt a sign already in use, as when computer

programmers adopted the word "cookie" for a type of code given to a visitor to a web

site, while bakers continued to use the word for something yummy, handy, and fattening.

The dog's chew toy is a concrete object (well, rubber), its willingness to defend its

toy shows the desire for possession, and the owner's desire to stop the damned thing from

squeaking so he can get a little rest, for God's sake, gives you the conflict that needs to be

regulated. In the animal world, a conflict over possession of a carcass, for example, can

produce a conflict red in tooth and claw. When the pack of hyenas takes the lion's game,

this has occurred because of the lack of such an institution. If the lion could communicate

to a higher authority that it had applied its labor to nature (the zebra, late of the Serengeti)

to make the zebra its property, it could have the sheriff come and evict the hyenas from

the kill.

Then, the zebra's family could sue.

In Locke's view, that's what the state was there for; to protect our property,

Page 15: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 15

including our lives.

But remember, prior to Hobbes, the state did not rely on such a secular conception

of its purpose. Faith and force ruled mankind from time immemorial. And faith, and the

ecclesiastical authority derived from it, needed symbolic thought as much or more than

property did. So did kinship, another source of legitimacy for hereditary kings.

These competing systems of rights, privileges and obligations were part of the

network of meaning that enabled us to have the concepts of property and the system of

authority needed to enforce it. I cannot tell you which of these came first, or even

whether that matters, but all are part of the structure of symbolic thought that Saussure

described in the posthumously published Course in General Linguistics.

Language had to come first, and it defined the group that spoke each version of it.

Language allows cultures to contain more knowledge than any one mind can contain.

Language, and the world of symbolic thought it makes possible, is the most distinct

attribute of human society. Language makes it possible to cooperate with members of our

species not closely related to us by blood, which is very different from the world of other

mammals.

So perhaps human society is not a compact to protect property, but a conspiracy

to create meaning, a thing of whispers, sighs, and cries instead of land titles, inventories

and bank accounts.

John Milton and the many shapes of truth

Our last couple chapters have been about property, and my opinion that Locke was wrong

to think that was the defining characteristic of human society. The basic notion of

Page 16: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 16

liberalism is to have a society that is suited

to human nature instead of imposed upon it,

so the issue is extremely important.

If the creation of meaning is, as I

maintain, the defining characteristic of

human society, then discourse must be

central as well. The English Civil War gave

us the greatest of the liberal thinkers in this,

as well

John Milton is today mainly remembered as a poet, but he was also a political

actor in the English Civil War, writing many tracts in support of the Puritan and

parliamentary cause, eventually serving as the Secretary of Foreign Tongues for the

Council of State. Under this remarkable title, he handled most of the council's

correspondence in, you guessed it, foreign tongues, but also wrote pamphlets in defense

of popular government and the regicide of Charles I. His clear and powerful Latin prose

made him a reputation in Europe.

He also wrote one of the founding documents of liberalism, Areopagitica, the

definitive (to my way of thinking) defense of free speech.

In 1644, when he wrote the Areopagitica, the war was going badly for the

parliamentary forces, and their ultimate victory would only be achieved after their army

was completely reorganized in 1645. In such times, rulers typically worry about what

gets said and written, not just in terms of military secrets, but in terms of propaganda and

Page 17: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 17

morale. Parliament had the power to censor, and Milton urged them not to use it.

He had personal reasons for this. In 1643 Milton married, at the age of 35, 16-

year-old Mary Powell. After only a month of living with a difficult older man, she left

him and returned home. Milton wrote a series of pamphlets saying that divorce should be

legal, which got him in a bit of trouble, which seems to have prompted him to write in

defense of free speech. Not, mind you, that he only wanted to be allowed to continue

agitating for a policy that at the time he thought he wanted (Mary returned to him in 1645

and they had three children together, she dying in childbirth with the third.) Milton seems

to have firmly believed that there should be no prior censorship for people, no matter

what their views, with one exception.

We all have our limits, right? The "no censorship" rule sounds fine until some

child pornographer comes along and tries to use this freedom. For Milton, there were

limits as well. Anyone should be able to voice their opinions, he believed, except

Catholics.

Remember, there was a war on, and it was very much about religion. The Catholic

Church was so opposed to the Bible being translated into English that at one point the

Bishop of London bought up as many copies as he could of William Tyndale's English

translation of the Bible and burned them (Tyndale used the money to print a new edition

with some correction he had wanted to make.) They hunted William Tyndale until he

could be strangled, and had his remains burned so that he could not be resurrected on

Judgment Day. A more forgiving man than Milton could take a dim view of that.

Page 18: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 18

Tyndale's translation of the Bible was the basis for what is now called the King

James Bible, because the scholars who followed recognized his genius. And Milton saw

the argument that censorship was a Popish import as one that would resonate with

parliament.

As it happens, in my misspent youth I studied the fashionable theorists of that

time, among them Jürgen Habermas, one of the leading theorists on the subject of

discourse. It struck me at the time that Harbermas (whose work has been criticized by

Marxists for being bourgeois) had a theory that was in many ways like Milton's, but not

as well written and far less radical. Habermas, by the way, is at this writing still alive, and

one of the most influential philosophers around, bridging the gap between Anglo-

American and Continental philosophy, and I will say that his philosophy is far more

complete than Milton's. It should be, he packs a lot into every sentence and The Theory of

Communicative Action runs to two volumes that seem to weigh more with every word

one reads. And that's just one of his books.

Habermas claims that if you could achieve undominated discourse, the result of

such a dialogue would always produce the same answer, which would be the truth. This

always struck me as a dubious proposition. What if no one present thinks of the right

answer? What, we may ask, if everyone present is stupid, or at least not clever in the right

way? I have a Manx named Bunny who is brilliant at being a cat, but faced with a logical

argument her only response is to bring my attention the feather-on-a-string toy. In short,

she is helpless before my logic. I tell her that the feather-on-a-string toy argument is so

far beside the point that she's not even wrong, but we end up playing her game in the end.

Page 19: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 19

I will admit that Habermas is worth any ten other theorists of the Critical School,

but his logic and Bunny's steely resolve about the toy would not produce the same result

as a conversation between him and Jacques Derrida. No doubt, the result would be better.

Milton had greater faith than Habermas in the truth:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?... ......For who knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licencings to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power: give her but room, & do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught & bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab, untill she be adjur'd into her own likenes. Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes then one. What else is all that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on this side, or on the other, without being unlike her self.

Unlike Habermas, Milton was willing to accept the notion that truth "may have

more shapes than one." England and Europe as a whole were rent by religious strife.  If

each sect insisted that only its truth was acceptable, the strife would continue. The notion

that ones’ countrymen could profess a different faith and not be persecuted as apostates

was a path to peace, just as Hobbes' effort to find a secular path to the legitimacy of

government was.

The method Milton proposed, allowing publication without prior censorship, is

the basic method adopted by liberal democracies everywhere. Sure, you can be sued,

Page 20: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 20

fined, even jailed for saying some things, but there is a very high bar the state must

achieve to justify censorship prior to publication.

The value system involved was about truth, not property. Parliament was planning

to reinstate licensing laws for publishers, and you were not "the press" unless you owned

one, so property rights were involved, but for Milton the search for truth was not about

property at all. He even urged parliament to recognize that bad ideas must be published.

In the section on the value of wrong ideas, he uses the Biblical story of Adam and Eve's

fall in a way I find reminiscent of Prometheus.

Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv'd and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern'd, that those confused seeds which were impos'd on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt. It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill?

Wisdom, then, is having the knowledge of good and evil that Adam and Eve

gained from the apple. What had been, in the Catholic Church, evidence of man's sinful

nature, became in the Areopagitica the source of essential knowledge. The church had an

entire economy of sin, of which indulgences were one small part. But in the mind of this

liberal thinker, the lesson to be learned was that God wanted Adam, Eve, and all mankind

to make choices, not to be denied them.

We have several intertwined sources of authority and value in our culture. The

law is a system of value about who is responsible for what, one might even say, it is

Page 21: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 21

about who is to blame. Property is about the rights and obligations between people and

the things they possess and use, one might say the meaning of things. Speech, discourse,

scholarship, are all about truth, one of the most difficult and important concepts in any

culture.

I like to think that truth is a word we use to describe that which we believe

without question. We are not free to choose what we believe, because belief is an

emotion akin to love (no wonder truth and beauty are so often seen together.) I may wish

to believe my lover is faithful, but if the truth whispers through each door I close on it,

seeps under the window sash when I try to close it out, I must in the end believe what I

do not wish or choose to. Milton maintained that we should never close truth out.

Milton, by the way, lost his vision as he got older, probably from glaucoma. He

had to dictate his later works to assistants, as portrayed in the 1826 picture above. He did

not attend any religious services near the end of his life, having become alienated from

the Anglican Church and objecting to the intolerance of the Dissenters (churchmen who

did not accept the Book of Common Prayer.)  He was exactly the sort of person he said

should be tolerated.

Adam Smith, moral philosopher of the marketplace

In 1776, two important documents in the evolution of

liberalism were published: The Declaration of

Independence and The Wealth of Nations.

The Declaration of Independence is a political

Page 22: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 22

document, based on a legal system of values. It is almost entirely about who is to blame

(hint: his first name was George, and he lived in a very large dwelling in England.) A

great deal of it has to do with the king's efforts to keep the colonies from governing

themselves. The quartering of soldiers, outlawed in our constitution, was one of the

things they objected to, because they were being required to give a place to live to the

very troops that were burning their towns (for example, Falmouth, Maine, located on the

site of modern-day Portland, burned on Oct. 18, 1775.)

The Declaration objects to the King preventing the colonies from naturalizing

new citizens, or encouraging their migration, because apparently the colonists did not

regard themselves as entirely English or want only English subjects to immigrate. In

short, they were saying that they were not exactly part of the English tribe, and should be

allowed to absorb people of other ethnicities. That's a fundamental difference over their

view of who they were, and not one the king was likely to welcome.

Adam Smith, on the other hand, was not so concerned with law, which may at

first glance seem strange, because he was by profession a moral philosopher. He was at

one time the Head of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, and his major work there

was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In short, he was a man interested in values.

Through the good offices of David Hume, a fellow philosopher of the Scottish

Enlightenment, he got a very well-paid position as tutor to Henry Scott, the Duke of

Buccleuch, which makes me very happy to be writing this rather than trying to pronounce

Buccleuch. This enabled him to travel the continent and meet such great minds as

Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin,  and François Quesnay, a prominent physiocrat.

Page 23: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 23

It always struck me as odd that the first widely recognized school of economics

should be the physiocrats, who considered only the agricultural sector productive of

wealth. This is a view they share with Confucious, strangely enough. The economic

philosophy they rebelled against, mercantilism, bears in many ways more resemblance to

modern economics. The physiocrats divided the world into the proprietary class, the

landowners, the productive class, those who worked the land, and the sterile class, the

merchants and artisans. They were influenced by Vincent de Gournay, French intendent

of Commerce in the 1750s, who's motto was Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va

de lui même! (let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself.) In Thomas Jefferson's

mistrust of cities and idealization of the independent yeoman we see the influence of the

physiocrats, in the Federalist advocacy for the role of the government in developing the

nation we see the influence of the mercantilists.

Mercantilism focused on the balance of trade, on the wealth of kings, and the

accumulation of gold. The current economic policies of China might be said to have

evolved from the physiocrat phase, in which intellectuals were sent to work with the

peasants because this would teach them what was truly of value, to the mercantilist phase,

in which the goal is to get more wealth from the world than you give up.

But in any case, it set Smith's mind to work on the issue of how values work to

produce wealth. Unlike the physiocrats, he did think merchants and craftsmen could

produce wealth. Like the physiocrats, he thought people acted in their own self-interest,

producing the public good as a side effect:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We

Page 24: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 24

address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

But he also foresaw the concept of market manipulation:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

And why is this bad? Because it is an attempt to pervert the system for expressing

value judgments that we've been discussing since Part 1 of this series, the value system

Hobbes adapted from commerce to give secular legitimacy to sovereigns and stop the

religious wars that were tearing England and Europe apart. Coercion and deception are

morally objectionable because they are efforts to corrupt the system of values on which

commerce is based, therefore parasitic and a threat to the system's proper functioning.

Once again, that Hobbes quotation I keep going back to:

The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another.

The worth of things is expressed in the marketplace with prices, and an effort to

rig prices is an effort to pervert social values; a sort of lie. Smith laid out the moral

justification, in other words, for anti-trust law, because one of the the intersections of the

legal and market systems of value was at the points where markets were not allowed to

function. Smith was not a fan of the laissez-faire advocated by Gournay, because he

thought the participants in any trade would prefer to pervert the system of social values

rather than have to deliver value for money. Thus, regulation of some sort was needed,

Page 25: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 25

but even that could be perverted.

Today, pundits like Matthew Yglesias argue that a great deal of our legal structure

is designed to protect economic incumbents from competition, and Smith would have

agreed, as he wrote:

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.

So if people, for example, who do cosmetic things to fingernails and toenails say

that their profession should require licensing, and the license should require X years of

working in the field, we should ask if bad cuticle treatments are a major medical problem,

or if this is intended to raise the incomes of people who do nails. What's important about

this is that it shows Smith understood that a market is a made thing, a social artifact that

can be perverted by social means such as lies and coercion. Without the legal system of

values to place blame for such behavior and punish wrongdoers, how could markets

survive?

And if the markets are subjected to arbitrary political intervention, what begins as

a political problem, described again in the Declaration of Independence...

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

... becomes an economic problem, to the point where stout merchants dress up in disguise

Page 26: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 26

and throw tea into Boston Harbor. If the courts are not just, but corrupted by the power

and purse of the sovereign, can property be secure? If the sovereign's navy bombards

your town with incendiary shot, then sends in the marines to finish burning the town,

what does the deed to a property mean? The values of the marketplace can create wealth,

but only when there is a functioning legal system. This is an additional problem to the

notion that society is formed to protect property: Until such protection exists, even the

concept of property is incoherent, and only the passion to possess exists.

In fact, to bring the discussion to the present day, I think one of the problems with

modern Russia is that the advisers they brought in to help them form a market economy

had lived so long in a society with functioning laws and courts, they did not realize how

important these things are to the functioning of capitalism. As a result, Laissez faire et

laissez passer was the motto of the new Russian state (until the oligopolists became

entrenched and the state went back to being repressive.) Add to that the fact that they had

spent generations convincing themselves that capitalists were gangsters, and their

interpretation of capitalism soon became a society in which economic activity resembled

a criminal enterprise, the courts were corrupted by those in power to reward their friends,

and the wealth of the nation was lost as all the evils that old moral philolosopher Adam

Smith warned of were realized.

Capitalism at its very beginnings faced a dilemma, that it needed regulation to

function properly, but the regulation itself could produce mischief that would either

unfairly benefit or unfairly penalize commerce. And that's important, because the system

of values Smith described was a system for rewarding or penalizing behavior to produce

Page 27: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 27

actions that would benefit society as a whole rather than just the individual. A lack of

regulation, excessive regulation, or regulation designed to unfairly benefit certain people

was a corruption of the way we negotiate the meanings of our actions. Again, this goes

back to Ferdinand de Saussure and his theory that language gives us the structure and

categories of meanings that allow us to think in that abstract world that is so distinctively

human. Manipulations of meaning make our structure of thought less coherent, and could

even cause it to break down.

We speak of commercial speech in terms of advertising, but commerce itself is a

kind of speech designed to answer the question, how much does that item mean to you?

And if the question cannot be answered honestly because of lies or manipulation, our

actions cannot accurately reflect this meaning.

Hegel, the end of history, and the triumph of the liberal idea

History ended on a Tuesday

afternoon, October 14, 1806. We know this

because Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

told us so.

It was about 1 p.m. that Napoleon

made the decisive move that defeated the

forces of the Prussian monarchy at the

Battle of Jena. To Hegel, that meant that the

Page 28: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 28

ideas of the French Revolution had triumphed in the world, by which he apparently

meant the German-speaking part of northern Europe, and we would henceforth take as

our standard of good government liberty and equality, rather than the custom, faith and

force that had legitimized the Prussian monarchy.

Never mind that the French Revolution had devolved into the Terror and reformed

itself into a despotic and aggressive empire, Napoleon never the less represented the

triumph of liberte, egalite, fraternite and that meant that man's long evolution from stone-

age tribe through its various eras was at an end.

Sure, history as it is usually understood, people doing stuff and people writing

about it in an effort to shape how people remember stuff, would continue to occur, but

history as envisioned by Hegel, a dialectic that worked to a definite end, had reached that

end.

Hegel was a dialectical idealist. He is unfortunately largely remembered as the

precursor to Karl Marx's dialectical materialism, but he is actually part of the liberal

tradition rather than the Marxist one. Marx used his idea of thesis meeting antithesis, and

the conflict producing a synthesis that became the new thesis, but he used it to advocate

for a quite different system than Hegel admired.

However, unlike Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Hegel saw mankind not as the

product of a fixed nature, but as an evolution of history. As a result, instead of the sort of

thought experiment about what sort of government was natural to man, his philosophy

was teleological, one in which man aspired to greater perfection and worked through the

dialectic of history to the goal of the perfect form of government.

Page 29: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 29

Oh, sure, there were still monarchs, Oriental despots, dictators and aristocrats in

the world, but they were atavistic after the Battle of Jena. Edmund Burke fought a gallant

rear-guard action with Reflections on the Revolution in France, maintaining that custom

and prejudice were the organic wisdom of society, but he could not claim history was on

his side, and one of his intellectual heirs, William F. Buckley, in 1955 wrote of his own

publication, “….if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different

reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so,

or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Conservatives have defined themselves as backward-looking, even those who

follow the radical logic of Ayn Rand or libertarian thinkers.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Frances Fukuyama wrote his famous essay

analyzing the delegitimation of Communism as The End of History, published in the

summer, 1989 issue of The National Interest. He later expanded this into a book.

The 2011 Arab Spring saw history ending again in another part of the world, and

the efforts of the Green movement in Iran showed that the theocratic state was none too

solid. In China, a Communist Party that no longer practices Communism is clinging to

power and trying to justify one-party rule through solid economic growth and

nationalism, which is certainly more stable than Napoleon's attempt to justify his rule

through military victory and chauvinism, but may not be as enduring as a form of

government that has the relief valve of letting the people peacefully choose a new leader.

Even the worst dictators often seem to feel a need to hold rigged elections,

because if they cannot make even the most implausible claim to be chosen by the people,

Page 30: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 30

they have no other claim to legitimacy. Why is this? Why do other forms of legitimacy

fail, when for most of history, mankind has been ruled by force and faith?

I maintain that this represents a change in our dominant mode of thought. Much

of the wisdom of ancient civilizations was transmitted in a mythopoetic manner,

explaining the world through the actions of capricious gods and spirits, coordinating

civilization through religion and custom.

The weird, wonderful word of symbolic thought that we live in with our minds

and our culture while our bodies inhabit the animal world of food, sleep and sex brought

awe to the human mind before it brought reductionist logic. The mythic world of beauty,

grace and terror has a pull on our minds that appeals no matter how logical we attempt to

be. At a time when our practical, problem solving abilities were primarily aimed at

making better tools and growing crops or hunting game, our minds were exploring the

virtual reality of the imagination, and the ancients were organizing their lives around

symbols of power, beauty, strength and fear.

We will, I hope, never be free of this world of songs, poetry, faith and art, nor

should we aspire to be. But as wealth increased, and our problem-solving selves were

evidently the reason for it, reason itself became recognized as a source of power. And if

reason could solve the problem of how to build better ships, could it not also solve the

problem of building better ships of state?

As we discussed in the first installment of this series, the religious conflicts of

Enlightenment Europe made continued reliance on religious or mythic justifications an

untenable source of legitimacy for governments. If half your people belong to one

Page 31: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 31

religion and half to another, neither will stand for being ruled by an apostate, and the

wars will be without end, or at least for thirty years.

Reason was on the rise outside the realm of government already. The Black

Plague had killed off a third of Europe, and since arable land was the main source of

wealth, this meant that the survivors were wealthier. It also meant that there was plenty of

used clothing to make rag paper. Earlier generations had engaged in palimpsest, erasing

ancient texts because they needed the velum to make a new psalter or such, but  Johannes

Gutenberg found plenty of paper on which to use his moveable type.

In addition, wealth had begun to feed on wealth, and Europe had begun its great

era of exploration, which resulted in the European settlement of much of the rest of the

world, including the conquest (or if you like, theft) of three continents. Reason increased

our wealth, not just through business, but through the instruments of navigation and

improved ships of exploration and improved weapons of conquest. Europeans gained

material benefits, it seemed, wherever reason was applied, and as reason began to

dominate the way we organized our societies, making myth and custom seem old-

fashioned.

We called the rise of reason as an organizing social force the Enlightenment. But

of course, the light shined brightest in European culture, and the light cast some strong

shadows as well.

Those who were not enlightened by European culture viewed as benighted. That

included the first peoples of the conquered continents, who were viewed as a lower order

of human, and could only be "enlightened" by giving up their old culture and adopting

Page 32: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 32

the new one, even if this had to be forced upon them by removing children from their

homes and punishing them any time they spoke their native tongue.

In addition, while reason can be used to solve problems, it can also be used to

justify what you want to believe, which is how the Fascist movement gave a scientific

sheen to its racism (although really, they were about tribalism, and the doctrine of blood

and soil.) And it can be used to take a false premise and logically move from there to a

wrong conclusion, which I maintain is pretty much the story of the Communist project.

David Hume, the most powerful thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, said that

"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." After all, my computer

doesn't think about anything I don't tell it to, because it lacks passion. My car does not

drive itself, because it has no destination and does not have the capacity to care where it

is. If it had appetites, it might be as fractious as a mule when I run the gas tank low, but it

doesn't care if the engine is starved for fuel because it lacks the capacity for caring.

This capacity for caring is the main restraint on those powerful ways of

organizing our world, faith and reason. Marx saw that the faith of religion sometimes

produced injustice, and concluded that religion should be done away with, saw that the

logic of the market sometimes produced injustice, and concluded that markets should be

done away with. The results were disastrous, as the main organizing principles of society

were abandoned and the only remaining organizing principle was force. Marx had the

same goals as the French Revolution, liberte, egalite, fraternite, but his philosophy

brought on even more spectacular Terrors. Such is the nightmare of reason.

Liberalism is a term that usually is taken to mean a belief that society should be

Page 33: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 33

organized around liberty, free markets, and free and fair election of government

representatives. But the way the word is used in American politics has another element.

Conservatives advocate traditional religious views and somewhat radical free market

functioning, with the claim that these produce just outcomes.

Liberalism has come to mean that the capacity for caring, an empathy with one's

fellow citizens, acts as a restraint on the excesses of markets and religious doctrines.

Burke thought the ascendance of reason and the excesses displayed in the Terror could

only be restrained by clinging to tradition and custom, maintaining that they were the

organic wisdom of a civilization.

But there are reasons no one today offers the forthright defense of "prejudice"

Burke did, because prejudice itself is in need of restraint. You don't have to know the sad

history of lynching in America or the struggles of the civil rights movement to understand

this. You need only have a little empathy for the kid who gets beat up for being a "queer,"

or the customer treated badly because of race.

It is this very empathy that modern conservatism disdains in modern liberalism,

yet in the end it is the main restraint on the excesses of faith, the cruelty of prejudice and

the nightmare of reason.

But is liberalism the end of history? It is hard to imagine a new force organizing

society with greater legitimacy, but this was true of the old forces, which remain potent.

New mythologies are arising, as noted in my post about the Rapture of the Geeks. At this

writing, the Republican candidate leading the polls in the selection of a nominee to run

for president is Rick Santorum, a sort of pre-Vatican II Catholic who has trouble

Page 34: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 34

imagining any governing idea not based on religion.

In a campaign stop in Ohio Feb. 18 2012, Santorum said our current president

bases his rule on the wrong theology. From the New York Times:

“It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology,” he said. “But no less a theology.”

This is a sort of paleo-conservative view that finds it impossible to imagine any

source of legitimacy other than religion, and it appeals to conservatives who share that

view. There may be enough of them to nominate a presidential candidate, and probably

there are more of them now than there were when John F. Kennedy ran for president.

During that campaign, he found it necessary to give the following reassurance:

"...These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues — for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.

"But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured — perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in — for that should be important only to me — but what kind of America I believe in.

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

"I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any

Page 35: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 35

other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."

Barack Obama had to give a speech demonstrating that he also would not shape

his rule to suit his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. But Santorum represents a kind of tribalism,

and for him his faith is the right one to be a part of the tribe. He portrays President

Obama as the Other, because he sees faith and tribe as the sources of legitimacy for the

presidency.

This means that history has not ended. It has instead entered a recursive loop, in

which we must choose time and again between tribe and faith on the one hand and reason

and empathy on the other. The first can fall prey to the doctrine of blood and soil, the

second to the nightmare of reason, so the loop serves a purpose.

The economic philosophies of America’s founders

It is curious how confused people become about liberalism and the economic systems

that can be associated with it.

As we've seen, liberalism was born when the old sources of government

legitimacy, faith and tradition backed by force, were failing. Thomas Hobbes brought a

fresh source of legitimacy in from the marketplace -- the sovereign deserves his job

because he performs for you the valuable function of imposing order and thereby

preserving you from violent death.

So, we might suppose capitalism is the natural economic system for liberal

political systems. The trouble is, although markets have become entangled with

Page 36: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 36

capitalism in our minds, markets are much older. The terms capitalism, liberalism, and

socialism are all 19th century inventions (use of the word 'capitalism' with its modern

meaning dates from about 1850.)

Prior to that, people had markets, fought over trade routes, paid taxes and made

arrangements for the common defense, for the construction of roads and bridges and ports

and canals, in complete innocence of the possibility of a science of economics and of

ideological battles that would one day be fought over what the best economic system is.

The United States was founded near the end of this period  of ideological

innocence. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, as we discussed in earlier, was

published in 1776, the same year as the Declaration of Independence. His ideas were not

immediately and universally adopted. In fact, the Virginia planter class that gave us

presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson was influenced more by the French

physiocrats. From Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents of American Thought:

The conception that agriculture is the single productive form of labor, that from it alone becomes the produit net or ultimate net labor increment, and that bankers, manufacturers and middlemen belong to the class of sterile workers, profoundly impressed the Virginia mind, bred up in a plantation economy and concerned for the welfare and dignity of agriculture. Franklin had first given currency to the Physiocratic theory in America a generation earlier, but it was Jefferson who spread it widely among the Virginia planters. He did more: he provided the new agrarianism with politics and a sociology. From the wealth of French writers he formulated a complete libertarian philosophy. His receptive mind was saturated with romantic idealism which assumed native, congenial form in precipitation. From Rousseau, Godwin and Paine, as well as from Quesnay and Condorcet, came the idea of political justice and the conception of a minimized political state, assuming slightly different forms from filtering through different minds. The early doctrine of laissez faire, laissez passer-a phrase given currency by Cournay, the godfather of the Physiocratic school-proved to be curiously fruitful in the field of political speculation,

Page 37: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 37

as in economics. From it issued a sanction for natural rights, the theory of progress, the law of justice, and the principle of freedom. The right of coercion was restricted by it to the narrowest limits, and the political state was shorn of all arbitrary power. "Authority," the Physiocratic thinkers concluded, "should only employ the force of the community to compel madmen and depraved men to make their conduct conform to the principles of justice."

But of course, while the physiocrats favored laissez faire, minimal regulation of

the economy, they also considered agriculture the only producer of value. Alexander

Hamilton was our first Secretary of the Treasury and is said to have been influenced by

Smith. Hamilton was distinctly not a believer in laissez faire. He favored high tariffs to

protect fledgeling American industry, a national bank, and public credit (the Sinking

Fund Act of 1790 bailed out states in debt from the revolutionary war, established federal

taxes to pay off those debts and in the process created a market for securities that would

become an engine for economic growth.)

Hamilton's Report on the Subject of Manufactures, presented to congress in 1791,

recommended means to stimulate the economy and ensure the nation's continued

independence. It recommended policies similar to those of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis

XIV's finance minister, a pioneer mercantilist. Hamilton's report would become the basis

for the American Way, sometimes called the American System, though it had little to do

with the American System as the term applied to manufacturing with interchangeable

parts. This interventionist approach to economic development was, however, associated

with industrialization, and became associated with abolitionism. Both were in the

Republican platform under Abraham Lincoln.

In short, the founding fathers were split between the physiocrats, who favored

Page 38: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 38

laissez faire policies but saw little value in industry, and the mercantilists, who saw value

in manufacturing, banking, and commerce as well as in agriculture, but were

interventionist in their policies.

Once you realize that the United States was founded by people who were not, in

the modern ideological sense, capitalists, certain things start to make more sense. It's easy

to see how Southern planters would take to the physiocrats' notion of all real value

coming from the land, and a philosophy of laissez faire, laissez passer had a certain

unsubtle appeal for owners of slaves at a time when much of the country was already

questioning the validity of the institution of slavery.

Theirs was the losing side in the Civil War. It was the mercantilist side that won,

the side that was more inclined to build railroads and the rolling stock that traveled them,

to build ships and their steam engines, not the side where a few people lived like feudal

lords and ladies, supported by the slave labor of people who were not even allowed to

own themselves.

But even up to the Civil War, the modern style of individualist capitalism as a

theoretical construct was not fully developed. Economists tended to talk about how

classes of people would act, much as Marxists still do, rather than about individuals make

economic decisions.

It all sounded very erudite, but it did not explain why water, which we all need, is

worth less than diamonds, which really aren't that useful.

A decade after the Civil War, the marginal revolution changed that. The theory of

diminishing marginal utility gave economists who studied markets an actual, working

Page 39: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 39

theory of value, one that explained why diamonds cost more than water and a great deal

else. Karl Marx, then reading everything he could in the British Museum and using what

he learned to write Kapital, never formulated a response to it, nor did his own theory of

value ever show itself as useful.

The Wikipedia explanation is pretty good, so I'll use that:

The “paradox of water and diamonds”, most commonly associated with Adam Smith[16] (though recognized by earlier thinkers).[17] is the apparent contradiction that water possesses a value far lower than diamonds, even though water is far more vital to a human being. Marginalists explained that it is the marginal usefulness of any given quantity that determines its price, rather than the usefulness of a class or of a totality. For most people, water was sufficiently abundant that the loss or gain of a gallon would withdraw or add only some very minor use if any; whereas diamonds were in much more restricted supply, so that the lost or gained use would be much greater.

That is not to say that the price of any good or service is simply a function of the marginal utility that it has for any one individual nor for some ostensibly typical individual. Rather, individuals are willing to trade based upon the respective marginal utilities of the goods that they have or desire (with these marginal utilities being distinct for each potential trader), and prices thus develop constrained by these marginal utilities.

Now capitalism had an explanation for how it worked, and it didn't need to talk

about classes of people. It could even take its explanation down to the level of the

individual. The marginalist's model of human nature is what we now think of when we

think of capitalism having a concept of how the world works.

Mercantilism could be evaluated with this new tool, and has not entirely died out.

Modern Chinese economic policy resembles it more than just a little. The physiocrats,

however, now look so far off track that they were not even wrong. They are simply

Page 40: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 40

irrelevant.

Yet the cultural legacy of those French thinkers and the Southern planters they

influenced lives on. When conservative politicians rally voters against big-city values and

ways of doing things, when they treat rural voters as the only "real Americans," part of

that, it seems to me, echoes those old claims that only the soil produces anything of

value. Of course, it also ties in with the more chilling doctrine of blood and soil, but we

can't blame the physiocrats for everyone who admires rural values.

William Aiken Walker, who painted this, also served in the Confederate Army.

Page 41: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 41

Property and freedom: Why language is the proper basis for the social contract

I keep finding myself writing about two books, Leviathan and The Second

Treatise of Government. I hope I may be excused for this tendency, because I think these

two books are among the most important in shaping our way of life.

In this chapter, I'm writing about the relationship between property and freedom.

It's an argument that echoes down the years from the Civil War to the current day,

between those who say the first freedom resides in our ability to use and dispose of our

property as we see fit, and those who argue that the rights of people matter more than the

rights of property.

It's a conflict that was present at the creation of liberalism. John Locke famously

founded the social contract on property, and said that we are all born with property,

because we own ourselves. As we've discussed before, in Locke's day you had to have

property in order to vote. In saying we are born owning ourselves, he was taking a radical

position that everyone should have full citizenship.

Objectively, many people did not own themselves in his day. One of my own

ancestors was kidnapped from the streets of Glasgow and taken to the new world, were

she was sold to an old man as an indentured servant, to care for him in his declining

years. This was in a Quaker community, and after the old man's death she married a

Quaker preacher. Not all forms of slavery are equally pernicious.

One of the most pernicious was race slavery as practiced in the Old South.

Slavery is the ultimate extractive institution; all the fruits of the slave's labor belong to

Page 42: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 42

the slave's owner. White indentured servants like my ancestor were cheaper than African

slaves, but they were genetically inferior as slaves in Dixie, because they lacked

resistance to malaria, a disease which devastated whites nearly as badly as native

Americans. Black slaves cost more because they were worth more.

But Locke's notion that all people hold property in their own person was a ticking

time bomb under the institution of slavery. That institution had probably been with

mankind as long as war and property, and yet, if the ownership of ourselves is, as Locke

suggested, an inalienable right -- one we cannot sell or transfer to another -- slavery is an

unthinkable evil.

The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave. The name his parents

gave him is unknown, and Epictetus means "acquired.". He was not so different from his

master, a freedman who was a secretary to Nero. Consider how different this is from the

situation of the slave in the antebellum South. The racial divide helped make it possible

to dehumanize slaves, and the rules provided few legal protections to them from the

whims of their masters. As recently as 1968, the striking Selma, Alabama, sanitation

workers carried signs saying "I am a man," asserting that which was not evident from the

way they were being treated. History can change quickly, but culture changes slowly.

There was a contradiction in Locke's philosophy and his own life. He taught that

we are born owning ourselves, but he was a shareholder in the Royal African Company,

which bought slaves in Africa and sold them in the new world, and wrote a constitution

for Carolina that gave slaveholders complete power over their slaves.

That conflict still reverberates in our society. The Republican Party started out as

Page 43: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 43

the Northern, abolitionist party. But because it was the Northern party, also became the

party of industrialists and financiers. It has now dropped its northern liberal wing and

joined the business interests to the people who used to be represented by Dixicrats,

southern Democrats who once dominated the South because theirs was the party that

opposed the Republican stand on slavery, stood against the Republicans in the Civil War,

and fought against the Republican efforts to reshape the South during Reconstruction.

And the argument that freedom to dispose of your property however you will is

the most basic freedom still rings true to the conservatives of the South. It's an argument

the leading men of the secessionists states made forcefully in the various declarations of

secession issued as the left the union.

Consider these words from the Georgia  Declaration of the Causes of Secession:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war.

From the South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession:

Page 44: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 44

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the *forms* [emphasis in the original] of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

The cries of "constitution" and "property" were central to the grievances of the

slave states. Even the claim that the North has tried to "arouse the passions and excite the

hatred of our people" seems familiar to the modern ear, because these arguments are the

language of the Tea Party.

Property is woven into our system of thought, our social order, and our language.

It is not objects, or the desire for objects; those are conditions that call out for the

institution of property.

Property is the system of rights, obligations and rules regarding the human use of

Page 45: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 45

things. One might say that it is the meaning and the grammar of desired objects. It

encompasses a universe of categories of thought that make it possible for us to peaceably

make and use things.

And, of course, meanings, and the rules governing how we use meanings together

in discourse, originate in language. Language does not just express our thoughts, it

makes  symbolic thought possible; one might even say, as Ferdinand de Saussure did, that

language gives us the categories we use to think. The notion of property, and the rules of

property, are not just expressed in language, they are based on language. Property is just

one galaxy in the universe of meaning.

It is language that gives us the structure of though that makes the strange,

symbolic world of humanity possible, and property is only one part of that world.

Property cannot, therefore, be the basis for the social contract.

Language is a social enterprise. As de Saussure noted, we have signs -- the words

we use to express meaning -- and the signed -- the meaning we express with the word.

The signs are arbitrary. It does not matter whether a culture refers to a substance as eau or

water, as long as all agree that the word used refers to the meaning of that wet stuff we

like so well we have it piped right into the house.

Before symbolic thought can give us the concept and vocabulary of property,

symbolic thought must exists, so language must come first. The most distinctive feature

of human society, this weird web of meanings in which we live our lives, so unlike the

world of other animals, is the thing which makes a society human. We do not form a

society to protect our lives (even wolves do that) or to protect our property. We form a

Page 46: Rethinking Liberalism

Rethinking Liberalism by John MacBeath Watkins 46

society to imbue the world with meaning.

The freedom to participate in that conversation, to have a say in what the world

means, is the most basic freedom, and it belongs to anyone who possesses language.

Locke persuaded us that we were born owning ourselves, even though it was not

objectively true in his day, and in so doing, he changed the meaning of the lives of slaves

and slave owners. We had presidents who owned slaves, that's how respectable the

institution once was, but now consider slavery unspeakably evil.

That Locke could change the nature of property with language is a dead giveaway

to the fact that property is a product of the system of meaning language gives us. It is a

secret that has been laying in the laps of mankind for a century and a half, at least,

invisible the way air is, because language is the symbolic world we live in.

The Selma strikers carried signs saying "I am a man" because they wanted to

write the meaning of their own lives, rather than be told their lives were meaningless or

have the meaning of their lives dictated to them. They were reaching for the most basic

human freedom, to have a say in who they were.