Max Weber on Value Conflicts: Better than Berlin

The sociologist Max Weber had some important things to say about value conflict and value pluralism, that is the inevitably of many ethical values and conflicts between them. Go here and here for Weber texts online.

The issue of value pluralism and value conflicts within liberalism is often discussed with reference to Isaiah Berlin. Weber’s discussion is more penetrating and deserves to be discussed more. First some clearing of the ground about Berlin’s limitations.

Isaiah Berlin was a distinguished figure in history of ideas, but I can’t really take him very seriously as a thinker about values. His most famous essay in this area, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is much cited, but does not strike me as a very good essay. It gives very little sense of the real richness of the ideas of political and individual liberty, personal and social growth, in the period he is discussing. A book like Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty is based on an extremely dubious premiss, that discussions about liberty can be reduced to football teams of enemies and friends. The ‘enemies’ in question are Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Maistre. 6 very different cases, and maybe none of them are completely innocent of arguments which are bad for liberty, but then who is completely innocent? Certainly Hegel has been rehabilitated by people with political views similar to Berlin, that is left-liberal/social democratic. Some notable French liberals (of a kind similar to Berlin) were members of a Saint-Simon Foundation in France from 1982-99. And so on. Berlin’s numerous contacts and connections, his clear style, impressive personal culture, fame outside scholarly circles, and delightful personality had the unfortunate consequence that simplified versions of the most simplistic elements of his thought have become widespread still, even after becoming at least partly discredited. The irony is that these simplifications have become common place amongst conservative commentators and the more absolutist and more simple minded free market libertarians, who find it helpful to resort to easy oppositions between ‘liberty lovers’ and their supposed enemies.

Back to Weber, who really should be more discussed as a political thinker. There are books and articles around, but not enough in comparison to references to Berlin. However, I am pleased to see that Berlin’s major defender JohnGray has alluded to the importance of Weber, in a recent newspaper review. Max Weber recognised that politics is caught between its more ideal claims and the pursuit of power. Weber also recognised that this is not a question of ethics versus power. The pursuit of an ideal must include the pursuit of the power to implement that ideas. We cannot tidily separate these two activities, even if we can introduce a conceptual distinction. An ethical perspective on a politician must include respect for the willingness to deal with power, and not be just an idealising spectator.

Weber also recognised that this kind of innate value conflict, within the pursuit of a value, is part of the innate value attaching to conflict. There is something deeply valuable about individuals, and groups struggling for their ideal and perspective. Weber was very willing to recognise the value of people he did not agree with engaging in very passionate struggle for their values, e.g. socialists and trade unionists. What Weber feared was that an economic system based on diverse individual initiative, capitalism, and a political system based on the same principles, liberalism, was decaying into conformity inducing bureaucratic states, a and private corporations allying with the state and seeking to stifle competition.

The liberty and strength of the economy, society, and politics, rests on the struggles for values. Struggles which can be defined in less ideal ways as well, but that does not detract from the importance of struggle between different value. It embeds the struggle more deeply. The free individual contains the struggle within, in this tension between abstract ideals and the power to implement ideals. The individual with the deepest calling for politics contains this struggle, and makes it evident, mobilising support for a position through a personal power of persuasion, which can never be purely rational but is not inherently contradictory with reason. Weber’s thoughts on leadership are widely misunderstood. He gave a positive value to persuasion through charisma, through the power of personal style. He thought that this was exemplified by 19th century liberal leaders like Gladstone and Lincoln, operating through democracy, and that this was necessary to the survival of democracy, if it was not going to sink into bureaucratic routine.

Rational bureaucracy is necessary in state and corporation, but the liberal state and the capitalist corporation will weaken if they do not find the means to promote individuality, and the exceptional leader has a necessary role here in enacting and performing strong independent character. The necessary components of depersonalised rules and reason, personal charisma and distinctness of character, along with tradition are conflicting and necessary components of a world of democracy and liberty. Liberty does not just rest on reasoned disputes about liberty equality, law and so on, but on deep conflict within society and inside personalities.

From Weber’s point of view, it is much easier to understand why a Hegel for emphasises the value of the coherence of laws and institutions in the state, a Saint-Simon who emphasised ‘scientific’ state administration, a Rousseau who emphasised the importance of a common political sphere, are not the ‘enemies’ of liberty. Parts of their thought tend away from individualist liberalism, and that leads to some problems to my mind. But, only an adherent of anarcho-capitalism or possibly a purely nightwatchman state, could reject those elements which tend away from pure individual freedom. At some point, the existence of laws and institutions, and some shared values, must restrain pure absolutist individualism. Even anarchism and minarchism cannot escape that dilemma, though it is a necessary aspect of such positions, to try to ignore or abolish it.

Original version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Me on Montesquieu at LiberalVision

My summary of The Spirit of the Laws (1748), by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1748). Liberal Vision, 3rd December.

Main points:

The impossible ideal of democratic republicanism based on equality of poverty and law which comes from custom, and is obeyed without coercion.

The possible ideal of a republicanism which may influence modern monarchies or be present in confederations of city-states.

The role of commerce and trade in this kind of realistic liberty, which brings different peoples into peaceful communication.

The principle of honour in monarchy, which incorporates the ideas of a harmonious competitive individualism with regard to wealth and status, fusing aristocratic and bourgeois competition.

Any state should be a moderate state limited by law.

Law should apply punishments in the mildest way possible, as harsh punishments are intrinsically undesirable and are part of despotism.

The value of a division between government and legislation, and decentralisation of government.

Enlightenment values present throughout, including opposition to slavery and oppression of minorities.

A social-historical method unifying the study of geography, history, law and political institutions.

Foucault’s Two Perspectives on Liberalism: 75-76

Also available at:

Barry Stocker's Webog (web.me.com) with visual content.

Stockerblog (Wordpress)

This is a somewhat delayed thought coming out of the Beyond Boundaries conference on European studies at Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul earlier this month (check blog archive for earlier posts). In between leaving the conference, and giving my paper, a conversation came up about the relation between Michel Foucault’s 1975 book Discipline and Punish and what I said in my conference presentation about Society Must be Defended based on lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-6. The books appear to overlap in time, though presumably Foucault did most of the work for Discipline and Punish before 1975.

Even if we take the two books as sequential rather than simultaneous, comparison between them suggests a dual attitude to liberalism, which illuminates his attitude to liberalism from 1975 until his sadly early death in 1984.

The political understanding of Foucault has on the whole been to take him as very left inclined, and as both Marxist influenced, and as establishing the grounds for a Post-Marxist radical left, maybe under the name of radical democracy. There has been a gradual shift away from that in the understanding of his work from 1975 onwards, but the shift is far from complete. Discipline and Punish was the key text for most of this kind of understanding of Foucault as it puts sovereignty, power, law, and coercion at its centre, and could be taken to endorse a strategy of localised struggles against alliance between state power and economic power. Even that has an ambiguity not noticed by many, which is that classical liberal/free market libertarian thought is also against that alliance. Left wing Foucault followers are not likely to notice that, since like most left thinkers they assume market liberalism is about defending the corporate-state alliance. This is partly because self-styled libertarians and classical liberals have often done that in practice, however, that is in contradiction with the principles of classical liberalism. The most radical parts of that spectrum share with Marxists a utopian belief in the abolition of all state connections with economic interests, in a completely spontaneous socio-economic order.

At least one commentator noticed that the Foucault of that time was open to the free market kind of liberatarianism, Martha Nussbaum. That’s a rather awkward example since Nussbaum has a very dismissive attitude to French ‘theory’, regarding Foucault as no more than the best of a bad bunch. Still, she gives Foucault some credit, and sometimes the person outside the community of enthusiasts is better equipped to pick up on aspects of the thinker concerned.

There is a critique of liberalism in Discipline and Punish, but in retrospect that can be seen as critique in the Kantian style, that is the way that Kant thought of critique as establishing the foundations, and limits, of thought. Here is a list of what we might regard as criticisms of liberalism in Discipline and Punish

Enlightenment concern for the sufferings of those exposed to torture and execution in the judicial process, is a step on the road to the greater coercion of long term imprisonment and attempts at inner ‘reform’ .

The struggle of the accused, and the convicted, with torture and execution, gave them more power to resist power, that the hidden process of the prison regime.

Public execution provide opportunities for popular revolt against sovereignty, which are eliminated in the world of ‘humane’ punishment.

The claims to rest punishment, and all laws, on internalised ‘norms’ of reason is a greater aggression and coercion than judicial torture, and public execution, on the body of those facing sovereignty.

The most direct critique of liberalism maybe in the account of the ‘panopticon’, the model prison designed of Jeremy Bentham, a major figure in early British liberalism. The panopticon is analysed by Foucault as a diagram of modern power, which rests on the internalisation of norms. All prisoners can be observed at any time from the central observation of tower, and them ‘internalise norms’ by following rules at all time and they could be under observation at any time.

Politics as war

The first thing to note here is that ‘liberalism’ has not necessarily ignored these issues. The idea of the movement to universal social rationality was very much noticed by Max Weber, the great sociologist, who played a role in German liberalism. He did not regard this as an entirely good thing, and Foucault’s account is dependent on Weber’s though I am not sure if this is directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Confirmation can be found in David Owen’s 1994 book, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason, though I doubt that Owen would support the political conclusions I am drawing.

Society Must be Defended, and other books based on Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, suggests that for Foucault, disciplinarity and other forms of modern power, like biopolitics, can occur in more despotic state and more moderate state systems. It’s difficult to see any political project for a going beyond the moderate state, which can also be called the liberal state. There are things going beyond liberal politics as previously understood, such as the self-creation of the self, or selves, and the interest in the rebellious actions of the most marginal groups. Neither of these things are in contradiction with liberalism though, particularly as Foucault puts them in the context, respectively, of antique republican government and resisting state power as such, even where justified by Marxist and other radical left discourses. Liberal thought contains accounts of the value of differing and varied personalities.

On war, Locke recognises that the state is always close to the point where it is war with the population, because it breaches natural rights and government by consent, Humboldt saw war as having value in he formation of independent personalities. Weber emphasised the irreducibility of force and violence in the existence of the state.

In general, what emerges in Foucault’s 75 to 84 phase is a dual attitude to liberalism.

A strong critique of any idealisation of abstract norms and universal laws; and any humanist ideal of a unifying ideal human direction in history.

A strong critique of all non-liberal politics, and the recognition of the value of a civil society which has a market economy at its core in limiting state power.

Link: Elections in Germany, Liberal Progress

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog .

‘Germany’s Shift to the Right’, Dennis Nottebaum. 28th September, 2009 in OpenDemocracy.

An article in the left leaning democracy and human rights website OpenDemocracy. Nottebaum points to the surge for the FDP (Free Democratic Party), a liberal party which emphasises free markets, a limited state, and civil rights, led by the first open gay to lead a major German party, Guido Westervelle. The FDP came third in German elections, which is evidently a limited kind of success, but it’s the biggest third party vote ever in the Federal Republic, the biggest FDP vote ever, and marks a big shift in power.

I don’t entirely endorse the notion of a shift to the right. It could also be descried as a shift away from social conservatism to social liberalism, and from monumental dominant parties to a more varied political scene in Germany freed from political machines linked with the churches, trade unions, and businesses seeking corporate welfare. The main parties, SPD (social democrats) and CDU-CSU (Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union), fell back from what was already a historically low share of the vote.

The Greens and the Left increased their proportion of the left inclined vote, and the Greens were co-lead by a German of Turkish origin, Cem Özemir.

The FDP matched the SPD in the youth vote.

The FDP ran on a platform of reducing regulation and taxation, showing that the current economic down turn is not leading to an automatic inexorable move to more regulation of the financial sector. And quite rightly so, it’s a big myth that the decline in value of financial assets was due to deregulation, seeing as the deregulation is a myth.

The existence of the FDP, and its success, shows that civil liberties, human rights, and social pluralism, are not the sole possession of the left; it shows that free market policies go with social tolerance and limitations of the security state.

Liberal and Libertarian Foucault I: Overview

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Michel Foucault is often taken as emblematic of radical leftism, but it is also well known that from about 1975 he showed considerable interest in ideas of limited government and the role of market economies in limiting government.

In 1975, he published Discipline and Punish, which famously refers to the forms of punishment as a way of understanding social power in general. Also famously, he suggests that there has been a movement from spectacular punishment (public execution) to disciplinarity (confinement in prison). In explaining disciplinarity, he seems to be targetting liberal thought at various points.

As is very well known, he illustrates disciplinarity with Jeremy Bentham’s design for a model prison, the panopticon, In bringing this up, Foucault was not just commenting on the history of prison architecture, he was referring to a whole phenomenology of the relation between visibility and surveillance. In the panopticon, the prison authority can observe all prisoners at all times, so even if they are not being observed at any one time, their behaviour is modified by the constant possibility of being under observation.

This is how power in general works, as all institutions have such an architecture in their buildings which make strategies of power visible. This is also a strategy which conceals itself behind talk of reforming prisoners, and more generally of the movement from coercion to norms as the social foundation.

The targetting of liberal thought can be seen in the apparent unveiling of Bentham’s panopticon. Jeremy Bentham was associated with early British liberalism and was the godfather of John Stuart Mill, a very big figure in mid-Nineteenth Century liberalism, and liberalism since. The reference to norms as new ways of coercing people, but without manifest violence, could be taken as a dig at Max Weber, the sociologist closely associated with German liberalism. There is critical discussion of Enlightenment thinkers who exaggerate the offence to humanity of torture and death, as compared to long periods of imprisonment. This might be taken as a dig at Montesquieu, a major influence of liberal political thought, though Montesquieu does refer to the ‘inhumanity’ of all forms of extreme punishment including long prison terms.

In general, Foucault has appealed to a kind of left wing thinker who regards ‘liberal’ as a purely negative terms for a way of thinking which denies real relations of power behind formal appearances. The other aspect of this way of thinking about liberalism is to associate it with ‘humanism’, something criticised by Foucault. Foucault did criticise the idea of ‘humanism’ in at least two senses: taking humanity as an ideal, taking the individual human as an undivided agent which is completely aware of itself and is the same over time. However, humanism in either sense is not a necessary aspect of liberalism. Who criticised the idea of a undivided agent, unchanging over time? Most famously David Hume, usually taken as a liberal thinker, though perhaps at the more conservative end of the spectrum. It would be a travesty of the thought of Montesquieu and Weber to talk as if they thought any society had, or ever could, end coercion and allow the completely spontaneous development of human essence. I can think of someone who did think like that though, Karl Marx.

Even given these apparent digs at liberalism in Discipline and Punish, the text does not fit neatly into any left wing classification. If claims to emancipation lead to new forms of power, where does that leave radical left wing claims to emancipation? Why should we think that the socialist revolution, or any socialist transformation, will be less prone to violence and coercion than the liberal state? In Discipline and Punish, Foucault comes close to a rather anarchist position, in which all power should be resisted, though he does nor provide an anarchist program of how a society could exist without coercion. His assumption that power has a positive constitutive aspect could just as well be taken to support the view that society rests on the existence of coercive power.

In introducing the themes of anarchism and constant resistance to power, we have introduced libertarianism. This is itself a highly ambiguous word. It was originally associated with French anarcho-communists but from the 1950s was used in the United States to refer to pure free-market anti-state ways of thinking. In general this sense of libertarian has become dominant, so that in political philosophy, libertarianism is usually taken to refer to the kind of minimum state property rights society advocated by Robert Nozick. Even here there is some ambiguity since there are left-libertarian political theorists who aim for redistribution of wealth in a minimum state context. The other aspect of that ambiguity is the way that libertarian is often used as a another word for conservatism.

It would offend less people to call Foucault a libertarian rather than a liberal, since the left Foucauldians certainly appreciate the idea of liberation from authority, though strictly speaking they should be just as sceptical about that as they are about liberal calls for a society purely based on law, individual rights, and representative institutions. It seems consistent with the kind of Marxism proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the early 70s, with which Foucault associated himself for a while; and with the ‘Italian Marxism’ of Giorgio Agamben, who provides a dominant perspective on Foucault for many. We might see Discipline and Punish as a flowering of that anarcho-marxism. Politically Foucault had Maoist leanings for a while and you cannot get more radically Marxist than that. This Maoism was based on illusions that Foucault later rejected. It’s a strange reality that Maoism, a version of Stalinism that was every bit as nasty as Stalin’s original, appealed to those who wanted liberation from all forms of state authority. Mao’s claims to be challenging bureaucratic authority in the Cultural Revolution were amazingly successful at convincing large numbers of educated leftists that some kind of liberation movement was going on in China, rather than the violent and sadistic destruction of anyone, and anything, independent of Mao Zedong, or which might possibly weaken his power in any way.

However, since Foucault’s sadly early death in 1984, his weekly lectures at the College de France have been published going back to 1974. It’s certainly interesting to compare Discipline and Punish with the lectures of 1975-6, published as Society Must be Defended. Anyone who sees the lectures as justifying a Marxist, or post-Marxist or neo-Marxist reading of Discipline and Punish is engaged in tortuous interpretation. Any kind of Marxism in power is referred to with the greatest of suspicion in the book, and the book does what the title suggest. It concentrates on the idea that society could be independent of the state, and that the role of government should be limited. A distinction is made between more absolute and more limited forms of government. Left wing politics is given a history linking it with ideas of race war against a supposedly foreign ruling class. The overall direction of the book is to establish some value for liberty in the sense used by liberal thinkers, before liberal started to mean left wing and statist; and in the sense used by libertarians when the word is not a synonym for a kind of right wing conservatism rebelling against the liberal state.

Later lectures develop ideas of governmentality, as limited government (in the spirt of Montesquieu’s idea of moderate government), against the absolute power of the state, rooted in ideas of the sovereign as shepherd of the people. Foucault does not lose his sense that apparent freedoms are tied up with coercion, but he emphasises the reality of those freedoms. He emphasises the superiority of Physiocratic free market solutions to wheat shortages in 18th Century France over Mercantilist attempts to regulate prices. In doing this, he is essentially repeating arguments mades by Adam Smith. He emphasises he the role of Ordo liberalism, that is a very free market liberalism, in the intellectual opposition to Naziism. He examines the work of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian economists and political thinkers who have had a major impact on Classical (free market limited government) Liberalism and Libertarianism. He emphasises the way state power has been extended through biopolitics, the ways in which the state takes on the role of improving and extending life.

We do not even need to read Foucault’s lectures. A lot of this is apparent in the three volumes of the History of Sexuality which Foucault was able to write before his death. Extensive discussion of antique attitudes reveal a strong inclination towards the idea of the self-creation of character, in a kind of self-mastery strongly linked in the antique world with ideas of citizenship and political rights, what we would not call republican virtues. So Foucault’s later work is deeply influenced by ancient and modern notions of individualism and limited government.

Of course there are those who prefer to find some way of taking this up in terms of Marxism, or some kind of radical left thinking at least partly rooted in Marxism. However, even among the left Foucauldians there are those who recognise and regret his shift towards ‘neo-liberalism’. Amongst those associated with Foucault, Jacques Donselot has referred to liberal aspects of Foucault’s thought. His assistant at the Collège de France, François Ewald, has worked on the rise of state welfarism from a liberal point of view.

More to come, expanding on the points above.

FNS 09: War and Liberty; Aristocracy and Liberalism

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

In my first post (three posts ago) on the Friedrich Nietzsche Society 2009 conference, I mentioned a point I made in the discussion after Brian Leiter’s presentation. I suppose this might be making a big deal out of a question, but I was dealing with some things I find important and have been working on for some time.

My point was in response to two claims from Leiter

Nietzsche links fighting in war with liberty, and no other philosopher has done so. Therefore Nietzsche cannot be linked with political liberalism.

Nietzsche attributes different moral worth to different kinds of individuals. Therefore Nietzsche cannot be linked with political liberalism.

My counter claims

Kant refers to war fought according to the laws of humanity as sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The experience of the sublime is way, for Kant, in which we encounter out transcendental self which stands outside natural determinism. This is our free self. This itself connect with remarks in the Metaphysics of Morals about the positive freedom, with reference to a will to perfection in following moral law which goes above mere minimal obedience, and again refers to our freedom in the most perfectionist way of rising above mere impulse and determinism. This clearly connects with Kant’s view of politics as a kind of perfectionist liberal republicanism, that is citizens rise to the highest levels of human personality in respect for law, as the basis for freedom in a state based on political participation. It also feeds into discussions about the liberty of the moderns and ancients in Benjamin Constant, and Wilhelm von Humbldt’s discussion of positive and negative welfare, two great figures of liberalism. Humbold also linked war with liberty saying that power of the state was less dangerous to liberty in the Ancient Greek states because constant war enhanced independence and strength of character. This is in Humboldt’s great contribution to political philosophy, The Limits of State Action.

Various major liberal thinkers have not been purists with regard to moral equality between humans. Before Alexis de Tocqueville they mostly assumed that only the propertied classes should have political rights. Tocqueville accepted the inevitability, and desirability, of democracy but with reservations and thought it would require a new kind of aristocracy in the legal profession and political leaders. John Stuart Mill thought the educated should have more political rights and that backward peoples should have no political rights until educated to the necessary level. Mill even suggests that some people are just lacking in moral character, suggesting that universal education would not make everyone equal. In politics, William Ewart Gladstone, the great British Liberal Prime Minister, and symbol of democracy and liberty throughout Europe, explicitly believed in aristocracy in the political system rather than pure democracy. As Tocqueville pointed out, representative government under law tends to produce its own aristocracy in any case. These liberal thinkers were picking up, though also revising, ancient republicanism in Aristotle, Cicero, Tactitus etc, which was rooted in the belief that liberty required an aristocracy proud of its rights and national independence. This continued into early modern republicanism, and then fed into Classical Liberalism.

The Relevance of Adam Smith

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog

I’m retuning to the issue of interpreting Adam Smith, which I referred to when posting in the Manchester Metropolitan University Workshops in Political Theory two days ago, I had hoped to post on Adam Smith yesterday. As I indicated two days ago, there was a paper on Adam Smith I found very unsatisfying. I made some comments on the paper but was only able to mention a few of the problems I found with the paper, and as far as I can see it other people in the workshop made the same criticisms after I spoke, but in less direct ways. I found the paper disappointing, but useful, in making a standard series of errors about Adam Smith which are typical of one kind of left-inclined commentators. I am going to summarise this as briefly as possible, and referring as much as possible to the very obvious mistakes, rather than the more subtle problems that will arise in any interpretative work. At the bottom I refer to what I think was good in that paper.

Mistake One

Adam Smith was not an original thinker, because a lot of what he said had been said by other people before.

Reply.

All great thinkers are preceded by various people who express parts of what appear’s in that thinker’s work. The achievement of major original thinkers, like Smith, is to integrate a wide range of previous work on the topic, adding some new thoughts along with grasping links and contradictions which appear when integrating everything. Just about everyone agrees that Smith produced a great original classic: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Mistake Two

Adam Smith is not relevant to current economics, and we know this because Mil refers to Smith’s work as partly obsolete and imperfect everywhere (in The Principles of Political Economy). Another supporting argument was that An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations covers a wider range of material than current economics and is therefore irrelevant to current economics.

Reply.

Most economists continue to refer to Smith as the founder of the discipline and refer to his ideas.

Miill’s comments are a statement of the obvious: any book on economics becomes increasingly obsolete over time because of new developments in the discipline and changing economic circumstances. However, economists continue to use use ideas from Smith and his earlier successors, particularly David Ricardo and Karl Marx. Smith’s relevance compared with Marx has clearly increased in most people’s minds since the 1970s.

Recent economists, most notably the Nobel Prize winner, Gary Beck, have been very interested in taking economics into the territory of psychology, anthropology and sociology. This means that recent economists have written about things like the history of religion, and the development of social ethics, discussed by Smith in Wealth of Nations.

Mistake Three

Adam Smith regards value and wealth as essentially the produce of agricultural labour, and regards industrial production and trade as less valuable.

Reply.

As others pointed out in the workshop, Smith thought that agriculture was more productive only in the sense that it requires less capital (though of course this has changed over time).

There is a confusion in what the speaker said between Smith and the Physiocrats the French economic school which included Turgot, Quesnay, and Mirabeau the Elder. The Physiocrats opposed Mercantilist restrictions on trade and thought all economic value comes from land. Smith clearly rejects their emphasis on land, even if by later standards, he exaggerates the role of agriculture. The slightly more subtle mistake the speaker was making here, was to confuse Smith’s emphasis on natural stages of development with a critique of wealth from industrial production and trade. As I suggested in a post on August 16th, Smith was tied to a teleological way of thinking in which nature and society unfold in necessary steps, a way of thinking which was not throughly challenged until the late 19th Century. The result of this is that he is disturbed when agricultural wealth is stimulated by towns, though even this is ambiguous since in some passages he refers approvingly to the ways in which urban wealth increases agricultural wealth.

Mistake Four

Smith was a left-wing, therefore anti-free market thinker because he opposed Mercantilism.

Reply.

Im extrapolating a bit here, but that seems to be the only way of understanding the way the speaker framed criticisms of Mercantilism. Mercantilism refers to the belief that the world contains a finite amount of wealth, particularly in god, and that trade between states is a way in which one country takes wealth from another. Imports are to be discouraged because paying for them causes wealth to leave the country, and exports are to be discouraged where it means that objects of value are leaving the country. Mercantilist policies were tied to the aristocratic and monarchic states of the time, and Smith criticises those states. The speaker used a slippage between criticising those states and criticising capitalism.

Mistake Five.

Smith did not approve of capitalism because there was less of it in his time and the word did not exist.

Reply.

The fact he word ‘capitalism’ did not exist is irrelevant and it is a feeble rhetorical trick to suggest it is relevant. Clearly Smith wanted to see more and more of what we now call capitalism.

Mistake six

Smith did not opposed socialism because the word did not exist.

Reply.

Again a feeble rhetorical manipulation. Smith opposed what we now call socialism, when he supported the sanctity of private property and opposed most forms of intervention in the economy.

Mistake Seven

Smith was like left-wingers now because his ideas were taken up by late 18th and early 19th century radicals and labour movements, including many French revolutionaries, so by people opposed to monarchical and aristocratic privilege.

Reply.

Left used to refer to people who though allocation of resources was better done by markets than by the state, this has nothing to do with the current socialist left, or even social democrats. Labour representative were concerned with forms of state intervention which held down wages, prevent labour from organising, and pushed up the price of basic items in the budget of labourers. Again these are different from the major aims of the current left. Left wing people in power, or even conservative states trying to accommodate working class demands, moved the issue away from cutting down that state to expanding the state as a means of regulating the economy and redistributing wealth.

Mistake Eight

Free marketers now support state interventionism and therefore contradict Smith’s demands for a less statism.

Reply.

This contradicts other comments the speaker made. It is simply not true that current free marketeers accept existing state interventionism. I drew the attention of the speaker to libertarian thinkers who oppose the privileged relations between corporations and the state. The speaker started stonewalling and trying to change the subject to how libertarianism used to refer to left wing positions, an obvious sign that he could not back up his argument. I insisted on pointing out that free market thinkers like Hayek, Mises and Friedman, and organisations using their views, are extremely critical of links between corporations and the state, including the use of war in promoting sectional economic interests.

Mistake Nine

The speaker clearly though the Thatcher and Reagan governments, and other ‘free market’ governments since represent the most radical forms of free market thinking.

Reply

Reagan and Thatcher get some support from free market thinkers for some of their economic policies. They are also strongly criticised for leaving the essence of the interventionist state in place, and for continuing state support for favoured economic enterprises.

Mistake Ten

The speaker claimed that books IV and V of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations justify levels of state interventionism and social welfarism in contradiction with current free marketeers.

Reply.

This is true in reference to anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, or minarchists (night watchman state) like Ludwig von Mises and Robert Nozick. It is not true with reference to Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman who are considerably more influential than the minarchists and anarcho-capitalists. The speaker clearly thought Friedman was less interventionist and welfarist than Smith. So what is the interventionism that the speaker alluded to in Smith. Books IV and V of The Wealth of Nations are concerned with: reducing ways in which states have limited trade and taken private property from subjects; expanding education, which should be mostly provided privately with the state supporting the poorest; raising revenue from taxes on consumption; protecting trade outposts fro violence through state military support. This is definitely a very limited role for the state, and certainly goes no further in that direction than Hayek or Friedman.

Mistake Eleven

The speaker said that Smith would be against free markets now because he takes the side of labourers.

Reply.

Smith takes the side of labourers in preferring low taxes on necessary goods, and in allowing labourers to seek the highest possible wages by removing barriers to competition between labourers and between companies when they are hiring labourers. Clearly this has nothing to do with being against free markets and capitalism.

Mistake Twelve

The speaker appeared to think that the discussion of negative and positive liberty comes from Isaiah Berlin, in his 1969 essay, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. That is the distinction between liberty from state compulsion and the liberty that arises from state action to expand human capacities.

Reply

I believe Isaiah Berlin’s essay to be highly overrated, its greatest virtue is to draw readers back to important late 18th and early 19th century discussions of liberty. At this time, Kant referred to negative and positive freedom in ethics; Wilhelm von Humboldt referred to negative and positive welfare; Benjamin Constant referred to the liberty of the moderns and the ancients. These all refer to the negative/positive liberty type distinction, though in Kant it’s a distinction about the relation of reason to action. These discussions are anticipated by what Hobbes and then Montesquieu have to say about the kinds of liberty which exist in different ancient and modern states.

Mistake Thirteen

Takes us back to mistake two. The speaker seemed to think that Smith’ status as a Professor of Moral Philosophy and the broad range of topics he lectured and wrote on undermines his place as an economist and free marketeer.

Reply.

The speaker seems to assume that economics is only about prices, when it is about more general questions of ranking choices in individual and social action, which connect with questions of law, ethics etc that Smith was also concerned with. The speaker claimed that An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was a wok of moral inquiry. In some ways it is, which in no way contradicts its status as a work of economics. The speaker appears to be making the absurd assumption that one cannot be simultaneously concerned with ethics and with issues of choice, and preference, which are often expressed in terms of prices within a monetised economy.

Mistake Fourteen

The speaker assumed some contradiction between: Aristotelian elements in Smith like a concern with standards of value, and teleology (the end towards something is moving); and free market capitalist thinking.

Reply.

The speaker exaggerates the Aristotelian elements in Smith. Unlike Aristotle, Smith was not concerned with determining a real value and excluding price variations, and he was certainly not supporting the limits in economic inequality (between citizens) proposed by Aristotle. Smith cannot both be strongly teleological in thinking, therefore seeing natural inevitability in the movement from land to city to trade, and believe that movement away from agricultural wealth is bad. Smith sometimes seems inclined to weak versions of those propositions, making it possible to refer to a tension perhaps, but the speaker referred to both propositions in a very strong way without noting the problem.

Generally Badly Formed Argument

Some of this is covered above, as when the speaker implies that Smith is left wing in the current sense by referring to the links between Smith and non-socialist radicals of the original left.

A really obvious problem is that the speaker claimed that Smith would be against capitalism as it is now and that he is irrelevant.

If Smith is irrelevant, his supposed arguments against capitalism must be irrelevant.

The speaker condemned current free markets while saying there are no free markets.

USEFUL POINTS

As I have already noted, the speaker drew attention to the way early radicals like Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham, used Smith’s ideas. I have already stated what I think is wrong with taking this as a reason for thinking Smith can be connected with socialist though. When they do lean towards a redistribution of wealth they are going beyond Smith.

The speaker referred to liberty in Smith as independence rather than as the ‘negative liberty’ or freedom from external compulsion. We might wander how much difference there is between the two and the speaker did not express this potentially useful thought clearly. If we clarify the thought, the point is that Smith was concerned with more than just leaving people alone but also with promoting the virtue that will enable the best possible use of that liberty in a spirt of general independence of mind. As I suggested in a post of 22nd August, this does bring Smith close to classical republican thinking which values political participation, rather than the more anti-political individualism of a lot of current libertarian thinking. On the other hand, individualistic liberalism and republicanism are widely recognised to have been combined in a variety of thinkers from Locke to Mill. I agree that it is unfortunate that current libertarians tend to ignore this. Gerald Gaus provides an interesting and valuable exception.

Link of the Day: ‘Liberaltarianism’ Debate

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

bloggingheads.tv. Angry Crazy People, with Mark Kleiman and Brink Lindsey.

The title of this webcast is rather misleading. It refers to just one segment of the discussion, where Kleiman and Lindsey compare right-wingers who think Obama was born outside the USA, and disrupt town hall meetings on health policy, with left-wingers who think Bush organised the 9/11 attacks. It turns out that Angry Crazy Right-wing people are concentrated among southern whites, suggesting there is a racial component but it would be wrong to say that is the only component.

Lindsey is a libertarian, who invented the idea of ‘liberaltarians’ in a 2006 essay for the left leaning magazine The New Republic, and now available at the libertarian (leaning to libertarian-conservative fusionism) Cato Institute website. Lindsey was arguing, and still argues that libertarians and liberals, in the American post New Deal social democratic sense, can find common cause around the renewal of liberalism in its original meaning. Lindsey argues in the webcast, and elsewhere, that libertarians should give up on a state that only forces contracts and property rights, accepting a broader notion of public goods including some welfarism ; (left-)liberals should accept a smaller more efficient state to deliver those goods, in a more individualistic spirit.

As is pointed out in the webcast, this has not become a big movement, but as Lindsey points out, there’s big group of fiscal conservatives-social liberals in the middle ground of American politics who could open to ‘liberaltarianism’, As Lindsay concedes, fiscal conservatism is pursued by social conservatives in the Republican Party, while social liberalism is pursued by statists in the Democratic Party, squeezing out a possible fiscal conservative-social liberal liberaltarian movement.

Kleiman is one o Lindsey’s (left-)liberal interlocutors, open to market based solutions to social problems. He is a public policy academic at UCLA and Harvard, with many links to the world of politics.

They debate copyright and intellectual property in the light of file sharing of music; carbon tax and cap and trade in relation to global warning; liberalising regulation of legal, and illegal drugs, while taxing them more; the public choice part of Obama’s health policy proposals; financing of Medicare (public federal health care for the retired).

How did Kant come to be taken as Anti-Liberal?

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

I mentioned the question of Kant and liberalism in yesterday’s post on ‘Liberating Republicanism’. I think it merits more investigation. Kant is clearly not always taken as anti-liberal (taking liberalism to mean classical liberalism). It might seem obvious that Kant is liberal, since his writings on ethics, law, and politics indicate the following core liberal ideas.

The primacy of the individual.

The autonomy of the individual.

The right to have property, of any extent.

The rule of law.

The progressive force of free trade and market based economies.

The importance of limiting and balancing power in the state, largely through a division between the law making power and the executive power.

The danger of unrestricted democracy, which for Kant would mean that the executive power is the same as the law making power, and both are democratic.

The value of peace between nations.

The value of a federal/confederal agency to enforce peace between nations.

So where does all these anti-liberal Kant assumptions come from? Most obviously in two groups of people: post-modern/post-Marxist political thinkers, particularly the Cosmopolitics crowd; the most purist market libertarians, I take Kant to be highly compatible with moderate market libertarianism . They are wrong, but they are not just being stupid. One part of it is that they over focusing on some passages, some aspect and not putting it in the context of the whole; one part is that they need to define their position by making an opposition between Kant and liberalism.

What aspects of Kant are they focusing on, in an imbalanced way?

1. Kant emphasises a transcendental power of the productive imagination, which for some people can be linked with the labour theory of value in Marx, and Marx’s general tendency to elevate the producer as labourer.

2. Kant’s enthusiasm for Rousseau, While I strongly resist attempts to turn Rousseau into the original totalitarian, I think just about everyone can agree he was not a liberal or libertarian of the free market individualistic kind.

3 .Kant’s references to positive freedom and therefore perfectionism. Positive

freedom in Kant means using our innate freedom not only to obey moral law, put to follow it it a very strong way so that we are perfecting ourselves. I don’t see that as anti-liberal, but since Humboldt talked about negative and positive welfare in The Limits of Stare Actions, there has been a tendency to see a social ethic based on a collective responsibility greater than mere obedience to law as threatening to purist liberalism. It can be threatening to freedom, but it does not have to be, if we understand it as a mixture of purely voluntary action and the steps the state takes to promote the values of individual freedom and political decision making through democratic institutions.

4. Kant emphasises a transcendental unity, and purpose, of humanity or of the republic.

5. Kant is placing some limit on national sovereignty and the interaction of states in his cosmopolitanism.

6. Kant emphasises an ethical foundation for law, the state, cosmopolitanism, public right, cosmopolitan right, which might seem to reduce the possibilities of self-interested actions by individuals in the private sphere.

In 3., I get at some of the issues around reading Kant the wrong way. If you believe that either the state is purely an agency for upholding contracts, property rights, and free trade; or that everything, or a very large proportion, in property/welfare distribution should be decided through democratic majorities in the public sphere, with nations to be similarly bound by some kind of transnational decision making body, then this makes sense.

We do not have to make this either/or choice. I just don’t believe either choice has been put into practice, or ever could be. We could regard them as useful extremes between which to define a range of positions, which is OK so long as we do not conceive that as distribution along a single line. For example, a stronger public sphere of law making could be more beneficial to private property than a weak, or non-existent public sphere, and that has often proved to be the case, in practice.

Defending H.H. Asquith's Reputation against the Nonsense peddled recently by Andrew Adonis and Martin Kettle

Andrew Adonis and Martin Kettle have recently tried to make points about Gordon Brown through remarkably poor and muddled accounts of Britain's last 2 Liberal Prime Ministers.

I've already put a case for elevating H.H. Asquith about David Lloyd George in the history of British Liberalism. It's necessary return to that topic since an article by Andrew Adonis in Prospect (a 'New Labour' magazine'), 'A Liberal Tragedy' (full version is subscribers only) has been taken up by Martin Kettle in The Guardian (left inclined British daily newspaper), 'In Asquith's Failure there is a Chilling Message for Brown'. Kettle generally takes a sympathetic line towards the Liberal Democrats, but is clearly New Labour in thinking. Adonis was a Liberal Democrat (I once saw his speak at a conference fringe meeting on liberal history), but jumped to New Labour in a very blatant bit of opportunism which led him to the House of Lords and a ministerial post promoting city academic (self governing state schools).

Both Adonis and Kettle assume that the Liberal/Liberal Democrat tradition in Birtish politics can be subsumed under the Labour tradition as the junior partner in Britsh centre-left or progressive tradition. Before the 1920s the Liberal Party was the largest part of this suppose group, but it clearly suits current New Labour types to emphasises this supposed tradition because since the 1920s the Labour Party has been the largest part. The last Liberal dominated government in Britain (1906-1916) had support from Labour and Irısh Nationalists, and there was a left or social shift in the New Liberalism of that era. Obviously it suits New Labour types to equate New Labour with New Liberalism, particularly if like Adonis they have made an oppotunistic jump between parties. As Adonis was reported to ahve regretted not joing the Conservatives in time for Major's 1991 victory I think we can discount any ideological principles he claims to have.

On the issue of Asquith, Adonis/Kettle claim that Asquith was a failure compared with Lloyd George on three grounds
1. Asquith opposed voting rights for women
2. Asquith did not solve the 'Irish Problem'
3. Asquith was responsible for leading Britain (which at that time meant not just the UK but the whole Empire) into the First World War, and was therefore responsible for the suffering of all parties to the war.

Answers
1. Only the first claim has much merit. Yes Asquith opposed woman's suffrage at the time that most Liberals, including LG supported it. In a bizarre mirror image, the Conservative leader Arthur Balfour supported woman's suffrage while most of his party opposed it. Asquith was very wrong and it's a major mark against him. However, he did undergo some change of mind during the First World war, as did other previous opponents of female suffrage due to the contribution of women to the war economy and the support given to the war effort by the more moderate parts of the suffrage movement.

2. Asquith was unable to resolve the 'Irish Problem' like a series of predecessors. The problem he was faced with was that while most British politicians recognised that home rule for Ireland was inevitable, Ireland itself was divided between Nationalists (mostly Catholic) who wanted the whole of the island to become one self-governing entity and Unionists (strongest among the Protestants of northern Ireland) who wanted the province Ulster in the north of the island to remain a fully integrated part of the UK. The Unionist leader Carson was willing to contemplate violence against Home Rule for the whole of island, and received support from the Conservatives which then existed officially as the Unionist Party. There were considerable doubts about the loyalty of army officers to the government in case of a conflict between London and Belfast over Home Rule. Asquith was faced with an awful situation in which the government could do nothing without provoking violence from either side or violating two plausible sets of arguments for how self-determination should be defined in Ireland. The question went quiet during World War One, though the Nationalist leader John Redmond turned down the chance to become Secretary of state for Ireland in the wartime government, until April 1916, when militant Irish Republicans (in the Irısh context Republicans refers to the more radical part of the Nationalist movement) seized the General Post Office in Dublin and tried to provoke a nationalist war. The provocation initially had little support from the ırish, but the military authorities executed most of the leaders of the uprising, a policy opposed by Asquith, before London could get control of the situation. The executions had a disastrous effect in turning the executed into martyr figures.

What was LG's solution to the Irish problem? As Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, he did arrive at a solution in the Anglo-Irısh Treaty of 1922, though this did not bring a final end to violence in Ulster/Northern Ireland and was followed in independent Ireland by a civil war about the Treaty. The Treaty was preceded by an Irish Independence war from 1919 to 1921, in which Black and Tan soldiers recruited, by LG's government, from World War One veterans behaved with extreme brutality.

There really are no grounds for marking LG above Asquith on Irish policy.

3. Asquith did not ask the Serbian South Slavist Gavrilo Princip to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Nor did he ask the Austro-Hungarian government to issue an ultimatum to Serbia essentially demanding that it accede to major violations of its sovereignty. He certainly did not ask the Veinnese government to mobilise its army after Serbia rejected full implementation of the ultimatum. He very certainly did not ask Germany to invade France as a response to the general moblisation of Europe's major powers. He very certainly did not ask Germany to invade France through neutral Belgium. The neutrality of Belgium had been considered a cornerstone of the European state system since the 1830s, the German violation of that neutrality confirms amongst other things that the German Imperial Government was aggressive and expansionistic in a manner not shared by the French and British governments. The violation of Belgian neutrality bolstered support in the Liberal cabinet for living up to its treaty obligations to France. Kettle and Adonis both appear to subscribe to the view of World War One in which Britain and France were morally equivalent with Germany. This is simply not the case if we compare their actions and if we compare their systems of government. I will just add that German war aims made clear in 1917, when Germany had the upper hand was to reconstruct Europe and the Middle East to be dominated by Germany and its junior partners. The Kaiser's government was not the equivalent of the Nazis but it was bad enough. In any case, only one Liberal left the cabinet over the declaration of war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. LG certainly did not leave the cabinet, he took the opportunity to seize the Prime Ministership with Conservative support in 1916. His view of war history, which strongly influenced historians until recently was that he and Churchill led Britain to victory through triumphing over Asquith's poor war leadership legacy and dim witted army generals. Both claims are less popular with recent historians. In any case, it is a complete nonsense to claim that LG was a greater and more successful Liberal leader than Asquith, because Asquith supported British entry into World War One. LG went onto destroy the Liberal Party by governing with the support of part of the Liberal Party and the Conservatives until the Conservatives got rid of him in 1922. Before then, LG supported the continuation of the War in Anatolia when he supported the Greek invasion of western Anatolia, defeated by the National Assembly and its armed forces, under the leader of Musta Kemal (later Kemal Atatürk).

Kettle's and Adonis' claim that Asquith was an irresponsible war mongerer while LG was not is total nonsense.

Both choose to support the Liberal leader who split the Liberal Party by choosing to lead a government dominated by conservatives. I guess that's the role they would like Nick Clegg to take in relation to the Labour Party, supporting New Labour while abandoning any distinctive liberal vision. No thank you. Clegg is clearly prepared to co-operate with either of the other major parties depending on circumstances, and keeping a distinct liberal vision in all cases.

Carl Schmitt and the Origin of Law

Continuing my discussion of the The Nomos of the Earth by Carl Schmitt. Schmitt refers to mythical material on the origin of law, going from Homer to Giambattista Vico's 18th Century investigations of myth. His account is of the origin of law in the earth.

Earth contains an innate justice in that it rewards the farmer according to productive effort. This is in contrast with the sea which lies outside law. The Greek word equated with law is Nomos. As Schmitt points out, it does not exactly correlate with law, which is why he uses the Greek word in his title. The Greek word equates with custom and in an even more basic way with appropriation. Schmitt argues that the opposition between Nomos as law or custom and phusis as nature comes later than the sense of appropriation, division and taking.

Schmitt compares this with the fundamental definitions of property in social contract theory. He argues that Social Contract theory is essentially about the definition and division of property. The original Ancient Greek sense of property is linked to the home as in the word oikos divide and protect land. which is at the origin of the word economy, which in Ancient Greek times is concerned with management of the home rather than with cash exchange or a market economy, or a national economy of any kind.

The original appropriation/division of property brings in sovereignty, since it is the state which establishes ownersip rights and the division of labour, and furthermore it is the state which carves out land for a people, and it is states whichThe state and sovereignty exist through land and through the possibility of working on the land.

In an appendix Heidegger suggests that we should abandon appropriation, but this is presumably an ironic way of agreeing with what he takes to be the liberal and Marxist approach to appropriation. Both want to replace the violence of appropriation, with a self-governing of the world of economic things without violence, where wealth is produced through socialist planning or liberal spontaneity, with no need for a political order, or at least the minimisation/separation of liberal order . For Schmitt his still always leaves the problem of division, I presume that at the non-ironic level he thinks that distribution is part of appropriation and that both liberal and Marxist approaches are utopian.

Schmitt conjoins sovereignty, law, labour, land, property, division of property, in an ironic struggle with Marxism and Liberalism which both try to eliminate the struggles within politics.

Hayek, Habermas and Schmitt Together

Friedrich Hayek, Jürgen Habermas, and Carl Schmitt do not look like a group of the like minded. Schmitt was the legal and political theorist who emphasised that law and politics rest on the capacity of someone to make a decision.

Schmitt thought that political theory should take sovereignty as its object not the state. If political theory takes the state as an object, it becomes primarily concerned with the institutional and administrative aspects of the state. He took a critical view of confusion of the state with civil society. Where politics itself engages with civil society, the state becomes one of various pressure groups. The order and unity of the state which is necessary to the exercise of sovereignty is undermined in a pluralist view of the state. Democracy itself is not best represented by the divisive nature of parliamentary politics, since the single ruler is much better suited to representing the majority as a unity, rather than as a divided aggregate of many points of view, where no unified will of the majority can emerge. Politics also contains the dimension of struggle between friend and foe, in which we struggle to defend ourselves against the enemy who threatens our existence. Schmitt considered that to be the basis of international relations. Attempts at world confederation, and world government, can only produce new wars with an enemy who inevitably resists other countries ganging up on it.


Habermas, a Marxist in principle but more of a social democrat/left liberal in practice, condemns Schmitt for reducing international relations to this constant war which leaves no room for the just war that enforces international order. One point at which Habermas raises this criticism is when he writes on the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Habermas does not think this intervention can be fully justified by the international law as it previously existed. The UN charter strongly opposes interference in the internal affairs of member states. Habermas did not write to condemn the Kosovo intervention It is an intervention which refers to morality rather than existing law, it is the intervention based on acting as it there is a global civil society, though it does not yet exist. The intervention was not wrong, it was however a precedent that should not be taken as a precedent. Self-legislating improvement should not be accepted. Habermas talks about being between morality and law, but he is halfway between legalism and decisionism. Some force took the decision to intervene rather than follow international law, and that itself is a welcome intervention There is an Enemy, Slobodan Milosevic who must be defeated regardless of previous law. With regard to internal law and administration, Habermas emphasises the difficulties that arise from social legislation This is inevitably administered outside the apparatus of parliamentary supervision. Increased administration is inevitable for these kinds of programs The regulatory nature of social intervention must come into conflict with the universality of law, democracy is fragmenting ştself.

Hayek, the best know advocate of pure free market and an almost non-existent state, condemns Schmitt, like Habermas, always in passing He appears to be condemned but disappears before he contaminates the surrounding text. Hayek thinks democracy should be limited, or should limit itself, in order to restrict the state to state matters, including the foundation of law, a foundation which must also be an apex. The state should not be interfering in society, it should be protecting its own sovereignty from any confusion about its role. The state is most admired before the establishment of mass democracy, and is most legitimate when defending itself against enemies. There is a strong element of elitism in Hayek, who would like constitutional constraints on democracy to the advantage of property owners. Hayek's wariness of democracy follows a tradition that goes back to Humboldt Humboldt recommended the free development of the individual after paying very little tx. Humboldt also opposed democracy, because he thought that would lead to increasing social demands on the state. Humboldt thought there should be just a king, remote from and above society. That itself recalls Hobbes. Hayek, and others with similar views, attack Hobbes as a supporter of a strong state. This misses the point that Hobbes thought the only purpose of the state was to leave people to be free in civil society while defending the state against its enemies. Hobbes preferred monarchy to democracy, a monarchy of the sword unconcerned with social questions, but wielding immense force to protect sovereignty within and without.

This is all consistent with Schmitt's enthusiasm for a separation between the political sphere and the economic sphere. Hayek assumed that since Schmitt refereed to the modern tendency for society and the state to be confused, that he was endorsing that tendency, and saw in the Nazis an ideal aspect of that trend. However, there is no reason to believe that Schmitt supported the Nazis for socialsit or statist reasons. He justified the idea of a Caesar like leader, and the rights of any large nation over its smaller neighbours. That is all. Schmitt was complicit with a totalitarian state, but that should not lead us to the conclusion that totalitarianism was his goal. A post-war speech to business people strongly suggests he though that the state should concern itself with politics without interference from above in the economy.

Like Habermas, Schmitt did not think all war must be founded on existing international law. Like Hayek, Schmitt was suspicious of democracy and particularly of welfarism.
Like both Hayek and Habermas, Schmitt thought that the modern state is fundamentally lost in a contradiction between general laws and administrative bodies which regulate more and more of life.

What's Wrong with Republican Political Theory Today? Force, Conflict and the Moment of Decision

Growth of Republican Theory
There has been a recent growth in Republican political theory, though the earliest aspect of it in J.G.A. Pocock goes back some way now. Pocock worked on Civic Humanism in Renaissance Italy and Early Modern Atlantic Republicanism. In the former field, he worked particularly on Machiavelli; and in the latter on James Harrington and the continuation of Machiavelli. Machiavelli's line of influence obviously goes up to Rousseau, after which the idea of a direct Republican line of influence is harder to maintain.

Kinds of Liberty
More recent work on Republicanism has included Phillip Pettit's work of normative (analytic) political philosophy of that name, Quentin Skinner's work on Roman Freedom/Liberty and Machiavelli, and Samuel Fleischer on a third liberty, between the negative and positive liberty I discussed in a recent post, 'Negative and Positive Liberty: A Short History'. That idea of the third liberty corresponds to the idea of 'non-domination' in Pettit. In a comparable manner, Skinner opposes 'Roman Liberty' to 'Liberalism' which he defines a pure negative liberty, on utilitarian grounds.

Tocqueville and Egalitarian Liberalism
Here I am continuing themes in a recent post on Tocqueville on Republican Politics and the Tyranny of Small Communities, where I suggested that Republicanism recently has been a form of social democracy, a development out of Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism. The recnet Republicans continue Rawls' theme of defining harm resulting from inequality very broadly, and defining necessary compensation very broadly. For Tocqueville Republicanism is more about maintaining institutions that prevent those with lower incomes from seeking to compensate themselves through limiting the property rights of those with property. That goes along with the wish for institutions that prevent a temporary majority from undermining liberty through any kind of attack on unpopular minorities. Tocqueville's version of Republicanism has clear precedents in Montesquieu, Locke, and Aristotle. Considering that Tocqueville was inspired by the emergence of democracy as we know it now, in the USA, we could say that this kind of anti-egalitarian Republicanism is at the heart of modern liberal, or representative, democracy. The issue is somewhat more ambiguous than that. Though Tocqueville was against strong egalitarian social measures, he recognised that modern liberty was democratic in the sense that a broad equality of conditions was emerging between citizens of all classes.

State Force
There is another question here. We can place Tocqueville in the context of more egalitarian style liberalism, but we would still need to notice something else about Republicanism, it does not just uphold moral community action, it upholds the state and the authority of the state as something that rests on force as well as consent. That is the dimension that Lockean liberal republicanism and Rousseauesque egalitarian republicanism are overlooking. The state has a an active role in establishing and maintaining republican beliefs, and it uses force against those who threaten those beliefs. Centralised force is necessary to restrain the conformist force which can build up to an irresistable intensity at the local level. as Spinoza suggests, democracy rests on the force of the majority of the people.

Elites and Aristocracy
The point of Machiavelli's Republicanism is not not just the moral advantage of a community of citizens. While it is important to avoid the still prevalent image of 'evil Machiavelli', we should not ignore that recognition of force and coercion in Machiavelli, which does sometimes have a gleeful edge to it. It can be like Nietzsche' enjoyment of wickedness, which is certainly not an enjoyment of evil for its own sake though. Nietzsche expresses admiration for those states which institute a great political aristocracy, or elite. Tocqueville considered the formation of a modern democratic substitute for aristocracy as necessary in order to maintain liberty under democracy.

Natural and Positive Law
Republicanism in Aristotle is the idea that the political community is a natural good in its own right beyond the aggregation of individual interests. Republicanism in Machiavelli adds the recogniiton that state power is not 'natural' and must be instituted, and maintained by force. Tocqueville's own thought is rooted in Pascal who emphasised that law is based on force in a godless unjust world, as Derrida also emphasises. Pascal finds positive law (law created by institutions, by the sovereign) is not rooted in natural law (objective moral order outside individual interests and historical constructions).

From Mill to Machiavelli
In John Stuart Mill, liberalism retains some elitist-aristocratic aspects, but is on the way to being a doctrine of politics based on consent, discussion and rationality which has difficulty with discussing what makes such activities possible. It is the sociologist Max Weber, who was more able to deal with this because he saw politics in terms of a 'realist' theory of pursuing power. Though current Republicanism emphasises politics as a human activity and goal, it lacks any sense of power and the foundations of the state in force. Despite Skinner's references to 'Roman liberty', it lacks a sense of the absolute devotion of the classical citizen to the sovereignty of the state and its laws. They push the more realist 'wicked' aspects of Machiavelli aside as they see Machiavelli in rather Rawlsian terms. Machiavelli did not see politics in those terms, he thought that interests permanently clash and not in the sense of constant dialogue, just as Tocqueville thought that politics must be rooted in human pride and the necessary conflicts in pursuing pride. There is something Realist in Machiavelli and Tocqueville, and there is something 'decisionistic', that is politics refers to the moment of decision which is never completely justified and is never completely rational.