Free Market Libertarians and Left Egalitarians Agree on Third World Poor

Some links on how egalitarian left moral and political philosophers concerned with Third World poverty and under development can find themselves in agreement with free market libertarians.

Peter Singer, a leading moral philosopher committed to strong egalitarianism, in conversation with Bill Easterly at bloggingheads.tv.

Easterly is a passionate advocate of Third World development and a passionate critic of state and celebrity based aid politics. A Professor of Economics at NYU, who runs the blog AIDWATCH: just asking that aid benefit the poor.

Singer and Easterly agree on the following points: the moral obligation of individuals to help the poor, the wasteful of many aid organisations and the importance of getting information about organisations before donating (details of useful websites given), wastefulness of state aid when as often happens it is designed to help a constituency in domestic politics rather than the Third World poor.

Also listen to Thomas Pogge being interviewed by Alan Saunders, or read the transcript at ABC’s The Philosopher’s Zone, ‘The Right to Property and the Right to Health’.

Pogge has a very different philosophical foundation from that of Singer. Singer is a Utilitarian, Pogge is a follower of Rawlsian reasoning from first principles about justice. Like Singer, he is deeply concerned with equality between nations as well as within nations. Though definitely not an advocate of libertarian (i.e. free market individualistic limited government liberalism), Pogge points out that there is an mportant areas of agreement between egalitarians and libertarians, on issues concerning the Third World poor:

Property rights and patent laws.

Patent laws which prevent all physical production of objects which are covered in very broad interpretations of intellectual property conflicts with basic property rights which have at their centre ownership and control of physical possessions. The importance for the Third World here is that patent laws make it extremely difficult for Third World pharmaceutical producers to manufacture medicine which has any resemblance, however accidental, or secondary, with already patented medical product. The same issue applies to developing new seed strain.

As Pogge points out this only applies to the position that some libertarians take on property rights, but he is certainly right to point out that there is a form of free market libertarianism which opposes broad and strict intellectual property rights. This often comes up in discussion software and computerised products. Two ‘libertarian’ points come up: it stifles innovation and interferes with property rights if companies can prevent others from incorporating existing knowledge into new products; innovation is an interactive discovery process involving many people and this should not be covered over by IP laws which presume that one person or company is solely responsible for innovation. On this version of libertarianism, complete reproduction of someone else’s product is wrong but no use of knowledge incorporated into that product.

Primary version of this blog, Barry Stocker's Weblog.

No Democratic Perfection in the Birth of the USA

‘A Constitutional Counterfactual’, FreedomDemocrats, 1st December, 2009.
I’ve linked with this item from the FreedomDemocrats, a free market libertarian group within the US Democratic Party, because though it does not mention the Lisbon Treaty which amends the core treaties of the European Union, it is very relevant. I’ve got quite a lot of detailed argument coming, so here is the big point up front. The United States was founded through a process which makes the process of ratifying European Union treaties look like text book democratic fastidiousness, despite which the right-leaning element amongst opponents of European integration, which is the dominant element in the UK, tend to be hyper-enthusiasts for the United States as an example of liberty, constitutionalism and limited governments (things I’m rather supportive of myself). That would be a model of federalism, instituted through considerably less fastidious means than those used by the EU political elite.

In addition it should be noted that the United States fought a Civil War to prevent the secession of the Confederate (southern) States of America. I am sure a few Confederate enthusiasts can be found amongst the Eurosceptics, but not many. No one can deny that the American Union was created by abrogating the Articles of Confederation in favour of the more centralising Constitution of the United State of America; and no can deny that this federal Union was re-founded, and strengthened by President Lincoln and the Republican Party of the time, in the blood and iron of a war fought to coerce the Confederacy to stay in the Union.

The methods employed in that war included a deliberate policy of the destruction of the property of southern whites, suspension of habeas corpus in the Union, and covertly sanctioned illegal violence against the anti-war press. One could argue about how much of this was justifiable, but I would say the price was worth paying to the recreate the Union as a unified democracy freed of slavery, showing as Lincoln argued in the Gettysburg address that the government by the people, of the people, for the people, could succeed and endure. That’s not an unusual argument, and its one shared by most Eurosceptics as well as Euro-federalists who give any thought to American history.

What is the ‘Eurosceptic ‘ criticism of the Lisbon Treaty? In part, that it is the rape of democracy, because only one country held a referendum to ratify it, Ireland, and that country held the referendum a second time, after a no vote on the first occasion. In the language of the Eurosceptics, this was like a rapist who never accepts ‘no’ for an answer from a woman, and a form of totalitarian oppression equivalent to that prevailed in the USSR and its satellite states. I’m not making this up, or exaggerating, this is the standard discourse. Rapists do not request a second answer which might be the same as the first, they use violence. Totalitarian regimes do not hold a referendum a second time, they rig elections in the first place through falsifying results in an atmosphere of terror against opposition.

Even if we take the Eurosceptic language in its (rather rare) calmer moments, it makes accusations of lack of democracy which cannot be sustained. It is the Eurofederalists who are arguing for more direct accountability of EU institutions to a European electorate, through increasing the power of the Parliament, and maybe considering a directly elected head, and certainly a head selected through an open and competitive process in the Parliament. The Eurosceptics oppose such ideas, fiercely, so reducing the EU more and more to a venue for intrinsically unaccountable diplomatic manoeuvres between states lacking a common democratic decision making body.

The second vote in Ireland was held in the context of assurances from the European Union and the Irish government that the claims made by treaty opponents about restricting Irish sovereignty, particularly with regard to military neutrality and the constitutional ban on abortion. were not at all true. No one of any honesty and integrity whatsoever can deny the truth of those assurances and the misguided nature of contrary claims made by anti-Treaty campaigners. Of course politics is a rough nasty business, and everyone tells lies, directly or implicitly. Nevertheless, those who directly use obvious lies, or at least rely on their widespread circulation, cannot reasonably complain when a referendum is held a second time, to test whether the electorate will still vote No after some of the more blatant lies have been countered by official assurances, based on clear law. The Irish people were very free to say no a second time, they did not. The Irish government was very free to block the Treaty of Lisbon, it did not. The Treaty was ratified in other countries through votes in freely elected parliaments in 27 of the world’s more solid democracies. Each of these 27 parliaments was very free to derail the Treaty, none did.

All of these countries have experienced moments of change in national political and constitutional arrangements without a referendum, no one denies that these countries are democratic. Of course a referendum can be appropriate in deciding on constitutional issues, but most established democracies in the world allow constitutional change without referendums. A referendum is a tool of democracy, not the only aspect of democracy; and while a few Eurosceptics may be advocates of government by direct democracy, most are not, and no one has tried to argue that established democracies are not democracies, because at least part of their constitutional development took place without legitimation through referendum.

It must also be noted that while the Eurosceptics shriek about undemocratic repression, the Lisbon Treaty increases the power of the European Parliament in relation to the non-elected decision making elements of the European Union (Council of Ministers and the Commission). That would be the kind of ‘totalitarianism’ that keeps transferring more and more powers to freely elected, multi-party bodies then. A variety I had previously overlooked, and which Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, and George Orwell carelessly ignored.

So back to the FreedomDemocrats. Like many of the UK Eurosceptics, the FreedomDemocrats identify themselves as libertarians of a kind who advocate free markets. There are other Eurosceptics, but the dominant tendency, such as the United Kingdom Independence Party and Daniel Hannan, a well known Conservative Member of the European Parliament (!), the current Big Man in Conservative Eurosceptic circles. UKIP Libertarianism is the kind which favours reducing immigration, that would be the kind of libertarianism that reduces individual liberties to cross borders freely. I would like to say that this kind of nonsense is unusual, but unfortunately it is all too normal for militant social conservatives to adopt the ‘libertarian’ label to mean freedom to be oppose rights for people they don’t like. The point of the item I’ve linked to, is that the (federal)Constitution of the United States of America was adopted without a popular vote, and that it is clear that a popular vote would have failed. The only consultative vote that would have had any chance of succeeding would have been one restricted to the biggest property owners. The FreedomDemocats like the idea of a history in which the Constitution was not ratified, which they think would have meant a number of regional confederacies lacking the power to violently expropriate Native Americans or create a militaristic interventionist superpower.

That brings up the whole question of the ‘libertarian’ (in the sense of individualist property owning and limited government principles) basis of the United States Constitution. The idea that the Constitution is either a perfect libertarian document, or at least that the adoption of the Constitution was the nearest the United States has ever come to libertarian perfection and that is has been in constant decline since some later point at which it apparently started to move away from the Constitution, is rather prevalent amongst US libertarians, though particularly those who could best be described as conservative-libertarian fusionist, and who tend to think conservative and libertarian mean the same thing.

The FreedomDemocrats in this item, and others posted on their website, correctly insist that the US Constitution was designed by large property owners who wished to use political power to preserve an existing pattern of property distribution, including ownership of slaves, and the freedom to increase property by violating the rights of Native Americans, along with various trade, tax and monetary rules designed to give their property a privileged status. The FreedomDemocrats lean towards minarchism (a state that does nothing but uphold the right to life and property rights in a purely neutral way), and even outright anarchism. I cannot go along with them on that, partly because I think what they say in a critical way about the US Constitution is really inevitable, in some form, to stabilise and legitimise the state body that is necessary to uphold law. A feasible libertarianism can only try to make the trades of self-interests around the constitution and around state policy, as balanced and as genuinely beneficial to the common good as is possible.

The other tendency in libertarian thought, to make the Constitution a quasi-religious document is just bad for liberty, bad for legal thinking, and bad for critical rational thought, for reasons I cannot explain in this already long post. But returning to the right-wing UK Eurosceptics, they cannot both: commend a US Constitution adopted with no referendum and designed to be very difficult to amend; and condemn the European Union for a process of progressive integration through Treaties, all ratified by representative assemblies elected by popular vote. The Treaties have been ratified by the unanimous agreement of all parliamentary bodies in all member states. It is difficult to reverse these treaties, but that is because the requirement of unanimity goes both ways. It would be good to see easier means of amending treaties, or even rejecting them at a later date. but that would only be possible if the ratification became easier in the first place.

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.

Liberal and Libertarian Foucault III: Physiocrats

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

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Lecture Two (page 207)

Actually, we can say that thanks to these measures, or rather thanks to the suppression of the juridical-economic straitjacket that framed the grain trade, all in all, as Abeille said, scarcity becomes a chimera.

The context of this quotation is a discussion of the impact of Physiocrat doctrines in 18th Century France. Quesnay, Turgot and others argued that grain shortages could not be cured by the measures the French monarchy had been using, that is measures of state coercion to keep down prices and prevent hoarding. The measures of the absolutist French monarchy to prevent farmers from storing grain and pricing it according to demand, are still the kind of things a lot of people find immediately convincing. Many states in the United States now, have laws against ‘gouging’, that is charging high prices for goods in an emergency which causes shortages. The issue of hoarding is linked, since those selling grain, or any other good, will not hoard it unless they expect to charge high prices for it in some future shortage. A reaction popular now, shared by despotic French monarchs is that shortages arise from hoarding, and shortages arise from sellers charging too much during an emergency.

Foucault endorses the Physiocratic policies, which anticipate Adam Smith who met the Physiocrats in a visit to France. As Foucault points out, it’s the Physiocrats who coined the phrase ‘laisser faire’ (letting it happen) in economics, and linked phrases like ‘laisser aller’ and ‘laisser passer’; and as Foucault implies, that policy worked. Allowing farmers and merchants to ‘hoard’ and ‘gouge’ ensures that enough grain is produced, and stored, to mean that there is no starvation even in times of relative shortage. As Adam Smith pointed, France was much more prone to hunger than Britain with less measures to restrain prices and prevent large scale storage ‘hoarding’. As Foucault recognises, the starvation of the poor was alleviated by following English style policies, which allow prices to go up. That benefits the poorest, since such market incentives mean there will still be grain available in times of relative shortage and much more cheaply at those times, than if the price of grain has previously been restrained.

In these lectures, Foucault is as much describing, or analysing, as judging or evaluating. The evaluations often have to be inferred, nevertheless the context really does not allow any interpretation other than that Foucault thought that the Physiocrat policies were an improvement on Mercantilist regulation. The quote above makes it clear that Foucault thinks such policies limit the power of the state in a desirable way.

It would be wrong to present Foucault as simply celebrating the market policies of 18th Century governments; he is constantly concerned with the way that limits on the ‘juridical-economic straitjacket’, or more generally sovereignty, biopolitics and disciplinarity, are consistent with their expansion. The French monarchy accepted Physiocratic policies in order to keep its power. That does not change the reality that Foucault recognises a preferable kind of power where state regulation is limited.

On a more general note, I ma titling this series of notes ‘liberal and libertarian Foucault’. Making this more precise, I would not link Foucault with those who insist that Classical Liberalism, or Libertarianism, means the end of all welfare and all regulation; and certainly not with those who think the state should be abolished or turned into a nightwatchman only, minarchist entity. Somewhat earlier, when Foucault was in contact with Maoists was the time he was closer to anarchism. Later text display anarchistic tendencies, but are overall disposed to look for a reasonable limitation on state power, and more dispersed forms of power, rather than abolition.

Foucault was always a man of the left, but I would argue on the basis of his later texts, that he was moving closer to an earlier sense of ‘left’ or ‘radical’ which regarded state intervention on behalf of sectional interests, or increased statism in general, as the enemy of liberty and of opportunities for the poorest to improve their living standards. Again, we must recognise the critical side of this; Foucault also points out that the original radicals, along with later socialists and anarchists, had attitudes based on ‘race war’, that is identifying the state and privilege with a non-national entity. I also doubt that Foucault thought all the forms of growth in state intervention since the early Nineteenth Century could, or should be, terminated. Extrapolating from these late texts, what others close to him have said, and so on, I would say that Foucault moved towards a position where he was in broad culture and allegiance on the left wing of politics, but in details on the left, or more moderate, side of free market libertarianism, allowing for state welfare but suspicious of the consequences of allowing state activity beyond very strict limits. I should also add that his concerns with disciplinarity and the dispersed nature of power, precludes a position in which the presence or the absence of the state is the definitive issue.

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.

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.

Foucault, Libertarianism and Europe

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

I’ve pasted in a conference abstract below. It’s an expanded version for the conference book of abstracts and serves as a summary of themes I am interested in around liberal political philosophy, European identity and politics.

‘Political Theory and the End of Europe: Foucault against Habermas’

I’ve taken the opportunity to look at Habermas’ status as a philosopher of the European idea, examine his political concepts critically and take up Foucault from a Classical Libertarian political point of view. Thee Foucault versus Habermas debate is well established, but the the best of my knowledge no one has looked at them in these terms before. I’ll look at how the anarcho-conservative Hoppe takes up Habermas, and the areas of difficulty that suggests in Habermas’ progressive liberal-Marxist synthesis; and look at Foucault’s relation to Antique Republican and Classical Liberal ideas in his later texts. This is in the cause of suggesting that Foucault provides a better basis for European political integration, because it is less reliant on ideal harmonisation than Habermas.

The conference is Beyond Boundaries: Media, Culture and Identity in Europe, hosted by Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, 2nd to 3rd October 2009. The conference is supported by an EU funded project run by Bahçeşehir University, University of Potsdam, and the University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam.

Jürgen Habermas is almost the uncrowned Philosopher Prince of the emergent European polity (the European Union, and more loosely the Council of Europe, with the EU as its ‘hard core’); and its cultural and media ecology. Habermas’ analysis of deliberative democracy, and cosmopolitanism, is of obvious relevance in constructing a European polity; and is embedded in theories of discourse ethics and communicative action which provide strong, ethical, and epistemological context for his political theories. Habermas tries to overcome two polarities: hierarchy of the political system versus democratic participation; individual rights versus economic egalitarianism. He works on this through notions of ethics, and rationality, in which it is assumed that both lead the individual to act according to the rules of the public sphere and a cosmopolitan political order. Habermas is sometimes troubled by the relation between the consensual aspect of the state and its more coercive ‘steering aspect’; and the difficulties of instituting democratic, and legal, accountability for the complex bureaucracy, which administers the social state through administrative orders, rather than to democratic political decisions, or court judgements, in accordance with legal norms. Habermas’ analysis also, more indirectly, suggests a problem with harmonising democratic decision with the power of judges in a law governed democracy. These tensions in Habermas’ work find expression in the work of Han-Hermann Hoppe, who wrote his doctorate with Habermas, but has since turned discourse ethics into a foundation for a ‘propertarian’ anarcho-conservative position. Without endorsing Hoppe’s position, it does give a very useful indication of how Habermas touches on areas of concern to Classical Liberal and (free market) Libertarian thought. Foucault’s thought is better adapted to these problems. From Society Must be Defended onwards, Foucault distinguishes between the more despotic forms of power and the more limited form of power; between absolutism, or totalitarianism, and govermentality. The idea of governmentality is not the idea of a perfect liberal consensus based on government by consent; it is investigated itself with regard to attacks on the body in biopower and disciplinarity (power over life and death; imposition of regularised activity). Foucault’s approach to liberal government is highly critical, but his analyses of political and ethical thought, and practices, since Antiquity, strongly suggest that he finds individualistic liberty, market economics and limited government to be the best possible counter to the most coercive aspects of power. Comments by associates like Jacques Donzelot on Foucault’s later thought, and the social theory of associates like François Ewald, confirm the impression that Foucault was aiming for balance of individualistic market liberalism, and welfarism. His late comments on Austrian School free market economics, certainly suggest Classical Liberal, and Libertarian, sympathies. The cultural, and media, legitimacy of the emergent European polity can be best elaborated through this kind of analysis, which address those aspects of trans-national European sovereignty which cause most disturbance to critics of European integration. Foucault allows us to avoid the utopian dream of a seamless relation between individualism and collective welfare, between democratic participation and political hierarchy, because he sees legal sovereignty and coercive power, autonomy and mastery as intertwined, in an unavoidable paradox. This establishes a way of thinking in which European sovereignty, including its cultural, and media context, can be both affirmed and seen as in need of restraint, and dispersion. Though Foucault did not directly address issues of the emergent European polity, his later texts are deeply concerned with pan-European ideas of sovereignty and government, including the way that modern European nations emerged as fragments of Roman sovereignty, which they saw themselves as preserving.

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.

Liberating Republicanism

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

What do I mean by liberating Republicanism? A few things.

I mean liberating Machiavelli the Republican theorist from the crass parody of him as an opportunistic servant of tyrants, a cynical engineer of despotism, even a version of the devil. Here I can only say, read The Discources, then read or reread ,The Prince. If you think you know Machiavelli, but you haven’t done this, you are very mistaken.

Republicanism is a theory of freedom. A theory in which the state is limited and upholds liberties, but also a theory in which freedom in a society is enhanced by political participation and political rights, by the existence of a political sphere. As Machiavelli notes, there is lot of self-interest at work in that sphere; as Machiavelli also noted, given good Republican institutions that self-interest can be turned into a freedom enhancing struggle for relative prestige. So Republicanism is something liberating.

On the whole Republican theorists have been concerned with the protection of individual rights, including property rights, from the state and from the more extreme decisions of temporary majorities. The two main exceptions are Spinoza and Rousseau, though I wouldn’t want to go down the sad and sorry road of blaming Rousseau for everything bad in politics since the Jacobin Terror, and there are certainly things a Republican concerned with individual rights can learn from those two. On the other side, we have Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Harrington, Sydney, and Kant, as the clearest examples, I would also add Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, Jefferson, Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.

The obvious thing about that last list above is these are people often listed as Classical Liberals. I think it bizarre that Kant is often not listed among the Classical Liberals, but more on him a bit later. Current Libertarian thinking tends to take those Classical Liberals as all united by a view of individuals and their property as absolute self-contained capsules. On this basis, voluntary contracts and exchanges between individuals are regarded as the only legitimate social relation. The political sphere is seen as valueless in comparison, and at best something to be tolerated as a necessary evil.

This view is most strong in the United States, and is tied up with a disguised nationalism in which it is presumed that the US Constitution rests on the same assumptions. As even some hard core libertarians have acknowledged, this is not a realistic presentation of the US Constitution, or the people associated with its political and intellectual origins (Jefferson and Madison, we could also add Montesquieu and Locke as ghostly intellectual presences). Indeed the most hard core libertarians, particularly the minarchists and the anarcho-capitalists, are bound to concede this if they are at all honest. There is no way that the Constitution presents a night watchman theory of the state, and how could it be am anarchist document?

An honest approach would lead to dumping claim to the thinkers I listed from Locke to Mill, except with regard to particular passages and aspects, which are compatible with hard core libertarianism. I have addressed this recently with regard to readings of Locke and Étienne de La Boétie.

The earliest thinker who really fits in with hard core libertarian thought is Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) in Limits of State Action, but even Humboldt didn’t follow the prescriptions of the book as a Prussian education minister. The next proto-hard core libertarian thinker is Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), a notable economic thinker. A really admirable and sometimes funny writer in the advantages of markets. I would say the same, as I would say about various libertarian economists since Hayek, great economic ideas, how very unfortunate that the view of politics and political liberties is so dismissive.

The intermediate step there is that economic ideas, which are great for explaining how social rationality emerges from free economic decision of individuals, are not so great for dealing with situations where the good is intrinsically collective, whether it’s transport planning or building a constitution. Both of those can, and should be, informed by market thinking, but the market cannot create a decision about whether or not to route a road somewhere, or what the voting system should be. In principle a non-state agency formed by economic agents could have the power to route roads, but then that would not be operating as a purely economic agent and would have acquired a political quasi-state role, and we’d have to ask who gave it this power and excluded other claimants.

One part of this is about showing that Republicanism promotes liberty. Another part of this is about showing that the Republican element in various Classical Liberal thinkers should be liberated from a large part of libertarian thinking. Another part of this is about showing how libertarianism needs to be liberated from the worst aspects of libertarianism. The last part is about liberating Republicanism from left-liberals, social democrats, and socialists.

Republicanism is big in political theory now, but not with people who aim to find some way of combining political culture with property owning individualism. It has become socialism for a period in which the idea has lost a lot of its force. On the political level, Republicanism has been picked up by Demos (a New Labour linked think tank in Britain, founded originally by hyper revisionist Marxists) and the Spanish Socialist Party, and probably some other left leaning groups and parties.

On the theoretical level, the most influential people are Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. We could also mention J.G.A. Pocock who preceded them with important studies of Early Modern Republicanism, but we’ll leave him aside in this context, Pettit’s idea of Republicanism is very much in the tradition of the egalitarian liberalism of John Rawls, but wishing to add more something, that is a right of non-domination which is one way of describing the idea of Republican self-government. But Pettit’s interest is in egalitarianism, of a kind which does not look very compatible with the kind of property rights and individualism of concern to Montesquieu and Locke. He has very little to say about political process and political culture, Skinner’s work is mostly on Early Modern political thought. Where he writes about the 19th Century, he produces a contrast between ‘Neo-Roman Liberty’ and liberalism of a kind which would leave us unable to account for a figure like J.S. Mill who believed in civic virtues as well as individual rights.

The left leaning use of Republicanism goes even further with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri where it has become a part of neo-Marxism, drawing on Spinoza, Jefferson, Machiavelli etc. For Hardt and Negri, Republicanism itself is not the answer, but the proper reading of it as the precursor of some transformed version of Marism and communism for the present age. This picks up on well established tradition of seeing Kant as the precursor of Marx, not as a whole but through the reading into Kant’s ideas of transcendental production and unity, of a prefiguring of Marx’s ideal of an emancipated community. There is a whole current of cosmipolitics around in post-Marxist post-Modern political theory, which interprets Kant’s ideas about world federation as fitting into that frame. I’ve even heard these people use Kant as what they regard as an alternative to liberalism and a critic of it.

This kind of reading of Kant can be found in Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) in Socialism, Mises is one of the inspirers of current libertarianism, a free market economist who interpreted liberalism as being about property rights in the most non-political, and even, anti-political way. Kant’s tendencies to talk about a kind of transcendental unity of humanity and history, are interpreted by Mises as socialist, proto-Marxist talk. This is bizarre, Kant is clear enough about property rights, the division of powers, the danger of unrestrained majoritarianism, the role of commerce. Why should Mises and the Neo-Marxists want to agree on reading Kant this way? Kant who thought labourers should be be excluded from the franchise? It suited Mises to turn against anything which shows Classical Liberalism gave value to the political sphere, that Classical Liberalism overlaps with Republicanism. It suits the Po-Mo left (in between mangling Foucault) to find a thinker about the political sphere against a liberalism they have parodied as Mises type anti-political libertarianism. An extraordinary alliance.

Maybe the phrase Libertarian Republicanism could provide a better approach.