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Yves here. I hope you’ll circulate this essay on the uses and effects of liberalism. Not surprisingly, one is to help those who wound up on the top of the food chain feel good about their position and rationalize the damage of inequality.
Forgive me for bringing up a pet issue, how “meritocracy” is touted as a justification for inequality. As we pointed out in Fit vs Fitness in the Conference Board Review, not only is meritocracy not attainable, but even the much fetishized personnel reviews cannot be made to work adequately.
By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health.
I have been a scientific worker or a working scientist for my entire professional life, which I date to the summer after my second year in the university when I got my first full-time job at the age of 19 in the laboratory where I served a long apprenticeship that turned into what has been, most of the time, a solid foundation [1].
In my experience, virtually every scientist I have known is a Liberal [2]. Most of them are now enamored of Neoliberalism, or what can be called Market Fundamentalism, and in what follows I don’t distinguish between the two versions of Liberalism. Yes, some were on the conservative side, including one of my most influential mentors who nevertheless was in the thrall of both the Economist and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. The former I understood; the latter remains a complete mystery almost 40 years later. My first faculty mentor/employer, 97 years old in 2023 and retired to Utah, still occasionally tries to get me interested in the “flat tax.” That he spent his entire scientific and academic career on the payroll at several public research universities seems to have been forgotten. In any case, I miss both of them, but they would undoubtedly wonder about me.
Most of my friends and academic/scientific colleagues tend toward the adjectival liberal side of the divide. To a person they are also paid-up, lifetime members of the PMC – Professional Managerial Class – and TDS [3] seems to be only getting worse among them. That anyone could be anything other than a liberal Liberal is anathema to them. Such is the way of their world in which something called “Democracy” is under constant threat from Donald Trump and apparently him alone.
That these men and women are also somewhat proud of their disdain for “mere politics” is a contradiction that never seems to register. That science is the product of the Liberal Imagination (this Liberal Imagination is a good place to start, from a mostly literary perspective) and a child of the Enlightenment (a recent accessible treatment is here) is perhaps the central pillar of the Liberal mind. All of this is a given, but the consequences are not widely appreciated. Anthropogenic climate change, maldistribution of wealth, rampant inequality, the imperative of capitalist growth on a finite planet that is now full, all of these are a concomitant of capitalism of the Liberal and now Neoliberal variety.
So, I am alert to new books, especially “little” books that address Liberalism and other conundrums. By little, I mean books that can be read in one or two sittings but tell a story we need to hear. Looking at my shelf devoted to these I see On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, who died at the age of 94 this summer, and Religion Without God by Ronald Dworkin. A few others include Why Not Socialism? by G.A. Cohen, Cannibal Capitalism and The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born by Nancy Fraser, Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? by Leszek Kolakowski, Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky). And from the “other side,” The Southern Tradition by Eugene Genovese, after he traveled somewhat from his original stance, Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver. My copy of Capitalism and Freedom seems to be missing.
A new addition to this collection is our focus today, Not Thinking Like a Liberal by Raymond Geuss, who is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Cambridge. The first book of his that I have read is his recent A Philosopher Looks at Work, which has been published in a series of “little” books already on my shelf in which A Philosopher Looks at Human Beings (Michael Ruse, whose work on evolution is essential), Sports (Stephen Mumford) and Architecture (Paul Guyer). A most remarkable thing to me about Professor Geuss is that he has a thoroughly working-class background. This is rare for an academic of any discipline, and my hope that this would make a difference was confirmed in both A Philosopher Looks at Work and our subject for today. I readily confess that because I come from a working-class background, I have also not thought like a liberal for a very long time.
Like many such good “little” books, Not Thinking Like a Liberal is substantially autobiographical. The story is told from the perspective of a student in a boarding school outside of Philadelphia run by Hungarian priests of the Order of the Pious Schools (Piarists). Geuss later attended Columbia, where he also received his PhD, and then became a Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, where he is now Professor Emeritus [4]. His teachers were profound, both in their work and in their teaching, and the journey is instructive. We all have teachers, if we are willing to pay them the attention they deserve. If we choose well those teachers we can, the outcomes are likely to be rewarding. In my view, Professor Geuss has gifted us with a very good book for our time.
And if we have been particularly fortunate, we all have had teachers like Béla Krigler who taught the young Professor Geuss and who understood Liberalism, both what it is and what it is not.
Humanly speaking, no individual, not even the most self-reliant, was truly independent and free-standing; each person was multiply dependent on other human beings, in the first instance on their own families and then on society. Metaphysically, no human being was independent of God. It was also simply not true that most people knew themselves and their inner world better than they knew the basic features of external reality, or that they knew themselves better than others knew them…”
Some of us might have no need that particular metaphysics, but apprehending the truth does require a strong epistemological foundation. Professor Geuss got his from his Catholic teachers who had little use for Aquinas. From one of my teachers: During the second half of the 18th century the Irish physician and trader James Adair lived among the Native Americans of the southeastern woodlands of North America. His ethnography depended on his theory that these peoples were descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel. No, but using this framework his observations had a theoretical foundation. Thus, they had value long after they were compiled in the story of his life.
When it comes to Liberalism, the fantasy at its core is that each of us is an “entirely sovereign individual.” However, according to Geuss, this is best currently viewed as a reaction to “massive anxiety about real loss of agency in the world…which is perfectly justified in the world we live in, and so the fantasy is clearly connected to the satisfaction of a real need.” But, of course, Liberalism “does not serve only as an imaginary consolation for frustrated needs…it actually does effectively and palpably benefit some powerful economic actors. The benefits of Liberalism are by no means imaginary for CEOs, the fossil fuel industries, and they thus have a very strong incentive, and ample resources, for contribute to maintaining it in existence and to strengthening its hold on the population.” Indeed, Margaret Thatcher told us 40 years ago that “There is no alternative” to Neoliberalism. So far, that has been the case.
The middle of Not Thinking Like a Liberal covers Authority, Religion, Language, History, and Human Variety. Suffice it to say that Béla Krigler and his fellow Piarist teachers were not in agreement with dominant mid-century American thought. For example, “Christianity was not to be found in the New Testament in the way in which the theory of evolution was to be found formulated in the writings of Darwin. Rather it was a constellation of historical events, institutions, and practices with some associated, but shifting, beliefs, and it could not be understood in a way that abstracted from that ‘Just read the Bible’ by itself was a truly idiotic injunction.” Protestant America, for the most part, would not understand this, except at the margin represented by Union Theological Seminary and similar institutions. Right was right, and Liberal; here, for an example of Liberal attitude [5].
Fear, shame, and guilt were, and still are, motives in the larger Liberal, Protestant culture, and were part and parcel of the Protestant “need to make the world simpler than it really was…(but) we should try not (italics in original) to allow ourselves to be motivated by any one of these three powerful human impulses. They were all completely natural and also extremely strong, but we needed to learn to act in ways that were as independent of them as possible. Obeying God’s command because of the fear of punishment was the sign of a low-grade personality” and the same applies to fear and shame. As one who was fortunate to have had a mainstream Protestant upbringing that did not rely on fear, shame, or guilt, all I have to say to this is “Amen.” Perhaps this was due to my particular union-supported working-class family? I would like to think so.
Which brings us to the next stage of Guess’s intellectual and professional journey, which he describes as follows:
There was nothing in the real politics of the 1960s in the United States that would have persuaded a young man like me, or anyone who was not already tacitly convinced that liberals were automatically always on the side of the angels, that classic liberalism was a particularly attractive position to adopt. After all, the major political issue was the war in Vietnam, which had first been planned and was now being conducted by people in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who had reputations as standard-bearers of liberalism [6]. On a wider range of other social, economic, and political issues, liberalism did not seem to be an ideology that was actively generating either much original thought or much effective action. None of this was…strictly a ‘refutation’ of liberalism, but it also meant that there was nothing terribly inviting about the liberal position.
Professor Geuss’s next teachers were “critics of liberalism from the Left”: Robert Paul Wolff, Sidney Morgenbesser, and Robert Denoon Cumming. We could use a new generation of critics of liberalism from the Left.
A brief discussion of Wolff follows. Morgenbesser is described here briefly, which is largely in agreement with Professor Geuss’s chapter on him. He was the teacher at the periphery we all need. Cumming is fascinating and I hope to return to him after having read is Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought (Chicago, 1969,) which is out of print. Too many books, not enough time.
Robert Paul Wolff, on the other hand, is a philosopher for our time. He recognized early on that meritocracy is a trap. Those members of the PMC who use the term today with such ardor seem to not have read The Rise of the Meritocracy, which was written in postwar Britain by the sociologist Michael Young as a dystopian novel with the subtitle “An Essay on Education and Equality.”
Wolff was also particularly critical of John Rawls, even before A Theory of Justice was published in 1971. He observed that Rawls “was an ideological genius because he showed how one could argue from the accepted liberal premises to the ‘justice’ of gross forms of social and economic inequality.” Harsh but, “Rawls had filled a major gap that existed in American ideology, and he filled it to a tee, by providing a theory which permitted a population deeply committed to massive real inequality to feel good about themselves, because obscene differenced in wealth, power, and life-chances in their society were mere surface phenomena, which anyone with a deep understanding would see were really just expressions of profound human equality.” I cannot imagine a better description of the PMC, as originally described by Barbara and John Ehrenreich and recently described as “virtue hoarders” Catherine Liu.
A good summary of Wolff’s libertarian anarchism, something which will be required of us as the world necessarily shrinks in the coming decades is:
If you really want to understand the human world at any given time, look at the characteristic forms of reciprocity and social cooperation in the major groups; they are what hold the society together and make it able to survive and are thus preconditions for the existence of any given individual. Subjectivity, consciousness, the individual ego, the sovereign self are not basic or free-standing phenomena.
Margaret Thatcher was wrong. And while John Rawls has become a favorite of the most performative tranche of the PMC, his work is still discussed seriously, as it should be. I picked up this book earlier this month while traveling: Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? by Daniel Chandler. I have only just begun, but from flyleaf, “Taking Rawls’s humane and egalitarian liberalism as his starting point, Chandler builds a careful and ultimately irresistible case for a progressive agenda that would fundamentally reshape our societies for the better.” Probably not. The book is blurbed by Stephen Fry, who calls it “A tremendous book, timely, wise, authoritative and clear.” The very talented Mr. Fry is also on the dust jacket of What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View.
For a final gloss on a teacher, we come to Theodor Adorno, who had this view of clarity: “Everyday language is corrupt because of its integration into the existing political and economic system, and as such is itself part of an apparatus of repression…It sounds very democratic and anti-elitist to demand that authors…express themselves in ways that can be easily and immediately be understood by everyone, but only if you fail to realize that what counts as clear and comprehensible is to a significant extent limited to what is thought to be compatible with the status quo.” This is not a brief for obscurity, but yes, this is true.
A famous, in some circles, argument between Lawrence Summers and Herman Daly at the World Bank about whether the economy is bounded by the physical world and the ecosphere, or exists in a theoretical economic universe of its own, was won by Summers who said, “That’s not the way to look at it.” But the truth, here unremittingly, is finally emerging.
Shorter and perhaps less dogmatic that Adorno (who wasn’t all that dogmatic in my view) are Raymond Williams, who published Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society in 1976, and more recently John Patrick Leary has written Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (2019) and Keywords for Capitalism: Power, Society, Politics (2022; both 30% off at Haymarket Books on September 12). Language is a tool, used for good or ill, whatever its apparent clarity.
Finally, we come to Liberalism in Our World (p. 165): It is hard to see how traditional remedies of liberalism will be of any help to us in the world we now inhabit:
Our species is now committing suicide by destroying our natural environment. It seems impossible to imagine how catastrophe could be avoided without significant coercive measures directed against the major actors and institutions of our current economic system (endnote citing Andreas Malm here). “Liberalism,” in the sense in which I have been using the term in this book, is committed to the inviolability of individual taste and opinion, the need to protect maximum unfettered individual choice, and free enterprise. Anyone who, in our world, can see a viable path from this conception to a situation in which we can avoid ecological disaster has a much sharper vision than mine.”
But “we have no choice to act because of the people we are.” And we can do this through the “ethos of the Enlightenment” if not the “doctrines of the Enlightenment. This comes from Foucault (who in this context might be understood through Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown). The “ethos” designates “a set of dispositions and habits of mind and action which are centered around investigating the world around us, reflecting on experience, and questioning the beliefs people hold and the claims they make (including our own), and, if necessary, criticizing them.” This is the ethos of the true scientific method, which is a product of the Enlightenment and Liberalism. The “doctrines” are a “set of assumptions about science, progress, human psychology, the nature of goals of human society” – basically the excuses by which we live in the world of Late Neoliberalism. We can cleave to the first without necessarily endorsing the second. This is recognized by precious few scientists these days.
And this we must do. Despite The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective (emphasis added; Michael Walzer, 2023), Liberalism is the solution to nothing we face in this changing world that Liberalism hath wrought. We have work to do.