Can sucking up make you free?

Daniel Oppenheimer has a very thoughtful essay on Mark Lilla and Corey Robin in the Washington Monthly. Among his observations is this: "Modern secular liberal society, of the sort Lilla prefers, will survive and flourish only if it’s able to reckon with the insights of those who critique and reject its premises. In fact it’s one of the necessary virtues of liberal society, for Lilla, that it’s capable of reckoning and sometimes even reconciling with its critics and haters. It’s also one of the responsibilities of liberal intellectuals to act as facilitators of this process." I think this really does get at the self-conception of many liberal intellectuals.

But then there is also this: "From this perspective an intellectual like Robin, who conspicuously rejects that conciliatory role, makes sense as a villain. And yet by this standard of villainy, many of the reactionary intellectuals whom Lilla respects and even admires would count as villains. These were people who had no interest in serving modernity, or contributing to its stability, because they saw it as hollow or rotten at its core, not worth serving or shoring up. They were not, in other words, liberal intellectuals, and had no desire to be. I would guess that Robin would say the same of himself, though from a very different ideological vantage point than most of Lilla’s subjects. So why not extend to him, and to the class of left-wing intellectuals of whom he’s fairly representative, the same intellectual courtesy, the same kind of sensitive, nuanced, historically informed and emotionally reserved critical treatment that Lilla is able to give to the subjects of his book, from whom he has more distance, either in time, space or ideology?"

Yes, why not? Why are many liberal intellectuals more understanding and sympathetic -- and astute -- readers of the anti-liberal Right than of the anti-liberal Left?

This has me thinking of an argument Philip Pettit makes in "On the People's Terms." Arguing against Isaiah Berlin's conception of freedom as non-interference, Pettit subjects it to what he thinks is a reductio ad absurdum. He argues that, if we are free so long as we are not being coerced or threatened, then this entails "that ingratiation -- toadying, kowtowing, and cosying up to the powerful -- can give you freedom of choice." It is not a very charitable or sympathetic thought, I admit, but I wonder if what Pettit thinks an absurdity is not actually a sincerely held belief of many liberal intellectuals: that getting cosy with the powerful can make you free.

When Lilla attacks Robin, when Jonathan Chait attacks young leftists, the animating intuition is that if the outsiders, rebels, and radicals of the world would just be nice to those in positions of power, their complaints would, if not evaporate, at least be significantly ameliorated. They can put themselves easily in the shoes of those who rule and govern, and can appreciate that ruling is hard. They also think that large differentials of power and wealth are inescapable, and so we ought to mitigate their dangers by attending to the resentments and complaints of the wealthy and powerful, to keep them in good humour lest they desire to employ their wealth and power more intrusively and despotically. And, from where they stand, why would they think otherwise?

My Research

In a recent discussion with a colleague, I was asked to articulate my current research interests, and I thought it would be worthwhile to expand and write down what I said.

In the first place, I am motivated by a certain fidelity to particular figures in the history of political philosophy--Marx and Aristotle, primarily--to defend the honor and virtue of their thinking. I believe that most and the most readily accessible interpretations of these thinkers are quite strikingly bad. I find Capital and the Nicomachean Ethics to be incredibly compelling works, but when I turn to the characterizations of these works that are found in much of the secondary literature or that function as shorthand in general discussions of political and ethical philosophy, I find them to be unintelligible or incoherent or banal.

I take this mismatch to be at least in part the consequence of Marx and Aristotle standing not merely outside but in opposition to the main current of modern political philosophy that stretches from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Habermas. It is Aristotle and Marx above all others who have served that tradition as enemies the denial of whom defines and cements the community of interlocutors. The refusal of Aristotle's politcal naturalism was just as necessary for early modern theorists of sovereignty, contract, and civil society, as the refusal of Marx has been for 19th and 20th century thinkers of liberalism, proceduralism, and the legal codification of rights.

This refusal comes at a price, since the modern conceptual framework that has grown up around the artifactual state (sovereignty, general will, property, claim rights, mechanisms of enforcement, representation, personality, etc.) functions as a grid of intelligibility, a set of landmarks by which to recognize and respond to theoretical assertions, but it is a grid that is largely alien to the thought of those refused thinkers, Aristotle and Marx.

Therefore, the first aspect of my research is merely to attempt to read Aristotle and Marx on their own terms, and to develop, to the extent that I am capable, a compelling account of their political thought that begins from those points where the modern grid of intelligiblity fails to grasp them. To some extent, this involves a sort of artificial naivite, an approach to their texts that seeks to identify and begin from the phenomena they themselves begin from, instead of taking any contemporary question or recognized problem as a beginning point and then seeking an answer or resolution in Marx or Aristotle. The latter method risks importing precisely the mainstream conceptual framework that I claim makes Marx and Aristotle so difficult to understand. To this extent, then, my method of reading must owe something to a sort of Heideggerian phenomenology that seeks first the pragmata of the text being read, attempting to suspend or bracket the questions and claims of mainstream political theory (basically, contemporary liberalism).

On the other hand, however--and this leads me to the second aspect of my research--the political theories of Marx and Aristotle are not simply outside modern liberalism, they are opposed to it. Therefore, there must be points of critical contact between the mainstream discourse and the discourses produced by Marx and Aristotle. Thus, at some point, the naivite must be put aside and the project of rediscovery must become a project of critique. Once Marx and Aristotle have been rearticulated to a certain level of concreteness, I feel the need to intervene in the contemporary mainstream in order to press on certain perceived weak spots in that discourse: its lingering technocratic flavor, its reduction of politics to the state with its laws and administrative functions, its reduction of all ruling to domination or the right to coerce, its assumption that needs and desires are pre-politically and privately articulated, etc.

As a particularization of this critical project--and this is the third and final aspect of my research--I am especially interested in political violence, both as a phenomenon and as a problem for liberal/modern political theory. You could say that the whole problematic of the modern state has been organized around the hypothesis that violence could be minimized or even eliminated by being concentrated or monopolized. A daring and dubious hypothesis!

Built into the modern political problematic are a host of such daring and dubious hypotheses: that violence is identical with coercion; that violence is therefore fundamentally a problem of the will (rather than of the body, or of life, or of measure, or...); that violence is therefore essentially a problem of the borders between soverign wills; that violence can only be authorized by a prior (necessarily unauthorized) violence; that legitimate (authorized) violence is not really violence at all (so, for example, the criminal wills his or her own punishment); that, therefore, violence as such (the unauthorized--but this is redundant--violation of a will) is always wrong and is to be reduced to an absolute minimum; that the wrongness of violence consists in its injustice (rather than its immoderation, its ugliness, its...). There are surely more.

Even some of the most cogent critics of modern political philosophy--I'm thinking of Arendt here--subscribe to the identificcation of violence with coercion, which seems to me to be entirely without justification (that is, I've never found anyone who even attempts to justify this identification, which is not to say that such a justification could not be given, just that no one seems to feel the need).

I think both Aristotle and Marx (and sundry post-Marx Marxists) approach violence with very different basic assumptions, and that the perspective afforded by these different assumptions might go a long way towards rethinking the place or non-place of violence in politics. I'll try to lay out some of these differnet assumptions in future posts.

Anyway, there we are: my research interests. Any thoughts, questions, pointers, criticisms?

Anti-Liberalism and Political Theory

I just read something I probably should have read years ago, Stephen Holmes' "The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought." (It was blown up into a book, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, I believe.) Since I definitely consider myself an anti-liberal in some sense (Aristotelian, and hence "conservative," but also Marxist, and hence "radical"), I feel a bit silly for having missed Holmes' essay until now.

Holmes claims "to identify twenty fundamental fallacies or intellectual failings of antiliberalism: six theoretical confusions and fourteen historical errors." That's quite a bit to tackle. I'll say only this about the "fourteen historical errors": I'm sympathetic to Holmes' point on some of these, but he seems, in the midst of his list, to forget that he is supposed to be pointing out historical errors. That is, he begins by pointing to claims anti-liberals make about the liberal tradition that distort the history of that tradition (no liberal actually believes in pre-social human beings, for example), but then he ceases making historical claims at all, and reverts to supposed conceptual confusions (like the anti-liberal skepticism about state neutrality).

Leaving those fourteen points aside, however, what about the six basic theoretical or conceptual confusions? As I understand them, they are:

1. Anti-liberals criticize liberalism by appeal to some sort of ideal community, but never flesh out the institutions of that community in enough detail to allow for comparison; they get their gauzy ideal, while liberals have to defend a richly detailed and specific set of institutions and rules.
2. Anti-liberals make an is/ought error, "deducing" the value of social life from the fact of social life, which is morally neutral. They do not differentiate good sociality from bad sociality.
3. Similarly, they do not acknowledge the possibility of virtuous self-interest. Anti-liberals conflate selflessness with good and selfishness with bad.
4. Anti-liberals vacillate between 1) provocative but indefensible claims about some form of society that is to replace liberal society and 2) defensible but trivial claims about the forms of community that should supplement liberal society.
5. Anti-liberals vacillate between saying that liberal theory is wrong (that society isn't really what liberal theory says it is) and saying that liberal theory is an unfortunately correct description of what society has become.
6. Anti-liberals behave as if a theoretical critique of liberal theory will itself do the work of reforming society.

I'm very sympathetic to (6); it's basically an application of The German Ideology. Anti-liberal academics are ideologues and idealists. Hard to argue with that.

I'm also sympathetic, to some extent, with (3), but it hardly seems to be a complaint about anti-liberalism as such. Rather, that seems to be an attack on a certain Christianity that pervades normative discourse. Certainly it cannot be applied to Aristotelians--we love ourselves best! This also sits uneasily with Holmes' own (correct) assertion that a "self-exception taboo" is central to liberalism. Conflating self-regarding behavior with bad behavior is problematic, I agree, but conflating self-excepting behavior with bad behavior is not obviously less problematic. Erecting fairness as the moral absolute is just as questionable as is erecting selflessness as such.

The other "confusions" (1, 2, 4, 5) all seem to be of a piece, and strike me as methodological. Here it seems to me that Holmes wants anti-liberals to play the same game that liberals play (a bit of righteous indignation at what he perceives as self-excepting behavior?). Liberal political theory (and political life) centers on discussing the rules and procedures we all should agree to follow, and the institutions that would best embody and secure the acceptance and stability of said rules. Basically, Holmes wants anti-liberals to join in that discussion. He says to anti-liberals: tell us more about this community you want, about its rules and institutions, its decision-making criteria for the use of state coercion, etc. When anti-liberals don't join this conversation, he accuses them of playing unfairly, of criticizing liberalism without opening themselves up to the same critical scrutiny.

This is obviously the complaint in (1) and (4), but I think it is also at work in his complaints about what I would call anti-liberalism's appeal to authenticity. Holmes thinks there is an is/ought error (2) or an outright contradiction (5) at work whenever anti-liberals say something to the effect that liberal society is not a "real" society, or that an authentic community acknowledges itself in ways that liberal society cannot. But, while "become what you are" is a paradoxical ethical demand, this does not mean that it is a nonsensical ethical demand. Or, if it is, then I doubt that liberalism can escape this nonsense any more than anti-liberalism can, despite the fact that the structure of the liberal theory game posits the ideal as something we can articulate outside of and prior to our action that would implement (or approximate) that ideal. Kant and the Kantian strand of liberal theory have always been on-board with the immanence of the norm to the domain ruled by the norm.

Anyway, have other thoughts about Holmes' article, but this is long enough already. I will say just one more thing: I've been reading a lot of very defensive liberals recently. George Sher's Beyond Neutrality opens with this astonishing bit about how "todays liberal thinkers are waging a necessary and courageous battle on behalf of certain vital but embattled Enlightenment attitudes," a battle against the dark forces of postmodernism, which would "reduce all political and intellectual disagreements to so much jockeying for power and advantage." Holmes' essay fairly drips with a similar sense of being embattled; one of his points against the anti-liberals is that they "uniformly underestimate the fragility and beleagueredness of the liberal tradition." Has this defensiveness passed out of liberalism? Was this just a symptom of the times (Holmes wrote in 1989 and Sher in 1997)? Was liberalism really so precarious (as a political theory) so recently? It just seems incredible to me now.