Loading summary
Transcript26 lines
- [00:00]
A
And I think what's got lost in a lot of these very abstract debates is the fact that liberalism is a set of solutions to a set of concrete real world problems and that those solutions change over time, that they vary in time and now the good fight with Jascha Monk,
- [00:25]
B
As you know, one of my abiding interests is figuring out why liberalism is in crisis today and how it is that we can renew this political tradition. Well, one of the most interesting and erudite books about this topic was recently published by Adrian Wooldridge. Adrian, a past guest of this podcast, was for a long time one of the key writers at the Economist and is now the global business columnist for Bloomberg or Bloomberg Opinion. He has written interestingly on a range of subjects, including the contested concept of meritocracy, which we discussed last time he was on the podcast. Now he has really reflected on what liberalism has to offer the modern world, how it has managed to get out of previous crises posed by industrialization, the rise of mass society, and of course, the threat of totalitarianism. Why it is that we've ended up in a serious crisis now, what the different strands of perverted liberalism are, from a neoliberal set of ideas and policies that are incapable of standing up for the broader interests of society to the identitarian attacks on liberalism that sometimes pretend to be liberal on the left. And finally, he has a set of interesting suggestions about how liberalism can renew itself, in part by regaining a moral language that promises to deal with genuine social dysfunction and is able to impose limits, moral limits as well as physical limits when it comes to it, is a wide ranging conversation. To listen to the last part of it in which we really diagnose the nature of a contemporary crisis of liberalism and what to do about it, how to respond to it, and in which I press Adrian on the title of this book, which is Centrists of the World Unite. Asking him whether there isn't a difference between liberals and centrists. Whether it is helpful to confound these two things, you need to become a paying subscriber, you need to support the work we're doing here. You need to go to writing.yashamunk.com listen and by the way, if you haven't yet set up the podcast on your favorite podcasting app, I also suggest that you go to that same link in which you can set up a private feed for the podcast if you're a subscriber, and this standard public feed if you are not on your favorite podcasting app so you don't miss Any of those episodes. That's writing.yashamunk.com Listen, thank you so much for tuning in. Adrian Wooldridge, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:31]
A
Thank you for inviting me again. Very kind of you.
- [03:35]
B
Perhaps I'll invite you for a third time, depending on how your Internet connection holds up. You know, we've both been thinking for a good while about the travails of liberalism. You know, we've both written books that are entrance into the genre of how to understand the roots of its troubles and how to imagine rejuvenation of liberalism. Tell us about this political moment. What is this political moment teaching us about the nature and the roots of liberalism?
- [04:05]
A
Yeah, I started writing the my book, you know, Centrists of the World Unite the lost Genius of Liberalism. I started writing it about four years ago because I was very worried about the state of liberalism. And as I wrote it, things got worse. I mean, throughout the whole period of writing this book, things got worse. And then it appeared. I mean, it's appearing just at the moment that the Middle east is in flames. So things are getting worse. But I also noticed as I was writing the book that quite a lot of other people were writing about liberalism as well, that liberalism had suddenly become a really big intellectual topic. And not a topic of sort of ratiocination by academics playing games with Rawls original position and things like that, but a really urgent issue because people are worried that the liberal order is fading, is failing to deal with the problems that we have at hand. And I think that is exactly what is happening at the moment. I think that urgency, that sense of crisis, that sense of urgency, that need to reconfigure, ask the question, what is liberalism and how can it be revived for a particular set of circumstances which we face at the moment is more urgent than ever.
- [05:23]
B
And in a way what you do in your book is to go back to the origins and say, what is it that liberalism actually had to offer the modern world? How is it that it dealt with previous periods of crises? And liberalism, as I've remarked repeatedly on this podcast, has gone through very serious crises in the past that it was able to adapt to by in some ways reinventing itself? How did it get into the current crisis? What is the set of factors that has led to the weakness of liberalism at the moment? And part of those are internal factors, part of that is external factors with a resurgence of autocracies and illiberal forces around the world. And then of course you have some suggestions for how liberalism can reform itself to respond to this moment. So let's make this more or less the dramaturgy of this conversation. There is a lot of instinctive anti liberalism today. I think a lot of people just blame liberalism for everything they dislike in the world, going back to the origins of the modern world. How is it that liberalism helped to create the world we have today? And how is it that it helped solve a bunch of deep problems we had? How is it that it actually made the world better through its emergence?
- [06:25]
A
Well, there is a fundamental question here, which is what is liberalism? And that is a question which philosophers and academics love to debate. And I think what's got lost in a lot of these very abstract debates is the fact that liberalism is a set of solutions to a set of concrete real world problems, and that those solutions change over time, that they vary in time, they don't vary infinitely, that there is an essence of liberalism which we have to pay attention to, but they do vary in very significant and substantial ways. And the philosophers tend to, I think, neglect that. I think liberalism comes into the world in the, let's say, the 17th and 18th centuries as a set of solutions to the following problems. One is the problem of collective identity. People are supposed to inherit their identity. People in traditional feudal society inherited their identities. The second is the problem of collective beliefs. People in pre modern, pre liberal societies were supposed to have a certain set of fixed beliefs. They belonged to confessional states and they were supposed to agree with those confessional states about fundamental things to do with the meaning of life. And the third thing was economic growth. People in traditional societies lived in fairly static times. I mean, most of human history has been fairly static. You know, you'd have 1 or 2 percentage growth over a century, not over or 10% growth over a century, let's say not over a year, as you get in some very fortunate countries today. And so what you get is in the late 18th century, let's say with the American Revolution, let's say at about the time of Adam Smith's the Wealth of nations, what you're getting is the emergence of a world that is mobile. People are moving, they're moving geographically, they're moving socially up and down the social scale. And they're moving so much that people begin to realize that mobility, motion is the essence of society rather than static inheritance. And so with individuals no longer anchored in place and in social role in the way they haven't been before they have been up until then, people begin to ask questions about what are the fundamental constituents of society? What should we believe? Where should we get our Beliefs from. And how should politics be organized? And liberals come along and say society should be based on the rights abilities of individuals and belief systems should not be dictated by the powerful. They should not be dictated by churches, and they should not. And power is something that we need to share out. It shouldn't belong to despots, needs to be. Or dynasts. I should say. It needs to be shared out. So liberalism comes along as a solution to the problem of collective beliefs, social stability versus social mobility, and the problem ultimately of power. Where does it come from? How should we allocate it? That's where liberalism starts and make the
- [09:43]
B
case for that set of things to begin with in that time, right? Like what is it? You set it out as a set of problems that liberalism solves, but looking back at the set of solutions that have a kind of common element, a kind of common core, but really are in some ways a pragmatic, emerging feature to the genuine problems of the moment. Now, why is it that that combination of things proves to have such durable appeal? Why is it that as we're looking at the problems we face today in the 21st century, with the challenge from dictators, with the rise of populism within our societies, with technological changes from the Internet and social media to artificial intelligence, why should we be looking back at that particular package of pragmatic inventions and solutions devised to meet the challenges of the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, let's say
- [10:38]
A
these solutions to these problems were not without problems, not without bloodshed. They were, you know, very difficult, difficult solutions to problems. You had the American Revolution, which is, you know, in many ways a successful solution to that problem. You divide power, you allocate rights to individuals, you constrain the power of the state, and you introduce a secular state, a wall of separation between church and state. But in the French Revolution, which is also grappling with similar sort of problems and which is advancing according to similar sort of premises about the rights of individuals, you have a very bloody solution to that set of problems. I start off this book with, you know, in many ways talking about. Talking about Erasmus as a sort of proto liberal, because he's trying to grapple with this idea of religious certainty and the way that religious certainty leads to persecution. Now, what do these insights or these arguments, why are they relevant today? I think, strangely, they're more relevant today than they have been for a long time, because we do have the return of the notion of collective beliefs, the idea that we can shout down people who don't agree with us, which we see in universities, which we see on the identitarian left, which you've written extensively about, we see the return of religious intolerance. You obviously have confessional states in Iran and other parts of the Middle east, but we also have communities within the west that have been. That are religiously intolerant, that say if you question certain religious beliefs, you should be cancelled. We have a headmaster in this country who has been in hiding for years because he tried to teach something about the Quran, which the local community took exception to. And the issue of the division of powers, the constraint of power, which was central to liberalism. Again, we have the rise of strong men. We have President Trump in the United States saying, the only limit that I'm willing to admit to what I'm going to do is my own conscience, my own set of beliefs, which is, you know, might be exactly the sort of thing that Louis XVI might say.
- [12:55]
B
Letace Trump.
- [12:58]
A
Exactly, exactly. All these issues are enormously relevant and important now. And there has been a sort of. And I think we will talk about this, but there has been a sort of period when people have thought that really what liberalism was about, the debate about liberalism was all about the relative balance of the state and the market, the role of those two things. And I don't think that's as central to liberalism as Hayekians and many libertarians would. Many neoliberals would argue. But I also would argue that it's not now what's really as fundamental to what we should be fighting for as it was, you know, the fight for limiting power, ensuring tolerance, ensuring open debates and doing away with collectivist modes. Identitarian modes of thinking are much more important to the liberal mission.
- [13:52]
B
Yeah, just a few thoughts on this. You know, one is that in some ways there's historical forces which made this question about how to deal with genuine diversity of religious beliefs and of ethnic identities very relevant in the period of the emergence of liberalism, somewhat less relevant for parts of the Post War II History of liberal states, and then much more relevant again now. And that's basically because when these states were emerging, they were on one very important dimension, extremely diverse, because even though they may have all been white, they may have all had the same ethnicity, you know, as Catholics and Protestants or various kinds of Protestant sects in some places, competing for political power and competing for influence in a framework which originally said, you know, one of these sets of worship has to be primary, and then everybody else has to submit to that. And that made for very, very high stakes for those differences, certainly in Europe and In some ways in the United States for different reasons. The post World War II period was actually quite homogeneous. It was homogeneous in Europe as a result of the ethnic cleansing. So the first half of the 20th century, which created in many places societies that were much more ethnic and religiously homogeneous than they were before. And at the same time, religious distinctions like that between Catholics and Protestants mattered less because the continent had secularized in various ways. And in America, which of course was more ethnically and religiously diverse throughout that period, there had been a real lull in immigration that had led to a much more homogeneous culture than America had either before the 1910s or after the sort of period of mass migration that you got in North America and a little bit later in Western Europe, starting the 60s and 70s, but really only gathering force in such a way that it became a principal question of politics a little bit later. And so you sort of joked a little bit about too much liberalism being the sort of domain of interpretation of Rawls. And I agree with you that a lot of the questions we're asking about are in some ways broader and more important than the work of John Rawls. But I think there's also an interesting shift within the world of work of John Rawls, which Joseph. He, for example, has talked about interestingly in the page of Persuasion recently, where A Theory of justice, his most famous work, is really about what is the right principle of distribution. And it's all about those economic questions. And it's claiming to have one kind of hegemonic answer to that, where, like, I have found the right principle of distribution and you should all get on the same page. Right. And when he realizes that liberal societies and contemporary societies are sufficiently diverse, sufficiently variegated, that you're not going to be able to get agreement about that. But just as you know, the brilliant philosophers of the past have not been able to persuade all of our contemporaries in their particular position. John Rawls was not going to be able to persuade all of his contemporaries of the great wisdom of the difference principle, his particular distributive principle. And so he has a real shift in how he talks about things when he writes political liberalism, which is all about how do we manage the fact of reasonable pluralism in society, the fact that reasonable, well meaning, intelligent people are going to come to very different beliefs about what the most meaningful way of leading the life is. And what can we say about building a society that is able to accommodate all of that diversity without opening the gates to the liberals who want to destroy it?
- [17:32]
A
Absolutely. I mean, I joked a little bit about John Rawls, and I'm not really joking about John Rawls so much as the John Rawls industry. I remember when I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1970s and lots of my friends were doing PPE and what. Which was philosophy, politics and economics. They all read John Rawls, they all read A Theory of justice, they all endlessly debated it. And it became a sort of liberalism, became all about a sort of procedural game, a game about discussing distribution. And some of the bigger issues of liberal society were ignored, and most of all the principle. I think the issue that was ignored was this issue of the clash of values, the clash of fundamental beliefs, the fact that people disagree, agree about very, very fundamental things because society at that point was very, very homogenous. You were talking about religion. What happens with religion is two things. One is secularization, that people don't believe it that much. And secondly is privatization. People retreat into the private sphere. And so religion doesn't really engage in politics that much. And everybody agrees that politics needs to be discussed in secular terms. And people don't really, you know, the sort of religion that survives tends to be it. Somebody said about Unitarianism that Unitarians believe in one God, if that. And that sort of thing triumphs. And what happens in the 20th, in the current.
- [19:03]
B
Well, the other thing that I love in retrospect, to cite the culture of your country, Adrian, is in. Yes, Prime Minister. When the Prime Minister, as is the duty of an office holder, or at least was, has to appoint a bishop.
- [19:19]
A
Yes.
- [19:19]
B
And so Humphrey, the civil servant, tells him that you don't want to appoint this bishop Prime Minister. He's a theological radical. And the Prime Minister asked, what do you mean he believes that God created the earth in six days. Evolutionists falls, that kind of thing, says, no, no, nothing as crazy as that. He believes in God.
- [19:39]
A
It's very good. I'd forgotten that. It's such a wonderful resource, that thing. So with the dawn of the 21st century, but, you know, with. With September 11th, religion returns in certain. In a. In a very fundamental way, religion returns in the form of being a hard religion that people are willing to die for. And it returns because it needs to speak in the public sphere, it wants to act in the public sphere. And now we have a, you know, a return to these fundamental liberal problems. How do we live together when we disagree about fundamental things? And that's particularly important in pluralistic societies because in the simplest term, we've had a huge injection of Muslim populations into Europe, particularly But also to some extent in the United States. And there is a clash of faiths going on which does, in many ways, you know, it does re echo the clash of faiths that was going on between Protestants and Catholics in the era when liberalism was first formed. And the liberal solution to that problem. Sorry, I'm in my talk, in my book about the Salman Rushdie affair, and the Salman Rushdie affair is a sort of pre modern thing. People are burning books because they regard those books as sacrilegious, as blasphemous, which is exactly the sort of thing that happened in the 17th century and exactly the sort of thing that, that upset the great philosophers of liberalism. And the liberal solution to this is that you dial politics down, that you lower the temperature of politics, that you say that we must agree to disagree about fundamental things. We must put limits on the power of believers to impose their beliefs on other people. We must create, not quite entirely, a neutral public sphere, but a public sphere where we can, we can engage in conversation rather than engage in biffing each other. So that's one fundamental way. So what we've argued so far is that liberalism arrives in the world as a solution to some very pressing urgent problems. Many of these urgent problems have revived, have returned. But one of the interesting things about liberalism, I think, is the way that, that it reconstitutes itself over time. And the reason I'm emphasizing this is I think we need to engage in another important process of rethinking, of re. Articulating, reconfiguring liberalism now. So what you get at the end of the 19th century, we started off talking about the 19th century, about the way that liberalism, you know, has difficulty in being born. The American Revolution, largely a successful revolution, the French Revolution, largely a failed revolution. England estranged. Strange thing, because you sort of preserve an official church, but it's basically a liberal regime that you create. By the end of the 19th century, you have a sort of, particularly in Britain, a regime of laissez faire liberalism in which liberals have agreed to establish a free market economy. They've agreed to dial down politics, so they're no longer burning each other and things like that, that they're trying to create a reasonable degree of toler tolerance. And then you get at the end of the 19th century, a lot of people coming along and saying, as they're saying today, liberalism is a dead philosophy. It's a dead philosophy because it's an individualistic philosophy. At a time when the world is being reorganized according to great masses of people. The State is becoming more powerful. It's a dead philosophy because we're discovering that individuals aren't rational agents because they have these, the subconscious mind and things like that. It's a dead philosophy because we have huge power blocks emerging in the world, conscript armies and things like that. So there's a whole series of challenges and many, many of the cleverest people of the time are saying, admitting that liberalism is dead and what liberalism does. Sorry. And finally, it's a dead philosophy because capitalism, this wonderful sort of twin of liberalism, is changing from the sole proprietor or the small company to the world of massive giant companies like Carnegie and Rockefeller and things like that, which are refining votes as well as oil and controlling the political system, saying, liberalism doesn't really exist in this world, it doesn't address these problems. And a group of liberals in both the United States and Britain come along and say, no, we have to reinvent liberalism for this new age. We have to reinvent liberalism so it's more active dealing with things like pollution, dealing with things like sewage, dealing with things like the lack of education of the working class. We have to reinvent liberalism so it can deal with big military threats from concert armies and things like that. But we need to reinvent it, and we need to reinvent liberalism so it can deal with the inheritance of vast fortunes which are concentrating enormous amounts of power in the hands of small groups of people, businessmen. But we need to reinvent it in a way that salvages the core principles of liberalism, which are individualism, which are reason, which are open debates, not destroy them. And that actually happens.
- [25:18]
B
So let's go a little bit into this crisis because that I think is really interesting. I've said in this podcast before that it feels to me like there's been three big crises of liberalism. One, around the middle of the 19th and late 19th century with the emergence of industrial capitalism. The inability of liberalism to really deal with how do you govern? Post industrial Manchester. Right, industrial Manchester, post industrial revolution Manchester. The second is the rise of totalitarianism and the form of fascism and the form of communism and the kind of competing claims on political allegiance that those ideologies make, the ways in which they reject bourgeois parliamentary democracy on principle. And then the third, I think, is the crisis we're going through right now. And we'll get back to that. You presented a little bit more, I think, as one unified crisis. I don't know if you would agree that sort of as really a separate 19th century crisis and a separate mid 20th century crisis, or whether you're thinking about them as part of one broader crisis. Perhaps that Alpine becomes a semantic question. But tell us a little bit more about these crises, in particular how liberalism responds to these charges. How does liberalism respond to the charge that it's just not capable of dealing with an industrial society in which there's a mass in parts impoverished proletariat, in which there's a few big Carnegie's and others in America, big factory owners in England and parts of continental Europe. This just have vastly more economic power than individual held before. And then the claim that, you know, the problem of democracy in its parliamentary form is that either it's just in the communist critique, the kind of fig leaf for the rule of the bourgeoisie and that sort of deals in its own interest, or in the fascist critique, you know, just too divided, too incapable of action, too incapable of really speaking for and representing the unified voice of an agonic people. How is it that liberalism really gets to the brink of extinction, particularly during that second crisis, what I'd call that second crisis, but is able to reinvent itself and to reconvince a big portion of citizens and a big portion of intellectuals, many who were the first to abandon liberalism and the last to rejoin liberalism, that this ideology in fact has a better solution?
- [27:32]
A
Well, look, there's an ongoing crisis from the middle of the 19th century whereby you have mass industrialization, you have the massification of society and you have obvious huge pools of poverty. Most of the reactions to those crises come from overt left wing people who say that we need to do something very fundamental about this. Or they come from novelists and writers who say that this is almost a spiritual crisis. We have to do something, you know, not sentimental, but we have to do something. We have to grasp what's going on and we have to do something in terms of reconstituting our whole civilization. So you have Marx writing wonderful stuff about this, but you also have Thomas Carlyle writing wonderful things, Dickens writing wonderful things about, about all of these problems. Nevertheless, the sort of the broad liberal elite, the politicians, the key liberal thinkers, basically saying we should stick with Bagehot would be a classic example of this saying we should stick with parliamentary democracy, we should stick with limited government and we should stick with the laissez faire economics. What really happens at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century which fascinates me is you get a whole bunch of liberal thinkers, self consciously liberal thinkers saying actually laissez faire is not working anymore, the limited state is not working. Anymore. You've got people like Graham Wallace who writes a wonderful book called the Great Society, which is later taken up in fascinating for fascinating reasons in the United States. Or you get somebody like Hobhouse writing books called Liberalism. So they're thinking within a liberal and TH Green reading Hegel and beginning to grapple with big questions about how to reconstitute liberalism. And these people are self conscious liberals who say, let's take this philosophy which has been so good for Britain, and reconstitute it. And they do so through something called new liberalism, which argues for a more active role of the state, particularly in providing welfare, which argues for a more active role of the state in resisting the rise of Germany, but which also says that we mustn't sacrifice fundamental liberal principles when we're doing all of these things. So that happens in America. You get a simultaneous movement in the United States of new liberals, the foundation of the magazine called the New Republic, which was an offshoot of, of this whole movement. You've got Teddy Roosevelt saying that we have to save capitalism from itself. Capitalism is being destroyed by gigantism, by gigantic corporations, by gigantic wealth, which is turning what should be a democratic republic into an aristocratic business oligarchy. And because business is much bigger in the United States than it is in Britain, so his solution is antitrust, break up the big trusts and inheritance tax. Let's try and dilute these, these huge fortunes. So in the heart of the Anglo Saxon world, which is really the laissez faire world, you get thinkers saying that we must change things. The reason I'm emphasizing thinkers so much is that what happens with this new paradigm that is developed largely by intellectuals, people at the lse, people at my old college at Oxford, Balliol, people to some extent at Harvard, Walter Lippmann is one of the communicators of this new philosophy is that it sends electricity, energy, it reinvigorates the political class.
- [31:38]
B
So what most interests me about this moment is actually the ways in which liberals had to sacrifice some of their genuine taboos in order to reinvent themselves. Right? I mean, the idea that private property was very important and that you needed to protect it from government overreach was central to liberalism and for very good reasons. Right? I mean, for centuries it was the crown that tried to appropriate for itself all of the property of its citizens and subjects for its own purposes. And centuries of European politics were about the attempts of first the aristocracy and then the bourgeoisie to create some protections for its properties against arbitrary taxation, against arbitrary extraction. And that is not just what created a lot of the space for political liberty, it's what's created a lot of growth of the 18th and 19th century because it took those secure property rights states to be able to have a system of large scale investments and so on. Right. And so now you suddenly have new demands of a state saying, you know, we should tax people a lot in order to create these new social benefits and so on. And for a lot of liberals, for reasons that at that point in history seemed very profound, that seemed like a form of surrender, Right. It's a thin end of a wedge and we're going to go back to losing all of that security of tenure of property with the terrible consequences both for the subjection of the individual to the whim of the state, but more broadly of an inability people to invest. Because who would invest if the moment you do that, you can have your property expropriated. Now at the same time you have this mounting social crisis. You have workers who don't have benefit of regulation and therefore work incredibly long hours, children being pressed into service, people having industrial accidents for which they're not appropriately compensated, and you know, becoming destitute overnight as a result. Right. And you have this incredible need for some of those economic changes. You know, I think that liberalism found a way of incorporating a defense of a welfare state, a defense of a mixed economy within the constraints of liberal theory in a very productive way, which ensured that we still have enough property rights that we have more giant corporations than we've had before, and an incredible amount of capital that is able to invest reasonably confident that it'll be able to enjoy the returns of that investment. And that's a lot of what has created the continued economic growth we've had over the last 100 years, while also having pretty generous welfare states that make sure that if you have an industrial accident, that will still affect your life negatively, but you're not going to be destitute as a result, even in the country where the welfare state is in some ways the least complete out of the advanced economies, which is the United States. But it took a real kind of wrangling with principles. And so I guess I both want you to take us inside that wrangling with principles and either now or later to answer the question, what does that mean for us? Right? I mean, what are the sacred chaos of liberalism that we might need to slaughter in this moment in order to rejuvenate the tradition? That's what it took last time. What are the things where we have trouble letting go that future generations of liberals, should they exist, inshallah, will look back on us and say, well, these were the changes that were necessary. And some idiots in the early 21st century didn't see them. But the courageous, you know, Asquiths and Churchills and, you know, whoever they turn out to be, you know, they saw that and they were able to reconcile the tradition with those changes that were necessary.
- [35:33]
A
Absolutely. I've just painted a picture of a sort of a decadent liberal elite in the Reform Club and various House of Commons and various other such places sitting on their laurels, and then a dynamic group of people like Churchill and Asquith and Lloyd George coming along and solving some problems. But you're absolutely right to pick me up on that and to say, isn't there a real debate here and aren't the real sacrifices being made? And a lot of liberals really thought that by opening the door to the welfare state, by opening the door to, you know, massed armies, by doing all sorts of things to compromise with the. With a different sort of world, by. By having antitrust legislation and the rest of it, you were sacrificing too much. You were sacrificing the precious things which had made liberalism such a dynamic set of beliefs in the 19th century. And there's a book published, I think, in 1905 by A.V. dicey, the Great British Doris, who says, well, basically, liberalism is dead. It's finished. You've destroyed it. All of these pieces of legislation which you're putting into practice bringing in are destroying this great individualist philosophy, philosophy, and goodbye to all that. Now, I think we now would recognize that that is not the case, that what the liberals manage to do is to take certain precious liberal principles and weigh them against other precious liberal principles and make a new mixture, a new compromise. It's not as though you're moving from a world of perfection into a world of imperfection. You're balancing things against each other. You're trying to create a sort of balance. And I would say the interesting example of this is the meaning of freedom. And we have Isaiah Berlin's classic statement distinguishing between freedom to and freedom from, and saying basically that the Hegelians and people in the late 19th, early 20th century play a sort of intellectual sleight of hand. And that what freedom really means is essentially the old liberal classic tense of not being interfered with by the state. I think that's the thin end of the wedge argument gone too far. And I think when people like T.H. green, who he rather mocks and derides, who's a sort of tries to marry Hegelianism with liberalism. I think the people like TH Green and the other new liberals are right to say that by providing certain goods through the state, such as free education for people who otherwise wouldn't be educated, you are advancing the cause of freedom. That, that is not an attack on individualism. That's not an attack on freedom. It's enabling people to exercise their individual abilities, rights and the rest of it in a way that is commensurate with freedom, which in other words, they're actually expanding the world of freedom, I would say.
- [38:42]
B
But Isaiah Berlin didn't object to universal primary and secondary schooling, for example, right?
- [38:48]
A
I mean, no, he didn't object to that, but he's saying that you shouldn't justify that in the name of freedom. You should justify that in the name of other things. He's saying that there's a confusion in this world, this word about freedom. And I don't think that's true. One of the things that I argue in this book is that when we're thinking about individualism, the notion of the individual. The notion of the individual, I think has been impoverished by pure sort of Hayekian style neoliberals to say that what individualism about is allowing the individual not to be interfered with by other people. And the freedom that comes from that is the sort of the freedom to go shopping. I don't think that that's really what individualism and individual freedom is about because I think there are, there are higher ends, there are lower ends. There is a whole process of self development, self improvement, which is essential to what the liberal means by individualism. So Isaiah Berlin's argument is that you're confusing terms. He would be in favor of education, primary education, and the rest of it through the welfare state. But he wouldn't be in favor of using the word freedom to. I'm more. I don't agree with that. I think that there's something about positive freedom. Obviously it can be taken to ridiculous lengths, the notion of positive freedom, but I think the freedom to realize your abilities, the freedom to exercise your talents is a very important form of individual freedom, personally.
- [40:27]
B
So let's get into that because I think it does get to an important question. I think that in different ways, both the identitarian left and the post liberal right really attack the individualist core of liberalism. I had one leading post liberal thinker on the podcast who's arguing that really the problem with liberalism is that its essence is trying to maximize autonomy above all other considerations, and that that is a huge problem. And then on the left you have somebody like Zoran Ramdami, who's so far been ruling in a way that isn't particularly illiberal, using a phrase like the joys of collectivism in his inaugural speech to contrast with a supposed sort of cold, joyless evils of individualism. Now look, I agree with you that that is based in part on the most extreme kind of renderings of that individualism within the liberal tradition by people like Ayn Rand or something like that really aren't, I think, representative of a wider tradition and in part even on caricatures of what those people think. Right? So the beginning of this is like, why do you care about individualism? And that goes back to the history of liberalism that you lay out in your book and laid out at the beginning of a conversation. When liberals start caring about the ability of the individual to make their own choices about the world, to be true to their conscience. It wasn't the idea that you should be an egoist and you shouldn't care about anybody around you in the world. And you know, true meaning consists in, you know, buying cheap clothes, is that actually each individual has a very different idea of the highest goods and of community. Right? It's because I have. I want to be in community with the people who share my religious beliefs. And you want to be in community with people who share your religious beliefs. Those religious beliefs aren't the same. And if we both think that we can only be happy if everybody else furloughs our tune, we're going to have a giant civil war, as Europe did for exactly over a century, over these questions. Right? And so the way to think about this is that we need to make sure that the state doesn't interfere with our conscience, with our worship, with our forms of being in community, precisely so that different kinds of communities can thrive in our societies. And then each person can make their own decision about the extent to which I want to be part of this community or that community, or the extent to which you want to have a community focused life. Some individuals are going to choose to have lives that are deeply embedded in the community they grew up in. Other individuals are going to choose to live lives that are deeply embedded in different communities that they choose later in life. And other individuals may choose to have lives that are quite autonomy seeking and self maximizing, in search of self expression. And that is their right too. But it's not. Liberals don't have a preference between those three options. They don't Say a good society is one where everybody abandons the religion of their ancestors or chooses a different religion or doesn't have any religion at all. A good society is one where the state and the pressures of society don't impose on you that decision. Right now, it's not clear to me to go back to Isaiah Berlin, and we don't need to make it a debate about Berlin, that that's not compatible with a broadly negative conception of liberty. I think everything I've said so far is perfectly compatible for negative conception of liberty. And I think it's also compatible to say, and then, by the way, in order for people to actually grow up to be adults who can exercise those kind of choices, you need to have a primary and secondary education. You need to have a basic welfare state so that people don't grow up in such poverty that intellectual development is stunted. And, and by the way, it's good for everybody to make sure that we educate future citizens so that they can defend the political systems and understand it and so that they can earn good incomes that keep society affluent. So I think all of that you can sort of derive from negative liberty. Then you can say, well, other things matter too. It's not just liberty that matters, which is one point that Isaiah Berlin makes. And then it comes to the question of positive liberty. And as I recall, Isaiah Berlin, it's been a few years since I've reread that article. The concern is really one about coercion, right? The concern is really one that once you say you don't just understand liberty as an absence of constraints from the world around you to what you can do, you understand liberty as living life in the right ways of fully exercising your autonomy. It's actually the positive conception of liberty, according to Berlin, that is autonomy seeking. That sense, then it becomes very easy to say, I know you think you want to be secular, but actually that's not how to lead a meaningful life. The way to lead a meaningful life is to be a good Christian. And so in your interest, we're going to force you to be a good Christian, or to say, you know, you think that all you want is to be a private individual who enjoys, you know, playing computer games and so on, but actually the truly meaningful life is to be a part of the proletariat as a universal class. And so we're going to force you to partake in the political activities and the proletariat, because that's where true freedom lies. And I take it that Isaiah Berlin is precisely responding to the pressures of a totalitarian age to the sense that the joys of collectivism is what really defines society and you need to partake in them in order to have a meaningful life. It's like, no, no, no. That is where you get into the danger zone, where the kind of claim of political elites that they know what true freedom consists in for you creates the fig leaf for the worst forms of state coercion that in a very real way we have just from the perspective of cyber Berlin, lived through with
- [46:14]
A
fascism and with communism, of course, and I can sympathize with that. But it's a sort of thin end of the wedge argument in the sense that obviously some terrible people, some terrible state actors have used the notion of positive freedom to coerce people, say, unless you agree with me, then you're, you know, a terrible person and doing the wrong things. But I think there is a sense of saying that our freedom to pursue our own preferences is not enough in itself, because there's a question of what those preferences are. And those preferences can be high or low. And what liberal education is all about. And I'm going to talk about this a little bit, what liberal education is all about is shaping our preferences so that they're aesthetically and socially good rather than bad preferences. Now, to go back to revert to your original point about the people that you've talked to, post liberals and left wing identitarians, if we want to call them that, or left people who are critical of liberalism from the left. If they say that the problem with liberalism is that it's a shallow philosophy, doesn't address things like meaning, it doesn't deal with really interesting questions. Well, that is something that I sympathize with, those people saying that, because that has been the position of all too many bits of the liberal establishment, particularly the neoliberal establishment, the libertarian establishment that they have said, well, basically what we must do is maximize autonomy and we must construct a society which gives primary aim to consumer choice. So if you think about our education policies in the last few years, there's been an enormous emphasis on vouchers or on choice or internal markets and things like that, treating the parent or the child as a consumer. That's been what sort of one associates, you know, this era of education policy with. And I think if you go, and I think so, I sympathize with them, but I think that they're attacking something which is not fundamental to liberalism, which is based on a misreading of liberalism. If you go back to John Stuart Mill, A wonderful, brilliant writer. Go look at what he says in On Liberty. Look at what he says in his autobiography. He has a much more richer notion of what personal autonomy means. He has this radical, you know, he has this radical break with the utilitarians and with Bentham in particular, and says that there are higher and lower. Bentham famously said basically that there's no difference between push pin I video games and poetry. You know, there's, you know, the individual is a machine, it's seeking satisfaction and that's all there is to the world. That's a view that re emerges with modern neoliberalism. Mills says no poetry is better than pushpin, that there are certain preferences that we should have. And his view is a. That you need to educate those preferences. You need to make sure that the child, as it grows up, is taught that certain things are good, certain things are bad, and that certain aesthetic values are worth pursuing because they make our life more fulfilling. But he also says, I think that there is. He's very influenced by Coleridge and Coleridge has this notion of this sort of clerity, what he calls the clerisy. And these are people who devote their lives to transmitting higher values, culture, teaching in schools, in universities, the value of, you know, the true and the just and the beautiful and all of those sorts of things. So liberal education is a moment of taking sort of animals, people with a whole bunch of basic desires and turning them into fully formed human beings. And that involves more than just in order to make them free, you have to educate them. And that's an education that must be sustained by a certain. A culture, essentially a culture that is kept alive by a group of people in intellectual traditions. And I think that that's what TH Green is arguing for, and that's something that really matters. In our defense of liberalism against the post liberals and the identitarian left states, if you're concerned about the meaning of life, then liberalism has an answer. But the answer doesn't lie in imposing beliefs from outside. It doesn't lie in getting rid of all property. It doesn't line nationalizing things, doesn't lie in community. It lies in the cultivated individual who is an individual, who is treated as an individual. But it's this notion Bildung, you know, self development, all this sort of stuff in Humboldt, I think is absolutely central to what liberalism is about.
- [51:47]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a good fight. In the rest of this conversation, we go further into analyzing the roots of a contemporary crisis of liberalism, and we discuss some of Adrian's suggestions for how to resolve it. We talk about how it is that liberal societies can get to a sensible middle ground between being judgmental of anybody who has an addiction and just allowing tent encampments to take over our cities, being empathetic towards people who, for one reason or another may have ended up in sex work and pretending that that is a wonderful life choice that is going to serve most people well. How is it that we can avoid the dangers of anarcho tyranny? And finally, we talk about how to distinguish liberalism and centrism. The title of Aidan's book is Centrist of a World Unite. I press him a little bit on whether or not liberals don't need people from, yes, the ideological center, but also from the left and also from the right to get on board with the basic liberal vision of a world for liberalism to become once again the operating system of society. To listen to that part of the conversation to support the work we're doing here, please go to writing.jaschamung.com listen and become a paying subscriber. Thank you so much for listening, Sam.