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- [00:01]
A
Fox News is now streaming live on Fox 1. When news breaks, we don't just report it. We go beyond the headlines to get the full story. Get live coverage in depth analysis and perspectives from the voices you trust all in one place. Whether you're at home or on the go. Stay connected to the stories shaping our world stream. Fox News on FOX one Download Today I think Hayek and you are right to see careers open to talents as something that should make our heart sing because it gives people in all their diversity an opportunity to do whatever it is that they, you know, would get something from. And it can be, you know, running something that has intellectual or artistic focus, or it can be just something people really like to do. And in illiberal societies that's not present or it's present much less. And both the left wing and the right wing attack on liberalism devalue careers owing to talents and now the Good
- [01:13]
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Fight with Yasha Monk. My guest today is Cass Sunstein. Cass is the Robert Walmsley University professor at Harvard University. He has served in a variety of very senior roles in both the Obama and the Biden administrations, is one of the most influential legal scholars working today, and is the author, most recently of a book called On In Defense of Freedom. So you can see why why I wanted to have him on the podcast. In today's conversation, we start out by trying to understand what liberalism isn't. I challenge Cass with the left wing criticism of liberalism, that it is just an excuse for the kind of rapacious neoliberal capitalism which ends up inducing inequality and injustice. And with the most prominent current right wing criticism of liberalism, the claim that it prizes a search for self discovery and autonomy which ultimately erodes the bonds which make societies work, that it is in some ways self cannibalizing. Cass has very interesting and perhaps I would say persuasive responses to those criticisms. But we also start to talk in the last part of the conversation about his own affirmative defense and definition of liberalism, in particular why we should follow John Stuart Mill in thinking about liberalism as offering to citizens experiments in living and why we should reject a perfectionist liberalism which says that the only worthwhile way to live is to really pursue self discovery and why those two things seemingly potentially in conflict actually go logically together. To listen to that part of a conversation, please support this podcast Gain access to all full episodes of the Good Fight and the new Good Fight Club format in which a panel of your favorite voices tries to make sense of the news event of the last week. Please go to jasamung.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. K. Hansten, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:55]
A
Thank you so much. A pleasure to be here.
- [03:58]
B
I really enjoyed thinking with you about the nature of liberalism. And I realized that trying to explain liberalism involves two tasks, the first of which perhaps is more difficult than the second. It involves explaining to people what liberalism is, of course, but perhaps the more difficult part is explaining to people what liberalism isn't. What do you think are some of the main misconceptions about what liberalism is that have become prominent in our political discourse and help explain why so many people are. Are skeptical about liberalism?
- [04:32]
A
Okay, so some people on the left think that liberalism means markets are the best thing in the history of things, and that if you have free markets and trade and open borders and one world government, then that's fantastic if the one world government is respectful of markets. So on the left, there's an identification of liberalism with inequality and, let's say, unrestricted capitalism, that kind of thing. On the right, the thought is that liberalism and the Playboy philosophy, according to Hugh Hefner back in the 70s, are the same, and that liberalism means everyone could have sex with everybody else and the family's terrible. And if you want to choose to put up a deep fake of someone doing something they never did, that's sexual, that's freedom, and if you want to sleep with someone, go for it, regardless of basically anything else. So the right identifies liberalism with a kind of freedom gone promiscuous or license, and the right identifies liberalism with the sanctification of, let's say, one conception of capitalism.
- [06:02]
B
Great. So let's delve into each of these, because I think you're right, that those are in some way the main lines of attack on liberalism from the left and the right, respectively. So on the left wing critique, that is the attacks on neoliberalism, that is the idea that liberalism is a worship of a market which makes any constraints on inequality, equality, disappear, that it is standing in the way, in some significant respect, of a more equal society, a more redistributive society. As you point out, there are many flavors of liberalism, and liberalism itself is agnostic about much of economic policy. You can have very redistributive politics, like you do in Scandinavia. You can even have some things you might call socialism, like one of the forms of economic organization to which John Rawls was at least open. At the same time, you also do make clear that there is a line that the moment you have monopolies, but also the moment you have a state run economy. That is probably when liberals get off board. Why is that the case? Where's the outer limit of how left wing you can be and still remain a liberal? And what's your logic for saying, well, once you have a form of central planning, bed really is no longer compatible with a liberal society?
- [07:33]
A
Right. Okay, so thank you for emphasizing the diversity of liberal views. I almost called the book Big Tent Liberalism, though no one else thought that was a good idea. So you can be very pro Ronald Reagan and be a liberal, or you can be very pro Franklin Delano Roosevelt and be a liberal, just as you say. So there's a diversity of views. If you believe in monopolies, that's illiberal. So to your point, the idea that we would favor private monopolies, let's say over whatever social media, that's an illiberal idea. Liberals like pluralism and they like diversity, and monopolies aren't consistent with that. If you a state run economy, liberals get off the train also because for broadly Hayekian reasons, though you can reject Hayek himself and be a liberal. For broadly Hayekian reasons, the relationship between freedom and pluralism in a state run economy is, as the teenagers used to say. I won't use the relevant tone of voice, but awkward. So a state run economy is in itself going to be incompatible with liberal commitments to pluralism and diversity, and it's highly likely to run into liberal commitments to freedom. So occupational freedom, choice of what you're going to do in life, that's a liberal idea. A state run economy, a la communism or fascism, tends not to be open to careers, open to talents, and that's something liberals cherish.
- [09:16]
B
One of the things you say in the book, I think, is you love Hayek, but you love Mill more than Hayek. So Hayek has shaped your thinking, but John Stuart Mill has done so even more. I'm struck by the fact that even though I studied the history of political thought as an undergraduate and did a PhD in political theory, I don't think I encountered Hayek in any of my classes. I encountered the name, of course he was a kind of figure somewhere in the general intellectual background, mostly dismissed negatively with a snide comment here or there. I'm not sure that the road to Serfdom was assigned in any of my classes or another word or page of Hayek's writing. And I wonder whether some of the listeners to this podcast have had the same experience. So perhaps we can do a very quick excursus and Tell us about that second love of yours after World War II. It felt during the war as though it had proven the efficacy of central planning. The Soviet Union was a major player at that time, probably at one of its highest ebbs relative to the United States in the entire 20th century. Countries like Britain were in many respects run on central planning in the late 40s and 50s, and most intellectuals were arguing that central planning was the future. And Hayek comes in and argues not just for the inefficiency of central planning, which proved to be obviously right, if you think about the trajectory of China over the course of the late 20th and early 21st century, for example, but also the reasons why it is incompatible with freedom in a more fundamental way. Do you mind just sort of giving us a two minute precis of that argument?
- [11:03]
A
Great pleasure. So let me tell you a story, a Hayekian story, and then we'll get to Hayek in particular. So when I was in the White House, I. My job was to oversee federal regulation and we had ambitious plans for fuel economy standards. And one of our set of standards would go for a run of approximately 10 years. And as I recall, my reaction to that was that what is the appropriate fuel economy standard three years from now, four years from now, five years from now is extremely difficult to know, let alone eight, nine, ten years from now. That's a Hayekian point for reasons we'll get to in a moment. So I said we need a midterm review just to make sure that our ideas at day one are consistent with how the situation's trending. We might be too unambitious with respect to fuel economy standards, we might have overshot the market and we just don't know.
- [12:01]
B
And presumably that's because there's a trade off there. And the extent of the trade, of the nature of the trade off depends on the state of the technology. Where you could build a car today that's three miles a liter, I'm forgetting the right ballpark. You could do that today, but it would be incredibly expensive and the car would cost $7,000 more and the speed of a car would be very severely impacted. Or you could, but in five years it may be that that only adds $500 to the price of a car. And so depending on the state of the underlying technology, a different level of ambition is going to be appropriate. Is that the basic underlying thought?
- [12:38]
A
Exactly, exactly. Thank you for that. So how much fuel economy is sensible to require depends on technology, and the government is going to have that knowledge at an early day. Because life outruns expectations. And that's a Hayekian point. Now let's get to Hayek. So his great insight is in a paper called the Uses of Knowledge in society from the 1940s. It was not really about freedom in the large. It was about how central planners can't know what markets know. And the idea was knowledge is really dispersed. So if you're selling laptops or shoes or tables, the amount of information that's out there about those things on the part of consumers and producers and everyone else involved in the market is massive. And even if you have a central planner who's incredibly smart and completely honest and well motivated, they just can't know what markets know. And this is the point of the story that in one year, let's say 2025, you can't know what markets are going to know in 2035. And it's really going to be hard to know what markets are going to know in 2026. And so Hayek's argument was that knowledge is really dispersed in society. And that is a plea for the use of markets and the price system, which he called almost with awe and reverence, he called the price system as a marvel. It adapts information, adopts and adapts information, and it also changes over time. So if it turns out there's some new technology with respect to AI or cars that comes in unanticipated, then the market is going to go boom with that and the central planner is going to be kind of clueless about what to do with that. And that's Hayek's idea. Now, I see that as fundamental to liberal thought. Hayek was the greatest exponent of it and a defining figure in the history of liberalism. But there were others who kind of were there. Adam Smith was a little bit there, not as systematic as Hayek. So was Ludwigon Bezos. This is a strand of the liberal tradition that is pro market. And notice we're not saying anything about neoliberalism and get the government away. We're just making a fundamental but kind of mundane point about how knowledge is dispersed. Now Hayek, in the Road to Serfdom, his great book about freedom, said that governments that start engaging in central planning end up not being happy with freedom generally, that the road of the economic tool of central planning is a hazard, hazardous role. It's the road to tyranny. Serfdom is a better word than tyranny because he put the spotlight not on the ruler, but on the ruled. And serfdom is not a bad term, I think Hayek, we need to be a little careful about the prediction that central planning leads to serfdom. It's not the worst prediction in the world. There are places that have central planning but have a high degree of freedom. You can do that. But the fundamental point Hayek made about the liberal order being one that accommodates freedom and pluralism through markets that accommodate zillions of people, that is something every student should understand.
- [16:15]
B
It feels to me like there's three kinds of arguments at play here and I want to disentangle them and help you think me through the one whose import I'm least certain about. The first is just the economic argument that the system of supply and demand is his marvel, which is easy to overlook. And what's marvelous about it is that it does these incredibly fine adjustments without any individual having to have heroic intelligence. Traders are very, very smart and shrewd people, but they look at what the prices of similar goods are at stores down the road. They have good information networks, they don't have to have an mba and they certainly don't have to do any advanced math. And yet by the agency you have this incredibly efficient price adjustment mechanism which matches goods to people without waste or flux, much less waste than you would have in central planning. And that's kind of marvelous. I think that argument is relatively clear and straightforward. I think the second argument may have been mildly overstated by Hayek, as you said, it may be that in certain circumstances, at least for a while, you can avoid straight out serfdom of central planning. But I think the basic logic of it is very compelling to me, which is simply that you do not want a society in which you're only dependent on the goodwill of one person. Person actually, though they don't use it in that way. The theorists like Philip Pattit and Quentin Skinner were worried about freedom as non domination. Should really be thinking a lot about this. You know, if there is central planning, that means that there is only one central planner. And that means that any participant in the economy is deeply dependent on their goodwill. You know, this is something that my grandparents and my parents experience experienced in socialist Poland, which is that when they fell foul of the goodwill of the regime, they didn't just lose political positions, they didn't just lose prestige in the society, they lost their jobs, they lost their place at the university. Because your thriving in the society is only dependent on one actor and that actor is the government. And so perhaps in some world you can have a government with that much power over every aspect of individuals. Lives over the housing, over their job, over their educational opportunities, and they restrain themselves in such a way that they never use that for ill. But absolute power corrupts absolutely in institutions as well as in individuals. And it's very hard to think that this is a sensible set of arrangements if you want to preserve free freedom over time. It is just concentrating too much power in the hands of one set of actors. And that to me is sort of a core argument, which I buy, which I'm quite convinced by. I think there's a third argument which is a little bit more complicated, which is that you also give taking away some of the freedom of people by constraining the economic activity. Right. I mean, doing this podcast provides me with some amount of income, not a huge amount of income, but it's an economic activity. But the main reason I'm doing this, the main reason I care about it, is not that it helps me pay my rent, it's that I get to speak to Cass Sunstein and engage with my audience about these really interesting topics. And if this was the system of central planning and somebody said, sorry, you have to have a permit to engage in that kind of work, what it would do is not just, to me, I make a little bit less money every month. It would deprive me of one of my core intellectual outlets and forms of engagement that I deeply prize. And of course, that's true in all kinds of other ways. If you love teaching and the central planner says, unfortunately, your political opinions are such. But we don't want to entrust you with teaching young, impressionable minds. You may not just be out of a job, you may not just struggle to pay rent. One of your life's purposes is being denied to you. And the same is true at every scale. If you want to run a certain kind of store, and there's a regulation that stops you from running that store, that might also undermine your life's purpose in some important way. And so here, I think, is an argument where a sort of Hayekian strand of argument does start to push in a slightly libertarian direction, does start to really point out the heavy cost of regulation. Obviously it's going to be things from the other side, right? If regulation is needed so that you don't operate a hugely unsafe store in which half of your visitors have falls into a basement and die, right? We're going to recognize those things on the other side. But how much should we weigh that argument about the expressive quality of. Of economic activity as something that should really push us nearly in a kind of Libertarian direction in this respect.
- [21:15]
A
I completely love that. I thank you for it and I'll work with some stories. So I was in China decades ago and there were people who were repairing shoes on the street. And I had a shoe that was a little broken and one of the people repaired it. It had some English and. And I talked to that person about this and the person was making what at that time in China was like a lot of money repairing shoes and they didn't work for the government. And so I asked about that and they said, you know, we have an initiative. He said with, you know, joy, we have an initiative now where small businesses I can just go and fix shoes. He said, I really like doing it and I'm making money and I'm not working for the government. And it was clearly, you know, it wasn't art, was kind of a really artistic fixing of my shoe by my lights. But it was something that gave his life energy that it wouldn't otherwise have. So that's one story. A second story is I have someone in my family actually who has a regular job and likes it fine and makes a living, but who wants to be creative. And he's making movies and the government doesn't have to authorize him to make movies and they're being made available and he's good at it. And my gosh, what a free country that he can make movies. I also have a friend who works for a consulting firm who likes it fine but really wants to run a bookstore. That's her dream. And you can tell when she talks about her consulting work, it pays the bills. When she talks about the bookstore, she starts to smile and she's in Europe now. I don't know what the constraints. She's in a free country, Germany. I don't know what the constraints are on opening a bookstore, but it's just to your point.
- [23:12]
B
Well, one of the constraints in Germany is that you cannot compete on price in books. There's a very old law saying that every store has to offer the same book for the same price. I think there may be exceptions for books that are remainder that are particularly old in this I agree. It's a sensible regulation because it allows more bookstores to persist. Otherwise bigger books bookstores would outcompete or something like that. But this is just things. That's interesting. One of the constraints that she likely faces.
- [23:36]
A
Yeah, that's fascinating. And as an author, maybe this is against interest, but the idea of competing on price is a really good thing, including for books as for apples. So price Competition. Hooray for that. But to your point, this suggests Rawls talks about. Great liberal philosopher John Rawls talks about careers open to talents as a thing. But it's clearly. I think the tone is that it's important, but it's not what makes his heart sing. But I think Hayek and you are right to see careers open to talents as something that should make our heart sing, because it gives people in all their diversity an opportunity to do whatever it is that they would get something from. And it can be, you know, running something that has intellectual or artistic focus, or it can be just something people really like to do. And in illiberal societies, that's not present or it's present much less. And both the left wing and the right wing attack on liberalism devalue careers omen to talents.
- [24:49]
B
So let's take Sweden, or rather let's not take the empirically existing Sweden, but what Jerry Cohen called Sweden, some idealized form of Sweden in this society. Let's stipulate you have a lot of free economic activity. It's true, incidentally, that Sweden has a high number of billionaires per capita than does the United States. You reign in regulation. You obviously have some regulation, but the state doesn't run wild. You don't have lots of needless regulation as you now do in virtually every Western democracy. Unfortunately, you allow for all of this economic activity, but then you have strong taxes that redistribute a lot of money to the pro Western society. You make sure that they have great educational opportunities, you make sure that you have a good health system, even for those who wouldn't ordinarily be able to pay for it, et cetera. That presumably is compatible with liberalism. How much further can you go? Is that the outer limit? Sort of. Where does liberalism start to say, now you're really starting to infringe on the liberal society? Which doesn't mean that the whole society becomes wholly liberal. Presumably liberalism is not a one or a zero. It's a question of degrees, but sort of. Do any of these elements start to infringe on liberalism already? High taxes in themselves in some kind of way undermining economic liberty? How would you assess this? How much further might left wing liberal thinker want to go?
- [26:17]
A
To be a liberal society, we need freedom of speech, we need freedom of religion, we need respect for pluralism, and we need respect for diversity. So if Sweden, or Sweden is very redistributive, has high taxes, lots of regulation, so far we've been able to check a lot of liberal boxes. If the regulation and taxes are, are veering toward a command economy, then we start to look illiberal on the pluralism and diversity side. If it just means there's private property and people can start their businesses and there's liberty to do that, but the tax rate is super high, maybe there's corporate taxes that are really high and there's a lot of redistribution from rich to poor that's completely compatible with liberal principles. So John Rawls, the great liberal philosopher, was enthusiastic about something called the difference principle by which economic inequalities have to be justified because they help people at the bottom. That's pretty aggressive as a egalitarian leaning principle and many liberals don't agree with that. But if we have a Rawlsian Sweden, it can certainly fit within the liberal tradition. So that's why we're talking about a big tent. If we talk about fascist or communist systems or systems that abolish private property or severely restrain freedom of speech or don't allow people to enter occupations unless they get the state's permission or have an occupational license system which is on steroids compared to what we observe in the United States states, then we are, I guess the technical word is either illiberal or pro tanto. Illiberal. Great.
- [28:12]
B
So we've given great treatment to the left criticisms of liberalism and why you think they don't hold. Let's go to the right criticisms of liberalism. I was struck reading your book, remembering the time I had Sohrab Ahmari, who I think is very interesting thinker on the podcast to have a discussion and debate about liberalism. And Saurabh kept insisting that the definition of liberalism is maximizing autonomy and maximizing self expression. And we had an interesting back and forth. I tried to explain to him why as a liberal thinker I think that that is not a helpful definition of what liberalism is precisely because it implies that liberalism is opposed to any lifestyle or any set of life goals. Any concern conception of what makes your life worthwhile and important that doesn't encourage the individual to maximize autonomy and self expression in those kinds of ways. Tell us about, and I think in that respect, Saurabh's I think unfair definition of liberalism definition of liberalism sort of spikes for football to create an easy opportunity to critique it from the right is rather telling of the post liberal movement more broadly. Tell us about what the post liberal critique is and why you don't buy it.
- [29:41]
A
Okay. From the right there's a passage from two psychologists who say that refutation of a caricature can Be no better than a caricature of a refutation.
- [29:55]
B
I made a note of that line when reading it in your book and thought I need to use that more often.
- [29:59]
A
Yeah, it's a good one, isn't it? It's kind of obscure, but it fits here. So thank you for that. If you say that the liberal goal is to maximize autonomy, it would be good to know what liberal thinkers said, something like that, and then to explain why that's the appropriate conception of liberalism. It isn't John Stuart Mill's conception of liberalism. It isn't Benjamin Constant's conception of liberalism. It is certainly in Rawls's conception of liberalism. It is in Philip Pettit's conception of liberalism. It is in Joseph Rask's conception of liberalism. So it's fair to say that autonomy is important to the liberal tradition, understood as freedom. The idea of maximizing autonomy, it's not even clear what that means. One view, it means choice. But liberals believe that harm to others is forbidden. And many liberal thinkers think that motorcycle helmet laws and restrictions on smoking and other forms of infringements on autonomy are permissible or required. So the idea that liberalism means that the prescription drug laws for pitting people to get medicines without a doctor's prescription, that those are just fine or maybe even acquired by liberal principles. So the identification of liberalism on the part of the right with maximization of autonomy to construct a thing, I don't know why we call it liberalism. We should call it autonomyism, I guess. But since no one holds, there's no autonomism. Autonomyism has no subscribers. It's not the most useful set of objections to have. We could define conservatism in ways that are tangentious or post liberalism in ways that are tangentious and that probably wouldn't be the most productive way to find a path forward.
- [32:04]
B
Well, one somewhat prominent left wing thinker claims that all of conservatism is just the desire to dominate and then goes for conservative history and says, look, all that any of these conservative thinkers wanted is just to dominate people. Well, it's great if you define conservatives in that way. Why would any decent person be a conservative? But that doesn't seem like a very fair way of describing what the concerns of an Edmund Burke, for example, were to go a little bit further than this. I feel like sometimes opposed liberals are their own worst enemies because they don't actually put forward the most subtle version of a critique. But in the same way in which I try to voice some of the left wing critique of liberalism and we Try and voice some of the conservative critique of liberalism. And I think that there's kind of two elements to this. One is to say that when you look at political philosophers, perhaps none of them fall prey to what you call automatonism or whatever it was. Was a nice phrase. But when you look at some of our actual political practice, that can easily turn out to be the case that liberal societies in the United States, and even more so perhaps in more secular places like Europe, have a huge amount of day to day disdain for religious people, don't give a lot of space to accommodate people who want to opt out of certain forms of secular education that they find deeply challenging to their beliefs. It's much harder to homeschool children in Europe, for example, than it is in the United States that to some extent they even push towards undermining religious liberties in ways that are concerning that during the pandemic, for example, the state was quite fast to close down religious services and in some ways strict on religious services in some places than on people visiting restaurants. Not to speak of the fact that participating in mass demonstrations was not discouraged in the same way in the summer of 2020. And then the broader kind of critique would be that while liberalism claims to be morally neutral, a lot of the reasons why our society's work is actually premised on a deeper set of smallly conservative principles about interpersonal care and community that are slowly being eroded over the course of a liberal society. That in practice, all of our cultural institutions tend towards encouraging people towards seeking those forms of personal self exploration and autonomy, and that therefore, as a result, we are slowly eating up the capital which actually has historically sustained and made successful liberal societies. And if you look at everything from the rise of loneliness, to people spending a lot less time socializing with each other, to the astonishing number of young women who are now on onlyfans, all of these are symptoms of a decadent society which has slowly eaten up the capital of small conservative values that sustained it, and it's going off the rails. Again, this is not my position, but to sort of play devil's advocate, I think that's kind of a more subtle version of a post liberal critique. Why do you think that that doesn't cut the muster? In what ways is that blaming any worrying aspect of our society for liberalism without liberalism actually being the cause of it?
- [35:59]
A
Yeah, thank you, that was beautifully put. And that, I think is a worthy set of objections to something. Whether it's a set of objections to liberalism is a different point. But let's talk about it. So I think it has two forms. One is, let's say, secularism as a thing where if there's, you know, contempt for, or a lack of respect for religious activity and religious persons, that's occasionally real in Western nations and it's horrible and illiberal. So the objection to shutting down religious practices in the midst of COVID or to singling out religious practices for regulation that similar gatherings were facing, that's a liberal objection. And liberalism is the cure for, let's call it secularism in its illiberal forms and hooray for I'd say putting religious organizations at least on a plane of equality compared to their non religious analogs. And I'd also say hooray for giving them special solicitude and requiring a particular burden of justification on restrictions on religious organizations. The idea of contempt for, you know, there aren't words for showing contempt for people of faith that's bad in a thousand different ways. One of the thousand different ways in which it's bad is it's illiberal. Okay, then there's the empirical point which David Brooks makes and Ross Douthat makes Tocqueville worried over it. And this needs analysis. So there's a more fundamental concern, I think, which is that liberalism, as you say, eats up or destroys the social capital or let's say non liberal foundations on which it depends on. And that's an empirical claim. The evidence for it is, let's just say, anecdotal and not systematic. So liberalism isn't everything. So in a family, the bonds of connection or religious commitments or community attachments may have nothing to do with liberalism. They may be affective. To say that they reflect freedom might be not exactly false, but which is not adequately descriptive of how parents feel toward their kids or about how, let's say, Jews feel about temples. And it may be that there are affective or emotional attachments of commitments that liberalism doesn't create and that liberalism needs. I think that's plausible, that's plausibly true. I think we wouldn't want to say that liberalism particularly needs it. Any society needs people who have deep, let's say, attachments and commitments and loyalties, including to their neighbors and their nation that liberalism either authorizes or benefits from. That's all fair. The question whether liberalism eats them up is not readily answered with a yes. So if it's the case that teenage girls, let's say, are doing something which is not respectful to self and maybe going to cause long term or short term harm, I wouldn't see why we would blame that on liberalism. Liberalism is in Voldemort. It's not. Some villain on Star wars, it's not Sith for the aficionado, it's not the Emperor, it's not Darth Vader, it's not Anakin in transformation. Liberalism does value freedom. To say that a society that values freedom ends up eating away at the affective or emotional commitments on liberalism on which liberal societies depend sounds good, but I'd wonder what the evidence is. They're probably more mid level or intermediate social forces that lead to the various things that people are rightly troubled by and to blame. Liberalism is the cautious way to put it is it's not proven the Scottish verdict. I think the more accurate answer is it's a speculation which is no more plausible than a range of other speculations which would take some abstraction ending in ism and say that the fact that there's divorce or young boys and girls are struggling is a product of that ism social media ism or individualism which
- [41:31]
B
yeah, I think one of the interesting things is that there's a general kind of category error or set of category error that I think are very tempting and you can see propping up in intellectual discussions again and again of which this is characteristic and that is to when there's a dominant kind of aspect of a system to ascribe everything to that and if you don't like it to describe everything negative to that. So you see that on the left in many cases where people blame capitalism for anything that is a product either just of the fact of material scarcity which long pre existed capitalism. And capitalism has actually helped to alleviate or even sort of any way in which people can root ruthlessly pursue the economic self interest. And of course those were the case long before capitalism. I remember an incident during the pandemic when people were arguing that we should open up to certain forms of economic activity. Again they say this is capitalism. And then somebody found great example of a trading port in the 16th century or the 17th century or something like that. And there were runs that run out of food and so they opened up the ports in order to be able to get food in. And then lo and behold that's how the Black Death re entered. I guess it would have been early in the 16th and 17th century in that case. Certain basic forms of economic necessity have always existed throughout human history and they often lead to very difficult trade offs, sometimes lead to contemptible behavior. It's a category mistake to blame capitalism for all of them. I Think the same way. Some of these post liberal thinkers on the right attempted to say if there's immorality, if there is certain forms of social decay, if there's certain things that we should be concerned about in our society, that's because of liberalism, because we live in these liberal societies and liberalism is everywhere. But it happens that many of these post liberal thinkers are deeply Catholic. You go back to Catholic countries and regimes like France in the 18th century, you have a lot of quite public prostitution. Right? You have a lot of forms of immorality that they perhaps rightly would have objected to. The idea that those are somehow all the product of liberalism and that they wouldn't exist were we not in a liberal society is I think, a similar kind of category mistake.
- [43:52]
A
I think that's completely right. So it's useful to put a spotlight on those aspects of liberalism that are inspiring and technical term, awesome. And there are many of them. So the fact that people can take paths that can lead them in directions that help their community do spectacularly well and that help their own life move in directions that make it worth living, that's a fantastic thing. Lincoln talked about slavery as wrong because one person is subject to another, is owned by another, and said that's inconsistent with the sheet anchor of American Republicanism. The idea was that America was created on the idea that everyone is a subject and not an object. And so the idea of self government and Lincoln's telling was closely associated with the attack on slavery, that each of us gets to govern ourselves. Now that's a political idea. It's not an idea about how we relate to our church or how we relate to our children or how our children relate to us. But it's something that is an engine of economic growth, which, unless things are really not working well, will benefit people at the bottom of the economic ladder. And we've seen that time and again. So to prize liberal agency, let's call it as an engine for economic opportunity. That's right. And to say if the resources get bigger, as they should, we will, let's say Roosevelt style, have a second Bill of Rights. Roosevelts for a second Bill of Rights, which said a right to a good education. It said a right to freedom from monopolies at home and abroad. Your point about monopolies. And also a right to protection against deprivation in case you are old or disabled or otherwise struggling. And liberal societies, in my preferred version of liberalism, are New Deal liberals. They're not. And Hayek was there, by the way. Hayek. Some Hayekians in The audience will squirm at this. When I say Hayek was there, I don't mean to say that Roosevelt was his absolute favorite. I mean the provision of resources for people at the bottom was something that Hayek was keen on.
- [46:22]
B
So we talked a lot about what liberalism isn't, and you've rightly transitioned into what liberalism is. And perhaps we can split this into two parts. First, how should we think about the broader liberal tradition? And then I'll have a follow up about what your individual version of liberalism is and what you put particular emphasis on. But to start more broadly, now that we've defined the negative space, now we've seen what liberalism isn't and what where some of the boundaries are, why some of the critiques of liberalism are wrong. What is the affirmative sort of description of what this proud tradition actually consists in?
- [46:54]
A
Well, if we want two words, we'd say freedom and pluralism. So a liberal tradition is enthusiastic about freedom of speech. It's enthusiastic about careers open to talents. It's enthusiastic about freedom of religion. The idea of property rights is congenial to the liberal tradition, I think built into it for the reason you gave, that if your property isn't yours, then you're dependent on the government. And that means that the government can destroy you basically if it wants to. And that means you're a supplicant rather than a rights holder. And liberals don't like that at all. So the idea of self governance is part of freedom. Pluralism means that if someone wants to spend their life with some kind of commitment, let's say it's a commitment to making movies, or let's say it's a religious commitment, or maybe it's a commitment to making shoes. Liberalism's foundations are very welcoming of that. Now, of course, there are limits. If you want your career to be one of terrorism or of dealing illegal drugs, that's not allowed. And we need a liberal account of why. And liberals have tried to do that. But let's say freedom and pluralism. The idea I'd like to highlight, which is less kind of in the bloodstream of current thinking, is experiments in living. That's Mill's kind of almost throwaway line in talking about liberalism and liberty. But I think the idea of experiments in living is really at the core of the liberal tradition, and it fits with Hayek and economic freedom, and also it fits with Mill and Ras and Rawls with respect to autonomy. Now, there are some hard questions to be raised about which experiments in living are impermissible. And they're important questions, but let's for a while not fuss about them. Let's say that if you want to have a podcast, or if you want to have a bookstore, or if you want to make shoes, or if what you're keen on is you want to create a little construction company, that's what my dad did. He loved it, loved it, loved it. The government didn't stop him. He didn't like regulation a whole lot, but it wasn't illiberal in such a way as to constrain him. If you think as my sister did, I want to be a real estate agent because I like working with people. And the idea of bringing people together with homes, that's a fantastic thing for me. Or I want to be a doctor or a nurse, because what I really care about is helping people who aren't doing so well in terms of their health. Or if you really love animals and you want to be a veterinarian, or you want to work with a veterinarian because you couldn't get into veterinary school, but that's what you want. And that's liberalism. It's experiments in living. And then if after a period of working, let's say, for a veterinarian, you think, I don't want to do this anymore, I want to try something else. I love animals and I want to create something or do something. I want to be paralegal. That's what I want. This is precious stuff and it's built into liberal societies and it's blocked in illiberal societies. And to your point, liberals, respect for freedom means that you don't need permission slips for things. So I notice I've traveled to in my various enterprises, I've traveled to multiple countries, including non democracies. And I hear a lot from my friends in non democracies and they often, often asked me to do something both when I worked in our government and when I teach as an academic. And I can't, it's like I just don't have the authority to. So if someone wants to study at my university, I don't have the authority to say yes because I like them. And if someone wants a visa, I worked in our government, had some role in regulation in our government. The various stints I couldn't give someone a visa, I to just wanted. Could lack the authority. And kind of no one has that authority except if you go by the rules. And people in illiberal countries, they're puzzled by that. They think surely someone who works for the government knows a guy who knows a guy and just can make it happen. But in a liberal society, you can't do that. Maybe if you break the rules a little bit, you can get people to the top of the queue, but if you break the rules, at least in the government, when I work there, you get fired.
- [51:47]
B
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight and the rest of this conversation. We talk about, well, three things. We talk about why the best way to think about liberalism, according to Cass Sunstein, is to expand on John Stuart Mill's idea of experiments in living. We take on the perfectionist liberals, discussing the difference between thinking of liberalism as a set of ideals for how to govern society and thinking of liberalism as an imperative about how individuals should conceive of their own life, which Kassen I think is misunderstanding the core of a tradition in a potentially dangerous way. And finally, Kass explains what it is that societies like the United States or countries in Western Europe have to do to more fully live up to the liberal ideal, to actually put it more fully than today into practice to listen to those parts of the conversation to support this podcast to gain access to all of our content, please go to Yashamon and become a paying subscriber. That's yashamunk.substack.com thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [53:29]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.