Give me Liberty. Or: Give me … umm … Democracy?
Hat tip to Cyril Hédoin. I will explain later …
“… much laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper works, is to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves only with the most able.”
Thus said Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan. It is both cautionary and magnanimous. Times of change demand that new ideas and new ways of life are established with care and not simply thrust upon those not in the vanguard. Else such change can easily meet more resistance than it might otherwise. Hobbes, of course, was speaking in the context of his pragmatic view of human nature. He recognized too well the material with which we work.
So it is somewhat surprising to read Michael Oakeshott’s essay, written in 1961, “The Masses in Representative Democracy”. Oakeshott, you see, wrote a lengthy introduction to an edition of Leviathan, and yet his essay pours scorn on what he refers to as ‘mass man’. Venom and snark fill his pages. Whilst he speaks of representative democracy he is evidently quite dismissive of the concept. Democracy is not, by all accounts, high on Oakeshott’s list of favorite ideas. Why? Because this disappointing failure, ‘mass man’, uses his democratically acquired power to subvert the efforts — the sublime efforts — of that noble and hyper-modern creature we know as the ‘individual’.
I am not exaggerating too much.
Right at the end of his essay, Oakeshott makes the following statement:
“… the event of supreme and seminal importance in modern European history remains the emergence of the human individual in his modern idiom.”
That’s pretty clear. The ‘individual’ is the centerpiece of modern liberalism. Everything most cherished by liberals, things like ‘liberty’, ‘freedom of speech’, and ‘freedom of association’, all followed once the individual came into focus in its modern form. Oakeshott, being a conservative of the highest order, sees these sorts of values as the most precious mined from our modern history. He wants to protect them as best he can from any subsequent backsliding. He wants both to conserve and to preserve our intellectual treasure for use and display. It cannot, in his mind, be improved upon.
He then says this:
“The onslaught of the ‘mass man’ has shaken but not destroyed the moral prestige of individuality; even the ‘anti-individual’, whose salvation lies in escape, has not been able to escape it. The desire of ‘the masses’ to enjoy the products of individuality has modified their destructive urge. And the antipathy of the ‘mass man’ to the ‘happiness’ and ‘self-determination’ easily dissolves into self-pity. At all important points the individual still appears as the substance and the ‘anti-individual’ only as the shadow.”
We can almost hear him hissing as he says this.
It is a rugged defense of individuality, which, he says, slowly emerged in fits and starts over a very long period beginning back around 1400. As he develops his argument he makes extraordinary comments about those who, for various reasons, are unable to rise to the task of being suitably individual. These folk are clearly failures. They fall prey, variously in his telling, to ‘resignation’, ‘envy’, ‘jealousy’, and ‘resentment’. Such people exhibit ‘impulses rather than opinions, ‘inabilities’ rather than passions …’ They are moved ‘solely by the opportunity of complete escape from the anxiety of not being an individual, the opportunity of removing from the world all that convicted him of his own inadequacy.’ Moreover the ‘natural submissiveness of ‘mass man’ may itself be supposed to have been capable of prompting the appearance of appropriate leaders’.
Oakeshott doesn’t like leaders. They lead by tossing goodies to the masses. That undermines the moral fiber of those being led. In contrast, rulers gather the best and brightest and, well, rule. No pandering for them. They stand tall and get out in front. Leadership has something to do with political parties and seeking votes and re-election. Rulers are not encumbered by such tawdry thoughts. They simply rally their fellow individuals and set a grand example.
Oakeshott situates the start of the development of the anti-individual somewhere in the 1600s:
“The emergence of the morality of the ‘anti-individual’, a morality, namely, not of ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination’, but of ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’ is, of course difficult to discern; but is already clearly visible in the seventeenth century.”
There you have it. Revealed in full view for all to see, the greatest fears of the conservative liberal tradition: ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’.
Which sound an awful lot like democracy.
How terrible. How gross. How offensive. How utterly, well, illiberal.
Oakeshott is reduced to sneering and vindictive language because of his intense dislike of equality. Why, we hear him asking, can’t everyone be rugged and autonomous, free-thinking and self-determining? Why can’t everyone think for themselves? Like he can. He gets so caught up in his subject that he ends up spewing scorn. He thus walks away from Hobbes to whom he had devoted a great deal of time in praising.
OK. You are all asking. Why am I devoting this effort to an article written in 1961 when the liberal tradition was being held up in contrast to the alternative thought to be represented by the Soviet Union. The 1960s were an era of unusually extreme thinking driven, we can say in hindsight, by rather partisan and ideological motives.
Blame Cyril Hédoin.
He has written an interesting article [on his Substack] , in three parts, discussing the inherent contradiction that has haunted liberalism since its emergence on the social and political scene. The problem being that its intense advocacy of the individual brings into sharp focus the issue of how all those rugged and autonomic free-thinkers are to get along peacefully with one another. How do they arbitrate conflicts? How do they associate? Do they associate at all? How do they avoid having nasty, brutish, and short lives?
It sounds Hobbesian doesn’t it?
This problem of engendering the whole out of a set of determinedly individual parts is a permanent problem for liberals. It brings into focus all those nasty issues Oakeshott talks about. How are ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ or ‘self-determination’ and ‘solidarity’ to co-exist? Oakeshott makes his case clear: he tosses the democratic part of the conundrum over the fence. He goes all in on the traditional, and very 1800’s, version of liberalism. He eschews firmly any attempt to modify its rougher edges. If someone cannot deal with the sharp elbows of individuality, then, tough. That must be because they are weak, ineffective, lazy, or otherwise deficient. Although he does allow, once or twice in his essay, that poverty might preclude full participation in the rugged landscape he envisages as that perfect for the most fulsome expression of hearty humanity.
Really?
That Hédoin sees fit to offer us an opinion on this subject at the end of 2025 shows how contemporary and permanent the debate is. The construct of the individual demands of us all a strength and capacity that is in rather more short supply than its ardent advocates imagine. And, yes, access to those qualities is determined, more often than not, by relative poverty.
We see and hear the argument all around us. As our social structures are stretched to breaking point by inequalities of income and wealth, and with the variability of access to the benefits wrought by all that individuality implied by those inequalities creating divisions that seem insuperable, the balancing of liberty and equality is very high on our agenda.
Or ought to be.
The struggle to wrench a fair distribution from the grasp of those most benefitting from our liberty to ‘truck and barter’, and from those most able to protect their advantages through the acquisition of undue influence, status, and power is ongoing.
The tell, so to speak, is in the details.
Almost lost in Oakeshott’s diatribe is the following:
“From the beginning, the designers of this [anti-individual] morality identified private property with individuality …”
Say more …
Am I simply imagining John Locke? Who said, inter alia:
“The great and chief end … of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”
That is to say, we square the individual with society as a whole by creating a government whose specific role is to defend private property. Locke is hardly a member of the ‘anti-individual’ crowd. The solution to the liberal dilemma is resolved by Locke precisely as a defense of property. It has nothing to do with the evils of equality or solidarity.
Perhaps Oakeshott didn’t read Locke!
I know.
Of course he did.
But then why say what he said?
Because the defense of private property was a major impulse in the development of the individual as a modern political and social concept. It wasn’t ‘mass man’ wanting to inject the defense of property into the conversation. It was Oakeshott’s individual busily carving out that defense against the traditional depredations of arbitrary impress by the ancient ruling class. But that can sound a little venal. Far better to focus on the moral high ground of ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination’. It sounds better. It sounds grander. It sounds virtuous. It elides the rather more mundane attention to mere property as motivation for all the social and political confrontations of the last few hundred years. Reconstructing society to flood it with freedom has a more authentic and grandiose sound to it than making sure private property is secure from seizure. Infusing us all with buckets of liberty sounds more moral than building moats around our sources of rent. So property has to be reduced as a centerpiece of liberalism.
That emphasis of Locke’s on property is rather gauche. No?
The problem, though, remains how to balance Locke’s ‘commonwealths’ — what have become our modern states — with the preservation of liberty as conceived by the likes of Oakeshott. It is an ongoing back and forth struggle. It surges to the foreground, in particular, whenever great technological changes disrupt a prior social equilibrium. We are in such a moment. As we move quickly beyond the age of industry and deeper in to the age of information new centers of economic power have emerged. New vulnerabilities have been exposed. New groups of individuals find their aspirations more limited. Their ability to ‘self-determine’ is under attack. Meanwhile those with the advantage push back harder against to limits placed on them by the ‘commonwealth’
In our parlance, capitalism and democracy are in greater conflict than usual. Which, at its heart, is what the central contradiction of liberalism has always been about and which it cannot easily resolve. It is why we hear so often nowadays that democracy is threatened.
As I say regularly: rich people don’t like sharing, and they mobilize the Oakeshott’s of the world to justify their disproportionate share of the common wealth.
So, our defense of democracy has to be aware of the long tradition arrayed against it. After all, liberty emerged before equality did. It has a longer and more dignified heritage, and it is ‘mass man’ who lies behind the search for democracy, not the enlightened individual.
So, let me leave you with another taste of what an extreme defense of ‘liberty’ sounds like. One more quote from Oakeshott will do:
“We need not speculate upon what combination of debility, ignorance, timidity, poverty, or mischance operated in particular cases to provoke this character [the anti-individual]; it is enough to observe his appearance and his efforts to accommodate himself to his hostile environment. He sought a protector who would recognize his predicament, and he found what he sought, in some measure, in ‘the government’.”
There you have it. In a nutshell. Individual liberty. Or government. You can’t have both. Not in Oakeshott’s world. Capitalism or democracy?
Demos Kratia.
Happy New Year!
