Balibar

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A Note on Furet

Intellectual vanities abound in a technocratic society.  It seems inevitable that as we push the boundaries of knowledge further and further into the space of potential beyond our current state that the division of labor presses down on us.  We become, each of us, more distant from any sense of self-sufficiency.  Such a state is an absurdity in our technologically infused and dependent world.  We have become enmeshed in the very supplementary support system we developed to drive ourselves out of the Malthusian trap we lived in for millennia.  As the complexity of our society rose, as the interdependence implied by the ever increasing network of specialities grew, and as we left behind the visceral ways of life we were prepared for by our evolutionary trajectory, we became attached to, and eventually, inseparable from, our technology.

The implications abound.

Our social organization has had to adapt to the complex realities.  We have had to create softer social technologies to foster and manage the harder technologies of production.  We had to organize.  We had to specialize.  We had to delegate.  We had to invent various forms of political arrangement to rein in the very freedoms that we unleashed in order to set ourselves beyond the deprivations of yore.  

This contradiction between the freedom necessary to defeat perpetual poverty and that needed to restrain the concentration of wealth that threatens to disintegrate the cohesion needed to maintain prosperity once achieved, is an ongoing and insoluble aspect of modernity.  

There has been, within the attempt to resolve this contradiction, a variety of illusions.  They are the vanities of intellectuals who identify supposed permanent, historic, or universal regularities within the tumult of what we have put in place over the past two hundred years.  

The contradictions, the paradox of modernity, has spawned its own intellectual contradictions that vie for attention and allegiance.  Neither offering any space for the other.  Neither actually solving the central question of how to achieve the delicate balance between the two opposed freedoms we need to maintain to preserve our progress.  Instead the intellectuals take radical sides and are willing to pretend that only one side is necessary to sustain us.

This conflict has played out in political and social reality.  In a tragic confirmation of the Keynesian notion that politics reflects the ideas of some long deceased thinker we have become embroiled in pointless debate.  Various illusions have entranced, enthralled, and deceived us for the better part of two hundred years.  Lives have been blighted by the failure to recognize that the answer is neither extreme.  

One of those intellectual vanities, the compilation of ideas loosely called neoclassical economics came crashing to the ground just over a decade ago.  The entire discipline of economics was diminished as a consequence.  It matters not whether other forms of economics persisted in the wings, what matters is that the discipline had rallied around what turned out to be a rotten core.  The degrees of difference from that core do not excuse the fringes from failure to influence society more strongly.  The discipline is in a cul-de-sac and is now reduced to being little more than a series of techniques or applications of techniques to social problems.  That is a very long fall from the lofty and practical heights achieved by the thinkers of the 1930s, which is the period that, on reflection, produced the most recent vibrant thought.  

Even now, after the embarrassment of 2008, there are far too many economists advocating so-called market solutions to complex problems that confound the simplicity of such markets.  The teaching of failures, or desecrations of the purity of the ideal, still comes after the advocacy of the ideal.  Even though the ideal is one of those intellectual vanities that misdirect our energies.  It has never existed.  It can never exist.  It is a complete illusion.  To teach it is to lie.  Yet it is erected in order to contrast with reality.  Worse, it is advocated as the long sought order that we might attain if only we eliminate the messiness of human relations.  Or, at least, restrain that messiness by imposing a technocratic regime to reduce the ardor and ignorance of the common folk.

The other great illusion of the past two hundred years was, of course, the great project of communism.  There remain advocates of that illusion also despite all the evidence that the past century has to offer.  The collapse of any practical application of communism has left us bereft of a bulwark against the rampant consequences of the unfettered freedoms we have come to call capitalism.  By imagining that human nature can be bent towards a consolidated consensus and thereby cleansed of its millennia of history, the left has deluded itself into thinking that nirvana is just around the corner if only something called capitalism were to go away.  And, because communism has manifestly failed, that departure is now dependent upon the supposed contradictions within capitalism.  But those contradictions are not potential weaknesses or sources of failure.  They are strengths.  

Anyone who dares to imagine an end of, or a trajectory to, history, is doomed to be known as a fool.  It is unimaginable.  It has no purpose.  It just is.  

It is the mightiest of all intellectual vanities to imagine otherwise.

As François Furet asked in the epilogue of his majestic “The Passing of an Illusion” :

“If capitalism has become the future of socialism, if the bourgeois world is what comes after ‘proletarian revolution’, whatever happened to temporal certainty?”

Furet is sympathetic to socialist thought and so its failure raised, in his mind, the confusing specter of uncertainty.  This reveals a misunderstanding.  It is the strength of capitalism that it adapts to onrushing uncertainty.  Indeed it revels in uncertainty.  It is an illusion ever to have imagined the possibility of something called “temporal certainty”.  It is an attempt to impose a structure where no structure can be sustained.  It is an attempt to freeze society in place and admit no change.  It is a failure to recognize the fluidity resultant from the destruction of the age old monarchic and religious orders that held back progress for millennia.  It’s worth reporting Furet’s contemplation of this conundrum in full:

“To add to this threat of uncertainty, there is the shock of a closed future.  Westerners have become accustomed to investing society with unlimited hope, since that promises freedom and equality for everyone.  In order for these qualities to assume their full meaning, it might one day be necessary to go beyond the horizon of capitalism, to go beyond the universe of rich and poor.  But the end of Communism has brought the individual back into the antinomy essential to bourgeois democracy.  It has revealed, as if something quite new, the complementary and contradictory terms of the liberal equation — individual rights, and the market — thus compromising the very foundation of what has constituted revolutionary messianism for two hundred years.  The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying to formulate a new concept.  Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it is.”

This gloomy conclusion is based on an error.  Which is that binary intellectual vanities are all we have, and that there can be certainties.  That theories of society need not bend or adapt as society does.  Or that perpetual conflict between those antinomies is necessarily a bad thing.  It isn’t.  It is how the excesses of those intellectual vanities are shaved off.  It is how we modify the extremes to bring them into the dull and more modest center.  

In the midst of modern complexity it is deluded to imagine simple solutions.  We left that world behind a long time ago.  Unfortunately we have carried forward with us too many ideas built back in those simpler days.  As Balibar tells us, the original concept of “liberty” was fractured into rival notions that have been in conflict or contradiction ever since.  The search by idealists ever since to reverse that fracture and to re-create the “equaliberty” Balibar spoke of has only produced unnecessary intellectual confusion. The ideal unity of individual and social liberties can never exist.  Instead they vie for supremacy.  They seek a balance in order to survive. It is the constant opposition of democracy that moderates capitalism.  And it is the existence of capitalism in opposition to democracy that prevents stasis.  Our two modern freedoms co-exist uneasily.  But their tension permits progress.  The presence of that tension, the existence of uncertainty in Furet’s words, is exactly what we want.  

It’s what draws us inexorably into the future.  It is what excites our imagination.  It is what gives us hope.

Meanwhile, the idealists are best left to their respective vanities.  The rest of us need to be pragmatic.  However boring and confusing that might be.

Our problem is not surfeit of capitalism. It is that we have allowed, through conceit and adherence to the false doctrines of modern economics, a deficiency of the democracy needed to rein in the capitalists.  Markets are not the be-all and end-all of social organization.  They fail too frequently if not all the time.  So our objective is to rebuild or re-invigorate democracy, not to eliminate capitalism. 

Or, returning to my Heraclitus of yesterday:

“The cosmos works

by harmony of tensions

like the lyre and bow”

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Let’s All Blame Capitalism

Well, actually let’s not.

Just as much as I decry single minded adherence to what I have called the binary vision of our world, as in markets are great, the state is bad, I also object to laying all the blame for our multitude of ills at the feet of capitalism. Simple answers to complicated questions always raise my suspicions. I suspect that the truth is somewhat more nuanced.

Take poverty for example. Is it really true that capitalism is the root cause of poverty? No. It is not.

What do we mean by poverty anyway? Relative poverty, as in some distribution of incomes and wealth? Or absolute poverty, as in an inability to provide sufficient sustenance to support life?

Theses are quite different things.

The libertarians are naturally inclined to look at what we can call the long view of poverty. Many more people live above the basic support level than ever before. To argue the contrary is to delve into special pleading and to redefine the issue in a prejudicial way. There is no doubt that we, in our part of the world, live a far more prosperous life than any of our ancestors. The great surge of invention unleashed after the Enlightenment and then applied after the Industrial Revolution has driven the average person’s lifestyle to gaudy levels undreamed about even a mere two hundred or so years ago. That is an extraordinary achievement.

And achievement of whom?

The people who benefitted most from driving the change. Most of whom qualify to be called capitalists.

Left wingers who deny this are always left stumbling about and creating oddball utopian visions in order to debunk the progress that basic free market economies have produced. They introduce things like our alienation from our previous self sufficiency. As if that was a nirvana from which our ancestors would not have wanted to escape. Endless hours tilling land with primitive technology. A constant threat of starvation because of dependence on weather. Awful living conditions and disease prone lives that were more squalor than haven.

Sign me up for alienation.

I doubt my ancestors – the servant class in an aristocratic backwater in England – would mind the oppression of modernity at all. In fact I know my grandmother embraced it. So do I. Cleaning stables so some aristocrat can go play polo is not my cup of tea. But that’s what her husband did. She looked after the fireplaces so the duke could keep warm.

No. My family was liberated by the Industrial Revolution. Capitalism, if that’s what we describe the basic economic  model of the past two hundred years of so, has done me proud.

But.

The leftists are right if they change the subject to today and quit the old nonsense. We have a problem with the distribution of the modern cornucopia.

Another but …

This modern problem is not a failure of capitalism. It is a failure of democracy.

I can hear you groaning.

The problem with the binary worldview held by both libertarians and leftists [Marxists in particular] is that it ignores the emergence in the past hundred years of something called democracy. Allow me to introduce you to it!

The political domain becomes a lot more complicated when we introduce the notion of self-governance. Even if the system is not ideal – as I am no doubt many of you are dying to tell me – it is far more progressive than one party, autocratic, military, or any other type of rule.

Why is it more complicated?

Because the people now have a foot in two camps. They work and trade in the economic camp. They vote and self-govern in the political camp. So even if economists don’t like the notion of political economy the real world now does.

So the distribution of income is as much political as it is an economic problem. People can vote to get a bigger share of the national pie. Which is what happened with social programs the world over. And which is also why libertarians with their binary view dislike those programs.

I have been flippant. The deeper issue is this:

At the onset of the great leap forward back in the 1700’s the concepts and ideas that support both the modern right and the modern left were conflated. They were very fuzzy. The great thinkers of that era were still struggling to sort them all out. Balibar calls it “equaliberty” for exactly this reason.

So the founding fathers of the US could prattle on about how egalitarian their new nation was even while ignoring slavery, the plight of women, and the lack of voting rights for the majority. Liberty, to them, was a very sparsely defined idea. It extended to  very few. In fact, apart from their lack of hereditary status, the founding fathers were to a whole lot different from the more enlightened [a relative term if ever there is one] European aristocrats they so despised.

During the 1800’s, as industrialization disrupted traditional lifestyles, late thinkers started to rise those muddled ideas apart. They saw liberty as something different from equality. Indeed they created a great divide that we still struggle with.

Liberty and equality are in conflict. And their modern manifestations are thus the source of argument. Liberty, and its economic version engine that libertarians interpret as the ‘free marketplace’, undergirds such things as private property and ultimately capitalism. It is built around incentive and wealth. It is divisive simply because different people have different abilities to respond to those incentives. And if rewards flow freely – as they do in a society based on liberty – then the distribution of incomes and wealth will inevitably be unequal.

The negative social consequences of capitalism – what the leftists identify as its oppressive and distorting effects – stirred up a reaction. But that reaction did not replace capitalism, it merely constrained it, by elevating people into the governance of the societies being distorted. The Marxist road to nirvana was blocked by an alternative logic of history. People wanted to be part of the great leap forward, but not stop it. Mitigation rather than elimination and replacement became the driver of modern politics. Hence the emergence of democracy as we know it subsequent to industrialization.

So as the original and muddled ideas were crystalized they separated into two conflicting streams that need to be balanced if we are to benefit from them both.

And, unfortunately, we cannot achieve that balance as long as the two sides, our libertarian and Marxist friends, insist on re-hashing arguments from the old days.

For instance is we all blame capitalism for the ills of poverty we miss its role in getting us to where we are. And if we simply laud its ability to generate wealth and prosperity, we miss our need to mitigate its downsides.

I realize its fun to be ideologically committed, and that a binary worldview make life simpler, but we need to get beyond that divide. The problem with modern democracy is that it isn’t a pure system. It isn’t socialist and it isn’t libertarian. It’s the ugly middle way no one wants to defend. But defend it we must if we want to preserve the prosperity capitalism has bestowed upon us, and yet enforce restraints on liberty to ensure a more equal distribution of that prosperity – and to prevent further degradation of our environment.

So is capitalism to blame for all our ills?

Yes. And. No.

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Liberty To Do What?

Continuing my peon to Judt: he reminds us of Condorcet’s fear:

“Liberty will be no more, in the eyes of an avid nation, than the necessary condition for the security of financial operations.”

No kidding.

How many times do we come across, in this avid nation of ours, some foolish comment that our social policies must not restrict commerce? How many times do we hear some politician arguing that we must become more business friendly? We scarcely can move an inch without tripping over someone cajoling us with fears that limitations on liberty are actually limitations on prosperity. As if prosperous was purely an arithmetic reference and had no qualitative content.

This is Condorcet’s fear alive and well. We seem to have reduced liberty to some small prop for the making of profit. Liberty is simply, in this ghostly shadow of what it once was, a veil behind which profits can be amassed without reference to the fabric of society as whole. And certainly without reference to any larger interest than that of the individual, or individuals, engaged in making that profit.

The invasion of the economic lexicon and way of thinking into domains where it has absolutely no right being is to blame for this diminution of our liberty. Or at least the severe limits placed on our understanding of what liberty means.

It was not always thus.

The war to gain liberty and to free ourselves from the oppression of ancient prejudice, tradition, and the burden of paternalist governance was not waged so that we could make a quick buck. It was to enable us all to have rights. It was a war to assert the right to have those rights. In that sense it is ongoing even today as successive groups manage to achieve such rights and join the rest of us in equal citizenship.

Being free to make that assertion is what liberty is in its more expansive and richer meaning.

Étienne Balibar puts it this way:

“It is always a struggle, and moreover a legitimacy of struggle, what Rancière calls the ‘the part of those who have no part’ which confers a universal signification on the demand of those who had been kept outside the common good or general will to be counted.”

This is not some petty attribute of a free market. It is a fundamental state of the human condition. It extends all the way to the roots of how we live and view each other. Placing a limit on liberty as if it were simply an enabling of market exchange is to gut the concept of its true content and replace it with a shill for capitalist aggrandizement.

Which is why we ought to search for the causes of this distortion: where did the idea of liberty get so reduced?

The answer, I suggest for our purposes, sits squarely within the libertarian screeds that pour forth from Chicago. This is, at first sight, a contradiction. How, after all did the generations that followed people like Hayek, pervert liberty so much that it now is a pseudonym for free market economics?

Well, they misunderstood it.

Being so obsessed with removing government from our lives because they imagined they had discovered the secrets of  market power, and rejecting any and all notions of such heresies as market failures, they attacked remorselessly to undo concepts of society that were not ciphers for the market. After all, having discovered the eternal truths of market power, they could hardly acknowledge any rival sources of social organization. So, like cuckoos, they had to toss those rivals from the nest.

And in so doing they eliminated alternative or grander meanings for liberty.

Thus armed they invaded all corners: in the hands of zealots like Gary Becker economic analysis bullied aside previous explanations for all sorts of relationships. In his own words:

“I believe that people make rational decisions and that they look ahead to the consequences of their decisions. They are affected by incentives. You can take markets, rationality, and incentives and illuminate issues involving race, education, and the family.”

Liberty is reduced in Becker’s hands to nothing more than the ability to be rational within the boundaries of some optimization problem, limited of course, by a set of constraints.

It is one of the great ironies of modern thought that the libertarian Milton Friedman, whose intellectual fingerprints are all over this diminution of the meaning of liberty, chose to enter the profession of economics because he wanted to do something relevant. As he explained it:

“Becoming an economist seemed more relevant to the burning issues of the day than becoming an applied mathematician or an actuary.”

But the result of his zealotry and that of his heirs has been to reduce economics exactly to a kind of applied mathematics. Why? Because that is the only way in which they could ‘prove’ the superior efficacy of markets as allocative devices. As opposed, let’s say, to the government.

In other words, not only has the entire Chicago tradition eroded the notion of liberty to a bare stub of its former self, but it has failed by its own — or rather Friedman’s —  measure of relevance. It ended up being applied math dressed up differently.

That society lost the concept of liberty along the way is a stain Chicago will have to bear until it repents. Which I doubt will be any time soon.