[Paleopsych] Hedgehog: John Gray: Two Liberalisms of Fear
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John Gray: Two Liberalisms of Fear
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[Gray is always worth reading. I know of no other think who has
reconsidered and changed his mind as much as he has, always unpredictably,
which is what rethinking will do.]
The root of liberal thinking is not in the love of freedom, nor
in the hope of progress, but in fear--the fear of other human beings
and of the injuries they do one another in wars and civil wars. A
liberal project that seeks to diminish the fear that humans evoke in
one another is open and provisional in its judgments as to the
institutions that best moderate the irremovable risk of social and
political violence. It does not imagine that any one regime is the
only legitimate form of rule for all humankind, and it does not assess
political regimes by the degree to which they conform to any doctrine
of universal human rights or theory of justice. It rejects the
view--which in the United States is treated as an axiom of political
discourse--that democratic institutions are the only basis for
legitimate government. It views democracy as only one among a range of
legitimate regimes in the late modern world and does not subscribe to
the Enlightenment hope--revived recently by Francis Fukuyama--that
peoples everywhere will converge on democracy as a political ideal.
The original and best exemplar of this liberalism of fear is
Thomas Hobbes. In Hobbes, the principal obstacle to human well being
is war. Wars arising between practitioners of different religions are
to be feared the most. They are the most destructive of the human
John Gray is School Professor of European Thought in the
European Institute at the London School of Economics. Among his
publications are Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought;
After Social Democracy; and False Dawn: The Delusions of Global
Capitalism.
good and generate a war of all against all in which no sovereign
power exists to keep the peace.
Writing in a time of religious civil wars, Hobbes was clear
that, aside from the human passion of vainglory or pride, the chief
impediment to a modus vivendi was the claim to truth in matters of
faith. On no account should the sovereign make or act upon any such
claim. The sovereign does not hold to any worldview but seeks to craft
terms of peaceful coexistence among the divergent worldviews that
society harbors. Here the liberal project is not a plan for universal
progress, but a search for peace. In this liberalism of fear, the
institutions of the state are not what is most terrifying. What is
most to be feared is the condition of anarchy in which human life is
ruled by the summum malum--death at the hands of one's fellows. A
liberal state is one that aims to deliver its subjects from this evil.
Today, there will be many who deny that such a project could embody
liberal thought in any of its many varieties. Yet a reasonable
argument can be made that this liberalism of fear is, in fact,
liberalism in its most primordial form.
Such a liberalism of fear may seem to late moderns unambitious
and timid, lacking in noble hopes for the species. For that very
reason, it is the liberalism that speaks most cogently and urgently to
us, that addresses the needs of a time whose ruling project is
peaceful coexistence among diverse and potentially antagonistic
communities and regimes. This Hobbesian liberalism of fear is
inherently tolerant of diversity in polities and communities, because
of its indifference to private belief. The authority of a Hobbesian
state does not derive from its embodying any doctrine or creed, but
only from its efficacy in promoting peace. In early modern times, this
meant ruling without partisan regard to the religious beliefs of
subjects. A Hobbesian state is not bound to attempt to disestablish or
to privatize religious practice.
In a late modern context, the Hobbesian indifference to private
belief has an application to ideological commitments. In our
historical context, a Hobbesian state does not make allegiance to
political authority conditional on subscription to any creed. A
peace-making state can hope to command the allegiance of the religious
and the irreligious, those who share Enlightenment hopes and those who
do not. It can be accepted as legitimate by communities and cultural
traditions that are not, and will never be, "liberal." The original
liberalism of fear does not aim to subject the late modern world to
democratic institutions. It recognizes a democratic regime as one
among many devices, potential and actual, for containing and
moderating conflict, but it denies that democracy has any universal
authority.
Hobbes's liberalism of fear can be contrasted sharply with a
second fearful liberalism--the anti-statist liberalism, grounded in
theories of universal human rights or justice, which is the ruling
orthodoxy of contemporary political philosophy. Nearly all liberal
theory today is a program for limiting the state. Yet, in the
conditions of late modern societies, anti-statist liberalism is bound
to issue in a significant enhancement of the state's most purely
repressive functions--without, however, significantly enhancing the
security of the citizenry. Conversely, regimes that aim for peace and
are not burdened by an agenda of anti-statism may be better able to
assure their subjects security without enhancing the state's
repressive role. The demonization of the state may have been
unavoidable during the totalitarian period that spanned much of this
century. As we near the century's end, it has become unreasonable.
This second liberalism of fear--the liberalism of Rawls,
Dworkin, Nozick, Hayek, and many others--which is a liberalism of fear
of the state, does not serve our needs in a time in which the state is
a desperately fragile and often inefficacious institution. The state
must be rehabilitated as an instrument of individual well being and
the common good. We must not look to the institutions of the state for
universal rights, strong communities, or moral regeneration. To do so
risks some of the worst evils of the age. Neither should we regard it
with such suspicion that we strive to limit it by foolish doctrines of
minimum government. We must rehabilitate the state as a protective
institution. This rehabilitation, Hobbesian liberalism, duly amended,
may be able to achieve.
Hobbesian Liberalism vs. Liberal Imperialism
Hobbes's liberalism of fear rejects, as anachronistic and
indefensible, the Enlightenment philosophy in which we are the telos
of history. Perceiving the dilemmas of modernity from a standpoint
near the beginning of the modern age as acutely as Weber and Nietzsche
did towards its end, Hobbes remains an instructive critic of the
conception of progress with which liberal thought came later to be
identified. Hobbes's thought shares with that of other early modern,
proto-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Spinoza, an underestimation of
the cultural variability of human motives; lacks altogether the
insight of Herder that individual well being requires participation in
strong communities; and shares with later Enlightenment thinkers, such
as Hume, the illusion that civilized human beings have everywhere the
same values.
Even so, unlike later liberal theory, Hobbes's thought is not
committed, essentially and inescapably, to the "hubristic" and
dangerous project of deploying the power of the state to promote a
universal civilization. It sees the institutions of the state as
indispensable--variable and alterable instruments for the achievement
of security against the chief evils of human life. In this Hobbesian
account, the state is not the embodiment of a civil religion or a
philosophy of history, nor the vehicle of a project of
world-transformation, nor a means of recovering a lost cultural unity,
but rather an artifice whose purpose is peace.
Hobbesian liberalism rejects the other liberalism of fear--the
dominant liberalism of our time, which responds to evidence of deep
cultural differences in the relations of liberal democracies with
nonliberal regimes and a fundamentalist reassertion of "Western
values" and which understands the state as a vehicle for the defense
of these threatened values. At present, liberal political philosophy
in all its standard varieties is fundamentalist in style and
apologetic in strategy. Its goal is a transcendental deduction of
western institutions as the only legitimate form of government.
The political consensus, which conventional liberal political
philosophy articulates, asserts the universal authority of liberal
human rights, individualist ethical life, and (more often than not)
free market capitalism. In the context of international relations, it
is a late blossoming species of liberal imperialism. It is a triumphal
reassertion of the western project at just the historical moment when
non-Occidental peoples are demonstrating that westernization and
modernization are not one and the same, but different and sometimes
conflicting paths of development. In domestic political practice in
the United States, this other liberalism of fear is a project of
return--an attempt to recover "traditional values," forms of family
life, of law, and of national sovereignty that belong to early rather
than late modernity.
If the Hobbesian liberalism of fear can reasonably claim a
universal root in the generic human evil of civil war, this latter-day
liberalism of fear is evidently an historically highly specific
phenomenon. Its aggressive affirmation of universality ties and dates
it irrevocably to the loss of American ideological identity that has
followed the Soviet collapse.
The fearful reality that the dominant contemporary liberalism
screens from the perceptions of western societies is the polycentric
diversity of the post-totalitarian world. In the late modern world all
western ideologies are of declining global significance, and western
institutions no longer function as the cutting edge of modernity.
Indeed, for parts of the world--the societies of East Asia, for
example--further westernization could mean a retreat from late
modernity. The perception that this other liberalism of fear is meant
to occlude is a perception of western decline.
If, in international relations, this other liberalism of fear is
a reaction against the passing of western global hegemony, in domestic
political life, it is an attempt to recover a national culture that
has irretrievably vanished. That is the significance of the cultural
preoccupation with relativism. The neoconservative discourse of
"relativism" is not used to conduct a debate in moral philosophy.
"Relativism" signifies views of which neoconservatives disapprove in a
dispute about American identity. This is a debate that has arisen with
multiculturalism and the erosion of popular confidence in American
exceptionalism. It is a local affair. The discourse of relativism is
not a moment in the history of philosophy. It is an episode in the
dissolution of American global hegemony.
The centrality and power in contemporary American political
discourse and practice of this other liberalism of fear is a perilous
dominance. No universalist political project can do without enemies.
In an incorrigibly plural world, they are soon found. The imagined
threat to "the West" emanating from Soviet Communism--itself
pre-eminently an artifact of western Enlightenment ideology--has been
swiftly supplanted, in the writings of Samuel Huntington and
elsewhere, by a discourse of "civilizational conflict." Now, if it
means anything, "civilizational conflict" means that cultural
differences of themselves occasion war. Yet this is a dangerously
unhistorical claim.
In the longer perspective of history, "multiculturalism" does
not denote one moment in a local debate about American identity; it
signifies the normal condition of humankind. Most polities of which
there is historical record, and all empires, have been
"multicultural," and the destruction of multicultural human
settlements in our century--such as the destruction of the city of
Alexandria by Nasserist nationalism--has typically been the work of
decidedly modernist nation-building movements. Huntington's polemic
against multiculturalism in the United States is not a contribution to
historical inquiry or to political theory, but rather a move in a
campaign to recover an early modern culture of nationhood that is
foredoomed by the conditions of late modernity.
In this climate of debate, it is unsurprising that longer
historical perspectives are foreshortened and distorted. The diverse
cultural traditions of Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity--which
until quite recently had coexisted for long periods in the Ottoman
Empire, the Hapsburg Empire, and the British Raj--are perceived as
inherently rivalrous. The very existence of cultures that have not
embraced westernization is perceived as a danger to peace,
particularly if--like the present regime in mainland China--these
cultures reject the universal authority of liberal rights. The
existing reality in some East Asian contexts (such as Singapore,
Malaysia, and Japan) of societies that have modernized without
westernizing, that have matched or surpassed western levels of
prosperity without importing an individualist culture of capitalism,
and that have assured low levels of crime-related insecurity for their
citizens without adopting a western culture of rights is
comprehensively denied.
The most feared and repressed possibility is that these
achievements were possible only because such countries have rejected
or limited westernization. For if this possibility were allowed, the
Enlightenment philosophy of history and the civil religion of American
exceptionalism--in which the creation of wealth depends on
institutions that embody a culture of individualism, progress, and
rights--would be falsified. In domestic contexts, this other
liberalism of fear is expressed in the poisonous politics of "family
values," in the atavistic legalist reduction of all policy issues to
questions in the arbitration of (supposedly) Lockean rights, and in
the recuperation of an early modern understanding of national
sovereignty. This liberalism supports "welfare reform," whose effect
is social exclusion, and penal policies in which mass incarceration is
adopted as a central institution of social control.
This other liberalism of fear cannot yield a modus vivendi of
any kind in the late modern societies in which it has arisen. It is,
on the contrary, an ideological rationale for social division and
cultural warfare. The history of the abortion issue in the United
States may be a marker for a future in which a legalist culture of
unconditional rights becomes an arena of political conflict where
compromise--and therefore politics, considered as an abatement of
war--is impossible. Indeed, in its combustible fusion of a legalist
culture of nonnegotiable rights with a repressive culture of mass
incarceration and radically exclusionary social policies, the new
liberalism of fear is a recipe for low-intensity civil war.
Hobbes's Abstract Individualism and Anti-Political Liberalism
In our historical context, the Hobbesian liberalism of fear has
many decisive advantages over the conventional liberal philosophies of
the late modern period. Yet it cannot be adopted unamended. I will in
the last section of this paper comment on the respects in which
Hobbes's thought requires most radical revision. Here I note, first,
that Hobbes's thought belongs to the early modern period in its
abstract individualism and its proto-Enlightenment project of deriving
political obligation from a rational choice of individual advantage.
No doubt it is immeasurably closer to political realities than most
subsequent liberalisms, but its individualist philosophical
anthropology is ill suited to thinking about how communities and
cultures can coexist in peace. As the author of one of the great
neglected twentieth-century classics of political thought, Crowds and
Power, has observed in a different work:
Hobbes explains everything through selfishness, and while knowing
the crowd (he often mentions it) he really has nothing to say about
it. My task, however, is to show how complex selfishness is: to
show how what it controls does not belong to it, comes from other
areas of human nature, the ones to which Hobbes is blind.[3]^1
Second, Hobbes's thought has in common with the dominant
Rawlsian liberalism of our time the illusion that the principal
impediment to peace is the rivalrous diversity of individual purposes.
The banal Rawlsian pluralism of individual life-plans, each expressing
a specific conception of the good, lacks the stark realism of Hobbes's
insistence on the insatiability of human desires, but these very
different liberalisms share in common a neglect of rivalrous cultural
identities as a cause of social conflict and--in the worst case--war.
Rawls is right in seeing the liberal problematic as the search for
peaceful coexistence that issued from the Wars of Religion and the
Reformation, but he is mistaken in supposing that, in late modern
conditions, peace can be pursued by relegating worldviews, conceptions
of the good, and cultural identities to the sphere of voluntary
association. Liberal institutions in which divisive commitments are
privatized are successful as devices for promoting peace only when the
background moral culture of society is already individualist. Where it
is not--as in most of the world--the search for terms of peace leads
not to liberal civil society, but to various kinds of pluralist
institutions.
Third, Hobbes's seeming hope that a form of rule can be
constructed in which politics has been marginalized links him with
that tradition of legalist utopianism that has had so paralyzing an
effect on liberal thought in our own time. Commonly, Hobbes is
criticized for his illiberal unconcern with the limits of state power,
and his apparent approval of tyranny, and it is true that we who know,
as he could not, the evils that go with totalitarian states cannot
rest content with his account of the sovereign's powers. What is wrong
with Hobbesian thought is not, however, its neglect of constitutional
limitations on governments, but its attempt to render political life
redundant--a project it shares with today's anti-political
liberalisms. In our conditions, peace cannot be the construction of a
sovereign, if indeed any such thing still exists in late modern
contexts; it must be an artifact of political activity. This is not to
say that a modus vivendi can be achieved in the late modern world only
through democratic institutions. It means that in societies that
already possess a highly developed tradition of political activity,
peace cannot be secured by trying to suppress politics.
In arguing that Hobbes's thought has an application to the
conditions of late modernity, I am not meaning to pass over those
aspects of Hobbesian liberalism that belong with a superseded
Enlightenment project. Hobbes's Cartesian understanding of political
reasoning, the unyielding universalism and individualism of his
philosophical outlook, together with his conception of political
obligation as arising from a calculus of rational advantage, all tie
his thought irrevocably to the Enlightenment project and cannot speak
to us today. The aspect that does speak to us--that must inform the
attempt to articulate a postliberal pluralism--aims to identify
universal and generically human evils and understands political life
as an enterprise of moderating and mitigating these evils. This aspect
of Hobbes's thought is far removed from the unrestricted cultural
relativism (such as Richard Rorty's) that animates most attempts at
formulating a postmodern liberalism.
Prospects for a Postliberal, Postmodern Pluralism
Thinking about the future roles of the two liberalisms of fear
begins with the recognition that there is no single trajectory of
modernity on which diverse societies stand at earlier and later
points. Our world contains pre-modern, early modern, late modern, and
postmodern states.[4]^2 In much of post-imperial Africa, in parts of
postcommunist Russia, and perhaps in some areas of China, there is
nothing that resembles the institutions of a modern state. Economic
and social life goes on, but in a context of near-anarchy where the
protective functions of the state are lacking or are exercised by
local military production centers.
The disappearance in many parts of the world of effective state
institutions of any kind is one of the most important but least
considered developments of the past decade. It represents an
acceleration in the declining leverage of the modern state that has
led prominent theorists of strategy to argue that along with the
decline of the modern sovereign state, which was inaugurated with the
treaty of Westphalia in 1648, we are now witnessing the disappearance
of Clausewitzian war.[5]^3 Considered as military conflict conducted
between agents of sovereign states, Clausewitzian war appears to have
been largely supplanted by intractable low-intensity conflicts in
which the principal actors are not states and their agents, but
political organizations, clans, and ethnic groups. Clausewitzian war
has not disappeared, as the Falklands War and the Gulf War testify,
but the ability of states or associations of states to direct
organized violence has declined dramatically in many parts of the
world. The control of war, taken in modern times to be the central
constitutive power of sovereign states, has slipped from states'
grasp.
Where this has happened, the result has been the emergence of
something not far from a Hobbesian state of nature. At the same time,
late modern societies are imbued by post-military cultures. It is hard
to mobilize democratic publics in support of any interventionist
policy that threatens to be risky, costly, and protracted. In these
circumstances, the anarchic, pre-modern conditions of some
post-communist countries may persist indefinitely. Alternatively,
these countries may attempt to reinvent their imperial traditions--an
option particularly attractive in Russia, which has never been a
modern nation-state. There is no reason to think that states in such
circumstances will be forced towards modernity in their political
institutions.
The first signs of postmodern political institutions are most
clearly observable in Europe. The institutions of the European Union
are not the institutions of a modern state writ large. The EU is not,
and will not become, a modern federal state. It is an association of
nation states that have embarked on a common project of shedding much
of the sovereignty that distinguished the modern, "Westphalian" state.
This project embodies the wager that nineteenth-century
balance-of-power relations between the Union's nation-states can be
rendered redundant in the context of the EU's common institutions.
The wager this project entails is on the possibility of enduring
and stable political institutions that do not presuppose a common
political culture and are not legitimated by a unifying ideology. This
is the postmodern dimension of the European project. It is the attempt
to found political institutions whose cultural identities are not
singular, comprehensive, or exclusive (after the fashion of
nineteenth-century nationalism and twentieth-century
weltanschauung-states), but complex, plural, and overlapping.
This is not the project of privatizing cultural identity in the
realm of voluntary association that is advanced in the standard
liberalisms of today. That project, in practice, can only entrench the
dominant cultural identity of a generation or more ago. This project
instead attempts to enable plural identities to find collective
expression in overlapping political institutions. The institutions of
the European Union constitute the single most convincing exemplar thus
far of the postmodern project of founding political legitimacy not on
a common national culture or on any universalist ideology, but on a
common acceptance of cultural difference. In East Asia, the
fascinating experiment that is underway in Singapore may amount to an
exercise in postmodern state-building and the conditions of
postmodernity may have been present for generations in Japan. There
may be a future for postmodernity in East Asia by virtue of the fact
that some of its diverse cultures have modernized very successfully
without thereby accepting any Enlightenment ideology.
It is in this historical context that an amended Hobbesian
liberalism of fear may be salient. The animating interest of European
institutions, as they have developed over the past 30 years or so, is
an interest in peaceful coexistence without loss of cultural
diversity. This points to the first radical revision that is needed in
the Hobbesian view--namely, an acknowledgment of the political
relevance of the human need for strong and deep forms of common life.
Hobbes's thought needs to be fertilized with the insights of Herder.
The abridgment of Hobbesian individualism that this entails is plainly
considerable and necessitates consideration of how participation in
common cultural forms can find political expression.
The second large revision to the Hobbesian account is to provide
for the permanent necessities of politics. Unlike later anti-political
liberals, Hobbes never supposed that the institution of law could
secure the conditions of peace. Such an unreasonable optimism about
law was alien to the spirit of his thought and foreign to his
experience of the fragility of legal orders. Yet, aside from his
insistence on the necessity of unfettered judgment by the sovereign,
there is little in Hobbes's thought that acknowledges the role of
political practice in negotiating the terms of peace--a lack that
derives from its debts to an early modern rationalist project of
conferring Cartesian certainty on thinking about politics. Hobbes's
thought must be modified to accommodate Machiavelli's perception that
politics is an ineradicable activity in common life.
This postmodern Hobbesian view does not hold that a condition of
postmodernity is the fate of all societies. That is only the illusive
Enlightenment idea of a universal history refracted through a late
modern prism, a kind of Enlightenment fideism. It may well be that
only a few societies will ever enter a postmodern condition, and that,
even for them, it may not be irreversible. We need to learn to think
of a world, integrated by innumerable economic and technological
linkages, which nevertheless contains societies, cultures, and
polities that are set on radically divergent developmental paths.
The alteration in thinking that goes with such a postmodern
perspective is substantial and requires adopting an instrumental,
rather than doctrinal, view of state and market institutions. At the
same time, it means accepting that the institutions that best serve
human needs will vary quite radically over time and in differing
cultural contexts. This is partly because the role served by social
institutions is never entirely instrumental; it is also always
expressive. The cultural forms that economic and political
institutions express are changeable, diverse, and complicated; and the
development of social or political institutions does not conform to
any universal laws. Much in the application of this Hobbesian view
will depend on highly contingent circumstances. In our present
historical context, however, the postmodern view I have sketched will
tend to undermine the vast claims made on behalf of the social
institutions of law and the market and to focus on the indispensable
place of the state and of the practice of politics among the
conditions of a peaceful modus vivendi.[6]^4
Postmodern Politics: Searching for a Modus Vivendi
An amended Hobbesian liberalism repudiates the Enlightenment
expectation that the world's peoples and cultures will converge in a
universal civilization and accepts cultural difference to be a
permanent feature of the human condition. It conceives political life
as the search, never completed, for a modus vivendi in which the human
goods of cultural diversity can be harvested, while the unavoidable
evils arising from the conflict of evils are tempered and moderated.
Among the diverse and changeable forms that such a modus vivendi can
take, democratic institutions are only one; they have no special
privileges of the sort conferred on them in recent versions of the
Enlightenment project.
The dominant fearful liberalism of today is part of the problem,
not the solution. By making the legitimacy of political institutions
dependent on ephemeral and contested ideologies--hubristic theories of
rights and discredited Enlightenment expectations of a universal
civilization--it works to exclude all those who do not subscribe to an
early modern worldview in which these beliefs were central. For the
majority of humankind today, such beliefs are not credible. Like all
western secular faiths, they have a declining leverage on human
allegiance throughout the world. The coming century may be no better,
or even worse, than the one that is ending, but it will be profoundly
different in that its central conflicts will not be family arguments
amongst western political faiths.
For the United States, there is no alternative to liberal
democracy. Its traditions and present circumstances do not allow the
luxury, or tragedy, of radical political experiment. It would be alien
to the spirit of the present argument to engage in prescription. But
there are clear implications of the argument I have developed: the
legalist cult of unconditional rights must be moderated; the suspicion
of the state, and of politics, with which the current liberalism of
fear is imbued is intemperate; and the evangelical faith in the free
market as the only acceptable mode of economic organization is a
danger both to domestic social peace and to international order.
America's present public philosophy and policies need some large
revisions.
The present argument suggests that more weight must be given to
political practice, less to the arbitration of rights; more emphasis
given to collective choices, and less to free markets. The faith that
law can supplant the murky compromises of politics, that societies
that lack a moral consensus can cohere through the practice of rights,
that the legitimacy of a democratic state must depend on its embodying
universal principles--these beliefs are poor guides to the world in
which Americans, along with the rest of humankind, must henceforth
live. Clearing away the debris of today's fearful liberalism may
contribute modestly to the large changes in public philosophy and
public policy that will be unavoidable in the United States in the
coming years.
________________________
[7]^1 Elias Canetti, The Human Province (London: Picador, 1986) 115-6.
] [8]^2 On this point, see Robert Cooper, The Post-Modern State and
the World Order (London: Demos, 1996). ] [9]^3 See Martin van Craveld,
On Future War (London and Washington: Brassey's, 1991). ] [10]^4 I
have considered what such a shift in our evaluation of state and
market institutions might mean, primarily in the context of Britain
today, in my monograph After Social Democracy (London: Demos, 1996)
republished in my book Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political
Thought (Cambridge: Polity, 1997). ]
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