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Immanent Liberalism: The Politics of Mutual Consent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2009

Roderick T. Long
Roderick T. Long
Affiliation:
Philosophy, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Extract

Part One of Marx's “On the Jewish Question” is a communitarian manifesto, one of the finest and subtlest ever penned. But has it anything valuable to offer defenders of liberalism?

I think it does; for in “On the Jewish Question” Marx points to a potential danger into which communitarians are liable to fall, and I shall argue that his discussion sheds light on an analogous peril for liberals. Specifically, Marx distinguishes between a genuine and a spurious form of communitarianism, and warns that a failure to recognize this distinction may lead communitarians to embrace liberal values in communitarian guise. Using Marx's analysis as a model, I hope to show that the same distinction may be found within the liberal tradition, posing a corresponding danger (communitarian values in liberal guise) into which contemporary liberalism has in large part already fallen.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Summer 1995 , pp. 1 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1995

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References

1 Blake, William, “Milton: A Poem in Two Books,” in Johnson, Mary Lynn and Grant, John E., eds., Blahe's Poetry and Designs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), Preface, lines 13–16, p. 238.Google Scholar

2 As opposed to Part Two, a cynically anti-Semitic diatribe unworthy of its author.

3 I shall be using the terms “communitarian” and “liberal” fairly broadly, and some definitions are perhaps called for. I would define as communitarian those outlooks that place primary emphasis and value on the society of status, and as liberal those outlooks that place primary emphasis and value on the society of contract. (The terminology of status and contract will be elucidated further in Section II below.) I do not intend these as stipulative definitions, but rather as attempts to capture what strike me as the respective unifying ideals of the two broad intellectual traditions commonly identified as communitarianism and liberalism.

4 Marx, Karl, “On the Jewish Question,” in McLellan, David, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 45–46.Google Scholar

5 Feuerbach, Ludvvig, The Essence of Christianity (1841).Google Scholar Marx's “On the Jewish Question” is evidently intended inter alia as an application to the idea of the state of Feuerbach's critique of the idea of God.

6 Marx, , “On the Jewish Question,” pp. 55–56.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 45.

8 As an example of this, Marx refers to the architects of the French Revolution. who beneath their communitarian rhetoric were ultimately committed to a liberal conception of civil society.

9 Marx, , “On the Jewish Question,” p. 57.Google Scholar

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11 In Plato's Crito, Socrates grounds political obligations on both status and contract relationships.

12 The status/contract distinction bears some resemblance to Robert Nozick's distinction between patterned and entitlement conceptions of justice (Nozick, , Anarchy, State, and Utopia [New York: Basic Books, 1974], pp. 150–74).Google Scholar The match is not perfect, however. The entitlement conception, as Nozick constructs it, is inconsistent with redistributive taxation; but a commitment to redistributive taxation is not necessarily at odds with the ideal of contract, if such redistribution is conceived as a necessary means of ensuring the genuinely consensual nature of socioeconomic interactions (e.g., by eliminating excessive differences in bargaining power).

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15 For an argument that the liberal right to withhold consent to status relationships is actually a prerequisite for the right sort of communitarian values, see Tomasi, John, “Individual Rights and Community Virtues,” Ethics, vol. 101 (04 1991), pp. 521–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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17 In fact, matters are somewhat more complicated. Although laws seem to have become somewhat more contract-oriented in their content, the rise of the nation-state may have resulted in a legal system less contract-oriented in its structure. See Benson, Bruce L., The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990)Google Scholar; and Bell, Tom W., “Polycentric Law,” Humane Studies Review, vol. 7. no. 1 (Winter 1991–1992), pp. 1–10.Google Scholar

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20 For the locus classicus, see Paine, Thomas, Common Sense, in Foner, Philip S., ed., The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974), p. 4Google Scholar; and Paine, , The Rights of ManGoogle Scholar, in ibid., pp. 356–58.

21 Marx, , “On the Jewish Question,” pp. 54–55.Google Scholar

22 Herbert Spencer also sensed the problem: “Most of those who pass as Liberals, are Tories of a new type” (“The New Toryism,” p. 5).Google Scholar

23 See Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. Cole, G. D. H. et al. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973), PP. 181, 191, 195–96Google Scholar (emphasis added):

Man is bom free; and everywhere he is in chains.…How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.… The problem is to find a form of association… in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.… This is the fundamental problem of which the social contract provides the solution.… [W]hoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so.… This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.…[W]hat man acquires in the civil state [is] moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.

24 Constant, Benjamin, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to That of the Moderns,” in Fontana, Biancamaria, ed., Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

25 Bastiat, Frédéric, The Law, in Selected Essays on Political Economy, trans. Cain, Seymour (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1975), pp. 86–87.Google Scholar

26 This Immanent Liberalism may also be identified as libertarianism, so long as this term is understood in its broadest sense, encompassing both capitalist and socialist varieties. (Since the nineteenth century, liberals advocating a radical redistribution of power from the coercive state to voluntary associations of free individuals have frequently called their position libertarianism, regardless of whether their political sympathies were capitalist or socialist—or something in between. Today, for the most part, libertarian capitalists begrudge socialists, and libertarian socialists likewise begrudge capitalists, the title “libertarian”; yet there seems to me sufficient commonality of ideological concern and intellectual heritage between the two camps to justify using the term in a broad but univocal sense to cover them both.)

27 Perhaps ironically, with regard to this issue it is Immanent Liberalism that endorses an end-state conception of justice. Vicarious Liberals often regard a political scheme as consensual if the process whereby it was chosen allowed input by the voters, whereas Immanent Liberals insist that the end state, regardless of how it was arrived at, must embody the ideal of mutual consent immanentiy.

28 Friedman, David, The Machinery of freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism, 2d ed. (La Salle: Open Court, 1989), pp. 131–32.Google Scholar

29 Albert, Michael and Hahnel, Robin, Unorthodox Marxism: An Essay on Capitalism, Socialism, and Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1978), pp. 255–73Google Scholar; cf. Prychitko, David L., “Marxism and Decentralized Socialism,” Critical Review, vol. 2 (Fall 1988), pp. 127–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 The classic source of this argument is Plato's Crito. The view is also often ascribed to Locke; but the attribution is somewhat misleading. Locke insists (Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed. Laslett, Peter [New York: Mentor, 1960]Google Scholar, Second Treatise, ch. 8, sections 119–22) that nothing short of express consent can make anyone subject in his or her own right to the authority of the political community; as I read Locke, the only role he grants to tacit consent is as follows: The Lockean right to private property ensures that a property owner may set the terms on which others may use that property. In setting foot on another's property, then, one tacitly consents (not to abide by the property owner's will simpliciter, but) either to abide by the owner's will, or to leave the property. When the property owner has himself expressly subjected himself and his property to the authority of a political community, the visitor's tacit obligation to abide by the owner's will or depart is thereby extended to a like obligation to abide by the community's will or depart. (Property acquired by gift or sale is accompanied by something like a restrictive covenant to the same effect.) For Locke, submission through tacit consent is thus only a temporary, conditional, and derivative adjunct of submission through express consent.

31 To the ordinary costs of relocation we may add the often prohibitive costs imposed by legal fiat, e.g., denial of exit (as in the former Soviet bloc countries) and denial of entry (as with immigration restrictions in the United States and other Western democracies).

32 “By institutionalizing their monopolistic controls over all geographic areas on this planet, governments have transformed the known world into a vast prison system from which there is virtually no escape” (Watner, Carl, The Voluntaryist, vol. 66 [02 1994], p. 6).Google Scholar

33 Rawls, JohnA Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

34 Rawls, John, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” in Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 14, no. 3 (1985), 223–51.Google Scholar

35 A political system is emergently justified if it is justified because of the way in which it came about; by contrast, it is teleologically justified if it is justified because of its beneficial consequences. Emergent justifications are backward-looking; teleological justifications, forward-looking. For a more detailed discussion of these two types of justification, see Schmidtz, David, “Justifying the State,” Ethics, vol. 101 (10 1990), pp. 89–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 When the production of some good valued by A imposes uncompensated costs on B, we speak of a negative externality, on both ethical and efficiency grounds, economists generally favor internalizing such externalities, that is, requiring those who value the good (in this case. A) to bear the costs of its production. The coercive provision of “public goods” does precisely the opposite: it externalizes internalities—since members of the minority (B), who do not value the good, are forced to subsidize its production in order to benefit members of the majority (A), who do value it. Since members of the minority do not value the good, the costs are uncompensated; these costs include not only the forced contribution to the good's production, but in many cases the existence of the “good” itself. (Perhaps this could be justified on redistributiontst grounds; but the public-goods argument is not generally put forward as a redistribution stratagem [imposing costs on B in order to benefit A], but rather as a scheme for mutual advantage.)

37 Nor is any attempt generally made to show that compulsory contributions are necessary for the good's provision, despite the fact that there is not a single example of a so-called public good that has not been supplied solely by voluntary means at one time or another in history.

38 Rousseau, , The Social Contract (supra note 23), p. 277.Google Scholar

39 Card, Claudia, “Rape as a Terrorist Institution,” in Frey, R. G. and Morris, Christopher W., eds., Violence, Terrorism, and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), PP. 303–12.Google Scholar

40 Spencer, Herbert, Social Statics: The Conditions Essential to Human Haftnness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1970), p. 190Google Scholar; cf. Spooner, Lysander, No Treason, in Smith, George H., ed., The Lysander Spooner Reader (San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1992), pp. 49–111Google Scholar; Leon, Sy with Hunter, Diane, None of the Above: The Lesser of Two Evils… is Evil (Santa Ana: Fabian Publishing, 1976)Google Scholar; and Radford, R. S., ed., The Power of Congress (As Congress Sees It) (Orange: Pine Tree Press, 1976).Google Scholar Despite the similarity in logic between the Card passage and the Spencer passage, I have discovered that those who find the Card passage plausible tend to dismiss the Spencer passage, while those who find the Spencer passage plausible tend to dismiss the Card passage. This division strikes me as regrettable.

41 Madison, James, “Federalist No. 10,” in Rossiter, Clinton, ed., The Federalist Papers (New York: New American Library. 1961), pp. 77–80.Google Scholar

42 Rousseau, , The Social Contract, pp. 203–4, 277–78.Google Scholar

43 . Spencer, Herbert, “The Great Political Superstition,” in The Man versus the State (supra note 16), pp. 123–66.Google Scholar

44 Madison, , “Federalist No. 10,” pp. 78–81.Google Scholar

45 It might be argued that Madison's federalist solution has not in practice proven terribly successful in preventing special interests from capturing the political process; but my concern here is with the kind of solution that Madison offers, not with the merits of its specific details.

46 Indeed, Madison's “Federalist No. 10” may well be intended in part as a reply to the arguments of Rousseau's Social Contract. For Madison's general attitude toward Rousseau, see “Universal Peace,” in Madison, James, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1865), vol. 4, pp. 470–72.Google Scholar

47 On the abolition of factions, see Rousseau, , The Social Contract, pp. 204, 278Google Scholar; on the Legislator, see ibid., p. 214; on the Censors, see ibid., p. 297; on the establishment of a state religion, see ibid., pp. 303–8.

48 Does this mean that an absolute monarchy would be an acceptable political framework to Immanent Liberals, so long as the monarch enforced liberal rights? Some Immanent Liberals have indeed held that there is nothing intrinsically illiberal about absolute monarchy, and that its only drawback is the pragmatic difficulty of there being no guarantee that the monarch, or the monarch's successors, will continue to govern in a liberal fashion. I for one do not agree; it seems to me that, pragmatic considerations aside, there is also something intrinsically valuable, from a liberal perspective, in having a say in the laws to which one is subject. My point is simply that having such a say is no substitute for having a say in the day-to-day control of one's life; the value of the former derives rather from its being an instance of the latter.

49 See Tucker, Benjamin R., Instead of a Book. By a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism (New York: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1893)Google Scholar; similar views were defended by Francis Tandy, Lysandcr Spooner, and Gustave de Molinari. For Mill, see especially his Principles of Political Economy and Chapters on Socialism, in Robeson, John M., ed., Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962–1991)Google Scholar, vols. 2–3 and 5, respectively.

50 Recall the fable of the king who proposed to command that the entire earth's surface be covered over with leather in order to protect his feet—until one of his subjects achieved the same effect by inventing shoes.

51 Sec, e.g., Okin, Susan Moller, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), pp. 124–33.Google Scholar

52 The following proposition seems a fairly elementary one: To the extent that the state is a tool that serves to advance the interests of a wealthy white male elite, any increase in the power of government, whatever its intended result, can only tend to expand and entrench the power of the wealthy white male elite. Hence it is that laws passed to benefit oppressed groups often end up being used against them (as, e.g., when anti-pornography laws written with feminist intentions have been used—by male police and male judges—to censor feminist publications).

53 Kateb, George, “Democratic Individuality and the Meaning of Rights,” in Rosenblum, Nancy L., ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 184.Google Scholar

54 Nozick, , Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 228–31Google Scholar; Sandel, Michael J., Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 77–80Google Scholar; Paul, Jeffrey and Miller, Fred D. Jr., “Communitarian and Liberal Theories of the Good,” Revies of Metaphysics, vol. 43, no. 4 (06 1990), pp. 803–30.Google Scholar

55 Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 180.Google Scholar

56 Rawls, , “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” p. 236n.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., pp. 224–25.

58 Needless to say. if the logic of the original position had in fact turned out to favor authoritarianism, Rawls would not have responded by embracing authoritarianism; in accordance with the procedure of reflective equilibrium, he would instead, I am sure, have rejected the device of the original position. My concern, then, is with the misleading structure of Rawls's argument: although for Rawls himself there may be a direct connection between liberal society and the ideal of mutual consent, in Rawls's theory the ideal of mutual consent is used, not to justify liberal society directly, but rather to justify the original position, which in turn is used to justify liberal society—yielding the implication, whatever Rawls's intentions, that the original position is justified by the ideal of mutual consent quite apart from whether or not it generates liberal results—in short, that the value of immanent consent is secondary, and subordinated to the value of vicarious consent.

59 Blake, . “Milton” (supra note 1), p. 238.Google Scholar

60 Certainly the list shows at least that Immanent Liberalism per se is not committed to any particular view of the value of industrial growth or the legitimacy of the nation-state.

61 From an Immanent Liberal perspective, the United States, despite a heavy dose of IL capitalist rhetoric, is a predominantly VL capitalist regime. Of the United States' two ruling parties, one represents a mostly VL capitalist vision, and the other a mix of VL capitalism and VL socialism. For example, the current debate over health care in this country may be seen as a struggle over the precise balance of power between, on the one hand, the state bureaucracy, and, on the other hand, the quasi-private beneficiaries of state privilege—e.g., The American Medical Association (with its state-granted power to control medical licensing) and the insurance industry (which has largely “captured” its regulators). That is, it is largely a debate within the Vicarious Liberal paradigm, rather than a challenge to that paradigm itself.

62 It is an interesting question whether IL capitalist and IL socialist economic relations could coexist within the same political regime. Given the preference of both for a radically decentralized political order, I am inclined to think that in general the answer is yes; but of course this may not be true for some particular IL capitalist or IL socialist theories.

63 Kolko, Gabriel, Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kolko, . The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967).Google Scholar

64 Chomsky, Noam, “The Soviet Union versus Socialism,” in Roussopoulos, Dimitrios I., ed., The Radical Papers (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987), pp. 49–51.Google Scholar

65 Weaver, Paul H., The Suicidal Corporation: How Big Business Fails America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 109–16, 198–99.Google Scholar Not all IL capitalists would agree with Weaver's suggestion that this VL capitalist plutocracy is now largely fading away; see, e.g., Mary Ruwart, Heading Our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle (Kalamazoo, MI: SunStar Press, 1992).Google Scholar

66 Among the most egregious examples of this co-opting process has been the appropriation of Adam Smith by proponents of VL capitalism. Smith was an avowed enemy of mercantilism, the VL capitalism of his day, harboring a profound distrust of businessmen and their tendency to seek special favors from government at the expense of the less privileged. Indeed, he devoted his masterwork, the oft-cited but seldom-actually-read Wealth of Nations, to a defense of consumers and laborers against the “mercantile interest.” Yet during the 1980s it was common for members of the Republican administration to sport Adam Smith neckties while championing the top-down corporatist policies Smith detested (e.g., the savings and loan “deregulation” described in the text).

67 It might be argued that deregulation was a step in the direction of Immanent Liberalism (capitalist model, at least) but did not go far enough, since it failed to abolish federal deposit insurance at the same time. But this objection makes the mistake of assuming that a particular act of deregulation has a fixed significance regardless of the context. Federal deposit insurance, by giving savings and loans a guaranteed claim on the taxpayers' money, in effect converted those savings and loans from purely private firms into autonomous arms of the state; hence, what would, without federal deposit insurance, have been a deregulation of private firms was instead, in the context of unrepealed federal deposit insurance, a “deregulation” of quasi-governmental agencies-a very different matter, and not a move in the direction of Immanent Liberalism. (And it is surely no coincidence that regulations were rescinded while federal deposit insurance was not.)

68 Even to attempt an adequate bibliography here would require far too many pages. I will thus name just two recent efforts: on the IL socialist side, see Cohen, Joshua and Rogers, Joel, “Associations and Democracy,” Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 10, no. 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 282–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the IL capitalist side, see Lavoie, Don, “Democracy, Markets, and the Legal Order Notes on the Nature of Politics in a Radically Liberal Society,”Google Scholaribid., pp. 103–20.

69 Marx, , “On the Jewish Question,” pp. 44–45.Google Scholar