I have stepped away for a few days from my thinking through of modern interpretation of classical liberal thought as I've been churning through
Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century.
I note that the West increasingly has the inverse of the traditional Chinese view of intellectual authority. On many subjects—climate change, for example—we think the views of the vast mass of the people count for more than the weight of scientific opinion. Authority counts for almost nothing.
He agrees. "That's actually a big problem in Western public administration because I think good governance is a kind of aristocratic phenomenon. And, we don't like deference to experts and we don't like delegating authority to experts. Therefore, we ring them around with all of these rules, which limit their discretion, because we don't trust them. The disease has gone furthest in the United States." His view seems to be that the world is caught between too little democracy in the East and too much in the West.
When it comes to economic policy do you defer to economists to churn over and fight out these issues, electing public officials who we empower to decide what direction our policy goes in? Or do we turn to public opinion? Or is politics already a difference to "experts" and politicians harness the ability to manipulate public opinion accordingly?
In the end this is probably cultural; but maybe not.
As I noted earlier, We have systemic politics--two massive bureaucratic parties financially backed by big money fighting it out in Public Relation campaigns for winning the plurality of the voting population (note: the voting population doesn't reflect the actual population). This means any classical liberal theory is going to be eaten alive and all the ideals will be eroded and mutated to fit the requirements of the political class. Refusal to acknowledge this--which is quite common with classical liberals (right-libertarians)--means we are destined to repeat the predation seen during the Bush II administration.
If people with vested interests in denying global warming, are they exploiting an anti-intellectual culture. Or are those with vested interests pounding the media via funding think tanks and buying off politicians to bombard everyday people to the point they they distrust experts (undermining what an expert is--which further erodes trust of any authority since nobody knows who to trust.) In that sense you can harness cultural leanings, but an anti-intellectual culture is something that must be nurtured?
If anyone can be called distrusting of authority and loving liberty it would be someone like Mikhail Bakunin who once said, “does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker.”
A distrust of authority does not necessarily mean a literal distrust of all authority in all cases. As far as I can tell, someone like Hayek has a distrust of government bureaucracies to come to the right conclusions via central planning mechanisms. But isn't all policy centralized planning in some way? And above and beyond this, is it even in line with actual classical liberals?
I think one problem i'm having is when we are talking about classical liberals I often times accept modern cheerleaders of classical liberalism, who i'd call right-libertarian, who point to examples such as Hayek or Ayn Rand. But should anyone even trust that this intellectual genealogy is correct? Which I guess is where i'm going--a need to flesh out the actual genealogy of liberalism. My hunch is it splits from right-libertarianism at some point. I've got to do more reading of the early liberals.
Whats worse, now I'm wondering what the influence of finance--the power of the rentier class on the likes of Locke and Adam Smith?
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I caught a Brad Delong comment earlier this week which made me think I'm completely off-base altogether even trying to accept the claims of modern right-libertarians to classical liberals at all.
Matthew Yglesias makes the essential and too-rarely made point that the classical liberals--the liberals of the Enlightenment--Locke and company down through Mill--were not theorists of "negative liberty" or "libertarians" but rather had a balanced viewpoint. For them, both negative and positive liberty were important: freedom from constraint and freedom to do things to pursue your happiness. Liberty and capability--much like modern liberals, who think that one thing civil society owes us is access out of the immense storehouse of human wealth piled up over past generations to a reasonable quantum of the resources we need to pursue happiness. We are the children of Locke and Mill--not those weirdoes out there on their seasteading oil platforms.
Matthew Yglesias:
An idiosyncratic intellectual project of mine is trying to rescue classical liberalism’s good name from the clutches of contemporary libertarianism. A big issue here is that classical liberals were very concerned with binding resource constraints. In their day, that meant primarily arable land. John Locke, for example, famously noted that individual appropriation of land as property was legitimate “at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”
The particular problem of arable land isn’t a big deal in a modern rich democracy. But the basic issue that individualistic solutions don’t work when you have binding resource constraints is applicable to a lot of modern day issues. The atmosphere has a finite ability to absorb carbon dioxide emissions before we hit some kind of devastating climate tipping point. It’s striking that seven of the world’s ten highest revenue firms are in the oil business. And a huge share of the recent action in the high-tech space is intimately bound up with the finite quantity of radio spectrum. Tim Lee, who identifies as a libertarian but who I see eye to eye with a huge range of issues, has a thoughtful post about the application of these Lockean issues to the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
Meanwhile, for the countervailing forces ledger note that the Communications Workers of America are strong proponents of the merger because AT&T is unionized and they think this will help them organize T-Mobile’s workers.
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