Liberalism or Democracy? – Sunic

Liberalism or Democracy? Carl Schmitt and Apolitical Democracy

By Tomislav Sunic

Growing imprecision in the language of political discourse has turned virtually everyone into a democrat or, at least, an aspiring democrat. East,West, North, South, in all corners of the world, politicians and intellectuals profess the democratic ideal, as if their rhetorical homage to democracy could substitute for the frequently poor showing of their democratic institutions.[1] Does liberal democracy – and this is what we take as our criterion for the “best of all democracies” – mean more political participation or less, and how does one explain that in liberal democracy electoral interests have been declining for years? Judging by voter turnout, almost everywhere in the West the functioning of liberal democracy has been accompanied by political demobilization and a retreat from political participation.[2] Might it be, that consciously or unconsciously, the citizens of liberal democracies realize that their ballot choices can in no substantial manner affect the way their societies are governed, or worse, that the rites of liberal democracy are an elegant smoke screen for the absence of self-government?

Liberal Parenthesis and the End of the Muscled State

This paper will argue both that democracy is not necessarily an accompanying feature of liberalism and that liberal democracy may often be the very opposite of what democracy is supposed to mean. Through the arguments of Carl Schmitt, I shall demonstrate that: 1) democracy can have a different meaning in liberal society than in non-liberal society, 2) the depoliticization of liberal democracy is the direct result of voter mistrust in the liberal political class, and 3) liberal democracy in multi-ethnic countries is likely to face serious challenges in the future.

Over the period of the last fifty years, Western societies have witnessed a rapid eclipse of “hard” politics. Theological fanaticism, ideological ferocity, and politics of power, all of which have until recently rocked European states, have become things of the past. The influence of radical left-wing or right-wing parties and ideologies has waned. “High” politics, as a traditional action and interaction process between the rulers and the ruled, and as a guide for purported national destiny, seems to have become obsolete. With the collapse of communism in the East, modern liberal democracies in the West appear today as the only alternative forms of government on the barren political and ideological landscape. Moreover, in view of the recent collapse of totalitarian ideologies, liberal democracy seems to have gained even more legitimacy, all the more so as it successfully accommodates differing political views. Western liberal democracy, people believe, can satisfy diverse and disparate opinions, and can continue to function even when these are non-democratic and anti-liberal.

For Schmitt, liberal tolerance towards opposing political views is deceiving. In all of his works, and particularly in Verfassungslehre and Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus, he points to differences between liberalism and democracy, asserting that liberalism, by its nature, is hostile to all political projects. In liberal democracy, writes Schmitt, “politics far from being the concern of an elite, has become the despised business of a rather dubious class of persons.”[3] One may add that liberal democracy does not appear to be in need of political projects: With its vast technological infrastructure and the free market network, argues Schmitt, liberal democracy has no difficulty in rendering all contending beliefs and opposing ideologies inoffensive, or, at worst, ridiculous.[4]

In liberal democracy, in which most collective projects have already been delegitimized by belief in individualism and in the private pursuit of economic well-being, “it cannot be required, from any thinkable point of view, that anyone lays down his life, in the interest of the undisturbed functioning [of this society].”[5] Little by little, liberal democracy makes all political projects unattractive and unpopular, unless they appeal to economic interests. “Liberal democracy,” writes Schmitt, “seems to be fitted for a rational, secularized environment in which the state is reduced to a “night-watchman” supervising economic transactions. The state becomes a sort of inoffensive “mini-state” [“Minimalstaat”] or stato neutrale.”[6] One could almost argue that the strength of liberal democracy lies not in its aggressive posturing of its liberal ideal, but rather in its renunciation of all political ideals, including its own.

To some extent, this apolitical inertia appears today stronger than ever before, since no valid challenger to liberal democracy appears on the horizon. What a stark contrast to the time prior to World War II, when radical left- and right-wing ideologies managed to draw substantial support from political and intellectual elites! Might it be that the “Entzauberung” of politics has gone so far as to contribute to the strengthening of apolitical liberal democracy? Very revealing, indeed, appears the change in the behavior of modern elites in liberal democracies; left, right, and center barely differ in their public statements or in their political vocabulary. Their styles may differ, but their messages remain virtually the same. The “soft” and apolitical discourse of modern liberal princes, as one French observer recently wrote, prompts the “liberal-socialist” to exclaim: “I will die from loving your beautiful eyes Marquise.” And to this the “socialist-liberal”responds: “Marquise, from loving your beautiful eyes, I will die.”[7] Leftwing agendas are so often tainted with right-wing rhetoric that they appear to incorporate conservative principles. Conversely, right-wing politicians often sound like disillusioned leftists on many issues of domestic and foreign policy. In liberal democracy, all parties across the political spectrum, regardless of their declaratory differences, seem to be in agreement on one thing: democracy functions best when the political arena is reduced to its minimum and the economic and juridical spheres are expanded to their maximum.

Part of the problem may result from the very nature of liberalism. Schmitt suggests that the notions of liberalism and democracy “have to be distinguished from one another so that the patchwork picture that makes up modern mass democracy can be recognized.”[8] As Schmitt notes, democracy is the antithesis of liberalism, because “democracy … attempts to realize an identity of the governed and the governors, and thus it confronts the parliament as an inconceivable and outmoded institution.”[9]

Organic Democracy vs. Apolitical Democracy

True democracy, for Schmitt, means popular sovereignty, whereas liberal democracy and liberal parliament aim at curbing popular power. For Schmitt, if democratic identity is taken seriously, only the people should decide on their political destiny, and not liberal representatives, because “no other constitutional institution can withstand the sole criterion of the people’s will, however it is expressed.”[10] Liberal democracy, argues Schmitt, is nothing else but a euphemism for a system consecrating the demise of politics and thus destroying true democracy. But a question arises: why, given liberalism’s history of tolerance and its propensity to accommodate diverse groups, does Schmitt adamantly reject liberal democracy? Has not liberalism, particularly in the light of recent experiences with “muscled ideologies,” proven its superior and humane nature?

The crux of Schmitt’s stance lies in his conviction that the concept of “liberal democracy” is semantic nonsense. In its place, Schmitt seems to suggest both a new definition of democracy and a new notion of the political. According to Schmitt, “democracy requires, first homogeneity and second-if the need arises-elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”[11] Homogeneity and the concomitant elimination of heterogeneity are the two pillars of Schmitt’s democracy, something which stands in sharp contrast to liberal party systems and the fragmentation of the body politic. Democratic homogeneity, according to Schmitt, presupposes a common historical memory, common roots, and a common vision of the future, all of which can subsist only in a polity where the people speak with one voice. “As long as a people has the will to political existence,” writes Schmitt,” it must remain above all formulations and normative beliefs. . . . The most natural way of the direct expression of the people’s will is by approvals or disapprovals of the gathered crowd, i.e., the acclamation.”[12] To be sure, with his definition of homogeneous democracy that results from the popular will, Schmitt appears to be holding the value of the traditional community above that of civil society which, for the last century, has been the hallmark of liberal democracy.[13] One may therefore wonder to what extent can Schmitt’s “organic” democracy be applicable to the highly fractured societies of the West, let alone to an ethnically fragmented America.

Schmitt insists that “the central concept of democracy is the people (Volk), not mankind [Menscheit]. . . . There can be-if democracy takes a political form-only popular democracy, but not a democracy of mankind [Es gibt eine Volksdemokratie und keine Menscheitsdemokratie].”[14] Naturally, this vision of “ethnic” democracy collides with modern liberal democracy, one of the purposes of which, its proponents claim, is to transcend ethnic differences in pluralistic societies. Schmitt’s “ethnic” democracy must be seen as the reflection of the uniqueness of a given people who oppose imitations of their democracy by other peoples or races. Since Schmitt’s democracy bears a resemblance to ancient Greek democracy, critics must wonder how feasible this democracy can be today. Transplanted into the twentieth century, this democratic anachronism will appear disturbing, not least because it will remind some of both fascist corporate and Third World states with their strict laws on ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Schmitt confirms these misgivings when he states that “a democracy demonstrates its political power by knowing how to refuse or keep at bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity [das Fremde und Ungleiche . . . zu beseitigen oder fernzuhalten].”[15] Any advocate of liberal democracy in modern multicultural societies could complain that Schmitt’s democracy excludes those whose birth, race, or simply religious or ideological affiliation is found incompatible with a restricted democracy. Foreign may be a foreign idea that is seen to threaten democracy, and a foreigner may be somebody who is viewed as unfit to participate in the body politic because of his race or creed. In other words, one could easily suspect Schmitt of endorsing the kind of democracy that approximates the “total state.”

Nor does Schmitt treat the liberal principles of legality with much sympathy. In his essay “Legalitat und Legitimitat,” Schmitt argues that the kind of liberal democracy creates the illusion of freedom by according to each political group and opposing opinion a fair amount of freedom of expression as well as a guaranteed legal path to accomplish its goal in a peaceful manner.[16] Such an attitude to legal rights is contrary to the notion of democracy, and eventually leads to anarchy, argues Schmitt, because legality in a true democracy must always be the expression of the popular will and not the expression of factional interests. “Law is the expression of the will of the people (lex est quod populus jubet),” writes Schmitt, [17] “and in no way can law be a manifestation of an anonymous representative or a parliamentarian who solely looks after interests of his narrow constituency.” “Indeed,” continues Schmitt, “an ethnically homogeneous and historical people has all the prerequisites to uphold justice and remain democratic, provided it always asserts its will.”[18] Of course, one may argue that Schmitt had in mind a form of populist democracy reminiscent of the 1930s’ plebiscitary dictatorships which scorned both parliamentary parties and organized elections. In his Verfassungslehre, Schmitt attacks free parliamentary elections for creating, through secret balloting, a mechanism which. “transforms the citizen (citoyen), that is, a specifically democratic and political figure, into a private person who only expresses his private opinion and gives his vote.”[19] Here Schmitt seems to be consistent with his earlier remarks about ethnic homogeneity. For Schmitt, the much-vaunted “public opinion,” which liberals equate with the notion of political tolerance, is actually a contradiction in terms, because a system which is obsessed with privacy inevitably shies away from political openness. True and organic democracy, according to Schmitt, is threatened by liberal secret balloting, and “the result is the sum of private opinions.”[20] Schmitt goes on to say that “the methods of today’s popular elections [Volkswahl] and referendums [Volksentscheid] in modern democracy, in no way contain the procedure for genuine popular elections; instead, they organize a procedure for the elections of the individuals based on the total sum of independent ballot papers.”[21]

Predictably, Schmitt’s view of democratic equality is dependent upon his belief that democracy entails social homogeneity, an idea Schmitt develops more fully in Verfassungslehre and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Although liberal democracy upholds the legal equality of individuals, it ignores the equality of rooted citizens. Liberal democracy merely provides for the equality of atomized individuals whose ethnic, cultural, or racial bonds are so weakened or diluted that they can no longer be viewed as equal inheritors of a common cultural memory and a common vision of the future. Undoubtedly, equality and democracy, for Schmitt, are inseparable. Equality in a genuine organic democracy always takes place among “equals of the same kind (Gleichartigen).”[22] This corresponds to Schmitt’s earlier assertions that “equal rights make good sense where homogeneity exists.”[23] Could one infer from these brief descriptions of democratic equality that in an ethnically or ideologically fragmented society equality can never be attained? One might argue that by transferring the political discourse of equality to the juridical sphere, liberal democracy has elegantly masked glaring inequality in another sphere-that of economics. One could agree with Schmitt that liberal democracy, as much as it heralds “human rights” and legal equality and proudly boasts of “equality of (economic) opportunity,” encourages material disparities. Indeed, inequality in liberal democracy has not disappeared, and, in accordance with the Schmitt’s ‘observations regarding the shifts in the political sphere, “another sphere in which substantial inequality prevails (today, for example the economic sphere), will dominate politics. Small wonder that, in view of its contradictory approach to equality, liberal democracy has been under constant fire from the left and the right.[24]

To sum up, Schmitt rejects liberal democracy on several counts: 1) liberal . democracy is not “demo-krasia,” because it does not foster the identity of the governed and the governors, 2) liberal democracy reduces the political arena, and thus creates an apolitical society, and 3) in upholding legal equality, and pursuant to its constant search for the wealth that will win it support, liberal democracy results in glaring economic inequality.

The Rule of the People or the Rule of Atomized Individuals?

From the etymological and historical points of view, Schmitt’s criticism of liberal democracy merits attention. Democracy signifies the rule of the people, a specific people with a common ethnic background, and not the people construed, after the manner of some liberal democracies, as the atomized agglomeration flowing from a cultural “melting pot.” But if one assumes that a new type of homogeneity can develop, e.g., homogeneity caused by technological progress, then one cannot dispute the functionality of a liberal democracy in which the homogenized citizens remain thoroughly apolitical: Hypothetically speaking, political issues in the decades to come may no longer be ethnicity, religions, nation-states, economics, or even technology, but other issues that could “homogenize” citizens. Whether democracy in the twenty-first century will be based on apolitical consensus remains to be seen. Schmitt sincerely feared that the apoliticism of “global liberal democracy” under the aegis of the United States could become a dangerous predicament for all, leading not to global peace but to global servitude.[25] As of today, however, liberal democracy still serves as a normative concept for many countries, but whether this will remain so is an open question.

In view of the increased ethnic fragmentation and continued economic disparities in the world, it seems that Schmitt’s analysis may contain a grain of truth. The American experience with liberal democracy has so far been tolerable: that is, the U.S. has shown that it can function as a heterogeneous multi-ethnic society even when, contrary to Schmitt’s fears, the level of political and historical consciousness remains very low. Yet, the liberal democratic experiment elsewhere has been less successful. Recent attempts to introduce liberal democracy into the multi-ethnic states of Eastern Europe have paradoxically speeded up their dissolution or, at best, weakened their legitimacy. The cases of the multi-ethnic Soviet Union and the now-defunct Yugoslavia-countries in endless struggles to find lasting legitimacy-are very revealing and confirm Schmitt’s predictions that democracy functions best, at least in some places, in ethnically homogeneous societies.[26] In light of the collapse of communism and fascism, one is tempted to argue that liberal democracy is the wave of the future. Yet, exported American political ideals will vary according to the countries and the peoples among whom they take root. Even the highly Americanized European countries practice a different brand of liberal democracy from what one encounters in America.

Schmitt observes that liberalism, while focusing on the private rights of individuals, contributes to the weakening of the sense of community. Liberal democracy typifies, for Schmitt, a polity which cripples the sense of responsibility and renders society vulnerable to enemies both from within and without. By contrast, his idea of organic democracy is not designed for individuals who yearn to reduce political activity to the private pursuit of happiness; rather, organic, classical democracy means “the identity of the governors and the governed, of the rulers and the ruled, of those who receive orders and of those who abide by them.”[27] In such a polity, laws and even the constitution itself can be changed on a short notice because the people, acting as their own legislators, do not employ parliamentary representatives.

Schmitt’s democracy could easily pass for what liberal theorists would identify as a disagreeable dictatorship. Would Schmitt object to that? Hardly. In fact, he does not discount the compatibility of democracy with communism or even fascism. “Bolshevism and Fascism,” writes Schmitt, “by contrast, are like all dictatorships certainly anti-liberal, but not necessarily anti-democratic.”[28] Both communism and fascism strive towards homogeneity (even if they attempt to be homogeneous by force) by banning all opposition. Communism, for which the resolute anti-Bolshevik Schmitt had no sympathy, can surely be democratic, at least in its normative and utopian stage. The “educational dictatorship” of communism, remarks Schmitt, may suspend democracy in the name of democracy, “because it shows that dictatorship is not antithetical to democracy.”[29] In a true democracy, legitimacy derives not from parliamentary maneuvers, but from acclamation and popular referenda. “There is no democracy and no state without public opinion, and no state without acclamation,” writes Schmitt [30] By contrast, liberal democracy with its main pillars, viz., individual liberty and the separation of powers, opposes public opinion and, thus, must stand forth as the enemy of true democracy. Or, are we dealing here with words that have become equivocal? According to Schmitt, “democratic principles mean that the people as a whole decides and governs as a sovereign.”[31] One could argue that democracy must be a form of kratos, an exercise, not a limiting, of power. Julien Freund, a French Schmittian, concurs that “democracy is a ‘kratos.’ As such it presupposes, just like any other regime, the presence and the validity of an authority.” [32] With its separation of powers, the atomization of the body politic, and the neutralization of politics, liberal democracy deviates from this model.

Conclusion: The Liberal ‘Dictatorship of Well-Being’

If one assumes that Schmitt’s “total democracy” excludes those with different views and different ethnic origins, could not one also argue that liberal democracy excludes by virtue of applying an “apolitical” central field? Through apolitical economics and social censure, liberal democracy paradoxically generates a homogeneous consumer culture. Is this not a form of “soft” punishment imposed on those who behave incorrectly? Long ago, in his observations about democracy in America, Tocqueville pointed out the dangers of apolitical “democratic despotism.” “If despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them.”[33] Perhaps this “democratic despotism” is already at work in liberal democracies. A person nowadays can be effectively silenced by being attacked as socially insensitive.

Contemporary liberal democracy amply demonstrates the degree to which the economic and spiritual needs of citizens have become homogenized. Citizens act more and more indistinguishably in a new form of “dictatorship of well-being.”[34] Certainly, this homogeneity in liberal democracy does not spring from coercion or physical exclusion, but rather from the voter’s sense of futility. Official censorship is no longer needed as the ostracism resulting from political incorrectness becomes daily more obvious. Citizens appear more and more apathetic, knowing in all likelihood that, regardless of their participation, the current power structure will remain intact. Moreover, liberal democrats, as much as they complain about the intolerance of others, often appear themselves scornful of those who doubt liberal doctrines, particularly the beliefs in rationalism and economic progress. The French thinker Georges Sorel, who influenced Schmitt, remarked long ago that to protest against the illusion of liberal rationalism means to be immediately branded as the enemy of democracy.[35] One must agree that, irrespective of its relative tolerance in the past, liberal democracy appears to have its own sets of values and normative claims. Its adherents, for example, are supposed to believe that liberal democracy operates entirely by law. Julien Freund detects in liberal legalism “an irenic concept” of law, “a juridical utopia . . . which ignores the real effects of political, economic and other relations.”[36] No wonder that Schmitt and his followers have difficulty in accepting the liberal vision of the rule of law, or in believing that such a vision can “suspend decisive [ideological] battle through endless discussion.”[37] In its quest for a perfect and apolitical society, liberal democracy develops in such a manner that “public discussion [becomes] an empty formality,”[38] reduced to shallow discourse in which different opinions are no longer debated. A modern liberal politician increasingly resembles an “entertainer” whose goal is not to persuade the opponent about the validity of his political programs, but primarily to obtain electoral majorities.[39]

In hindsight, it should not appear strange that liberal democracy, which claims to be open to all kinds of technological, economic and sexual “revolutions,” remains opposed to anything that would question its apolitical status quo. It comes, therefore, as no surprise that even the word “politics” is increasingly being supplanted by the more anodyne word “policy,” just as prime ministers in liberal democracies are increasingly recruited from economists and businessmen.

Schmitt correctly predicted that even the defeat of fascism and the recent collapse of communism would not forestall a political crisis in liberal democracy. For Schmitt, this crisis is inherent in the very nature of liberalism, and will keep recurring even if all anti-liberal ideologies disappeared. The crisis in liberal parliamentary democracy is the result of the contradiction between liberalism and democracy; it is, in Schmittian language, the crisis of a society that attempts to be both liberal and democratic, universal and legalistic, but at the same time committed to the self-government of peoples.

One does not need to go far in search of fields that may politicize and then polarize modern liberal democracy. Recent events in Eastern Europe, the explosion of nationalisms all around the world, racial clashes in the liberal democratic West – these and other “disruptive” developments demonstrate that the liberal faith may have a stormy future. Liberal democracy may fall prey to its own sense of infallibility if it concludes that nobody is willing to challenge it. This would be a mistake. For neither the demise of fascism nor the recent collapse of communism has ushered in a more peaceful epoch. Although Western Europe and America are now enjoying a comfortable respite from power politics, new conflicts have erupted in their societies, over multiculturalism and human rights. The end of liberal apolitical democracy and the return of “hard” politics may be taking place within liberal democratic societies.

Notes:

1. See Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 3. “In a somewhat paradoxical vein, democracy could be defined as a high-flown name for something which does not exist.” See, for instance, the book by French “Schmittian” Alain de Benoist, Democratie: Le probleme (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), 8. “Democracy is neither more ‘modern’ nor more ‘evolved’ than other forms of governance: Governments with democratic tendencies have appeared throughout history. We can observe how the linear perspective used in this type of analysis can be particularly deceiving.” Against the communist theory of democracy, see Julien Freund, considered today as a foremost expert on Schmitt, in Politique et impolitique (Paris: Sirey, 1987), 203. “It is precisely in the name of democracy, designed as genuine and ideal and always put off for tomorrow that non-democrats conduct their campaign of propaganda against real and existing democracies.” For an interesting critique of democratic theory, see Louis Rougier, La Mystique democratique (Paris: Albatros,1983). Rougier was inspired by Vilfredo Pareto and his elitist anti-democratic theory of the state.

2. See, for instance, an analysis of U.S. “post-electoral politics,” which seems to be characterized by the governmental incapacity to put a stop to increasing appeals to the judiciary, in Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter, Politics by other Means: The Declining Importance of Election in America (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1990).

3. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge: MIT,1985), 4.

4. The views held by some leftist scholars concerning liberalism closely parallel those of Schmitt, particularly the charge of “soft” repression. See, for instance, Jurgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968). See also Regis Debray , Le Scribe: Genese du politique (Paris: Grasset, 1980).

5. Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Munchen und Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1932), 36. Recently, Schmitt’s major works have become available in English. These include: The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Prress, 1976); Political Romanticism, trans. G. Oakes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986); and Political Theology, trans. G. Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press; 1985). There may be some differences between my translations and the translations in the English version.

6. Schmitt, Der Begriff, 76.

7. Francois-Bernard Huyghe, La soft-ideologie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987), 43

8. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 8.

9. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 15.

10. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 15.

11. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 9.

12. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Munchen und Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker und Humblot, 1928), 83.

13. See Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), trans. and ed. Charles P. Loomis (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). Tonnies distinguishes between hierarchy in modern and traditional society. His views are similar to those of Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, the Caste System and its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury and L. Dumont (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Dumont draws attention to “vertical” vs. “horizontal” inequality among social groups.

14. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 234.

15. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 9.

16. Carl Schmitt, Du Politique, trans. William Gueydan (Puiseaux: Pardes, 1990), 46. “Legalitat und Legitimitat” appears in French translation, with a preface by Alain de Benoist, as “L’egalite et legitimite”

17. Schmitt, Du Politique, 57.

18. Schmitt, Du Politique, 58. See also Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre, 87-91:

19. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 245.

20. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 246.

21. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 245.

22. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 10.

23. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 13.

24. See, for instance, the conservative revolutionary, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das Dritte Reich (1923) whose criticism of liberal democracy often parallels Carl Schmitt’s, and echoes Karl Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Program (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 9. “Hence equal rights here (in liberalism) means in principle bourgeois rights. The equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor.” See also Schmitt’s contemporary Othmar Spann with a similar analysis, Der wahre Staat (Leipzig: Verlag von Qnelle und Meyer,1921).

25. See Carl Schmitt, “L’unite du monde,” trans. Philippe Baillet in Du Politique, 237-49.

26. In some multi-ethnic states, liberal democracy has difficulty taking root. For instance, the liberalisation of Yugoslavia has led to its collapse into its ethnic parts. This could bring some comfort to Schmitt’s thesis that democracy requires a homogeneous “Volk” within its ethnographic borders and state. See Tomislav Sunic, “Yugoslavia, the End of Communism the Return of Nationalism,” America (20 April 1991), 438–440.

27. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 234. See for a detailed treatment of this subject the concluding chapter of Paul Gottfried, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory (Westport and New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).

28. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 16,

29. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 28.

30. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 247.

31. Carl Schmitt; “L’etat de droit bourgeois,” in Du Politique, 35.

32. Freund, Politique et impolitique, 204.

33. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1966), vol. 2, book fourth, Ch. 6.

34. There is a flurry of books criticizing the “surreal” and “vicarious” nature of modern liberal society. See Jean Baudrillard, Les strategies fatales (“Figures du transpolitique”) (Paris: Grasset, 1983). Also, Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Warner Books, 1979).

35. Georges Sorel, Les illusions du progres (Paris: M. Riviere, 1947), 50.

36. Freund, Politique et impolitique, 305.

37. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Munchen und Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker und Humblot, 1934), 80.

38. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 6.

39. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 7.

 

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Sunic, Tomislav. “Liberalism or Democracy? Carl Schmitt and Apolitical Democracy.” THIS WORLD (An Annual of Religious and Public Life), Vol. 28, 1993. <http://www.tomsunic.com/?p=38 >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Liberalism or Democracy? Carl Schmitt and Apolitical Democracy).

Note: This essay was also republished in Tomislav Sunic’s Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity – Collected Essays (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).

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America in the Eyes of Eastern Europe – Sunic

America in the Eyes of Eastern Europe

By Tomislav Sunic

While a massive amount of both critical and laudatory literature on America is circulating in western Europe, only a few critical books on America and the American way of life can be found in today’s postcommunist eastern Europe. This essay is my attempt to add to that literature.

Before attempting to tackle this complex subject (an eastern European account of America), one needs to define terms. People living in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, or Slovenia do not like being called eastern Europeans; the term eastern Europe has a ring of an insult to their ears. They consider themselves, despite their region’s undemocratic past, full-blooded Europeans–as much if not more so than west Europeans. There may be some truth in this semicomplacent attitude. From the ethnic point of view, all postcommunist countries in eastern Europe are highly homogeneous, with only a few non-Europeans living on their soil. By contrast, western Europe, or what is today part of the fifteen states of the European Union, has a non-European population of approximately 7 percent. Moreover, the population of the United States–which can be thought of as an extension of western Europe–is well over 25 percent non-European in origin.

Ironically, due to the closed nature of its communist past, eastern Europe has never known a large influx of non-Europeans. The paradox is therefore twofold: the label eastern Europe is viewed by many as ideologically colored, its derogatory meaning referring to the formerly Soviet-occupied and communist-ruled part of Europe. Second, although claiming to be 100 percent Europeans, all east European nations, and particularly the newborn nation-states in the region, are well aware of their ethnic roots–certainly more so than are west Europeans. For decades, if not centuries, and even during the darkest hours of communism, east Europeans had a strange love for America, while displaying strange resentments toward their next-door European neighbors.

Any American who travels to Budapest, Zagreb, or Warsaw, be it in a public or private capacity, is welcomed. An American backpacker may enjoy passing through Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but he will never be so warmly embraced by west Europeans as he will be by his east European hosts. The communist rule, which lasted well over forty years in eastern Europe and seventy in Russia, created a mental atmosphere whereby the very term West became synonymous with America, and only to a lesser degree with nearby western Europe. The West, in the eyes and ears of east Europeans, was not so much the rich and opulent Germany or France, but rather the distant, Hollywood-hazed America.

While one could find scores of Marxist true believers in American academia during the Cold War, most east Europeans privately nurtured strong anticommunist and pro-American feelings. Former Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had more true, albeit hidden, constituents in communized Poland, Hungary, and Albania than on the West or East Coast. It was difficult for many east Europeans, particularly those who physically suffered under communism, to grasp the motives of young American students during the anti-Vietnam protests in the late sixties. Of course, pro-American and anticommunist sentiments among the wide layers of eastern European society had to be skillfully hidden. But a great majority of people in eastern Europe privately applauded the U.S. bombing of Vietnam and the harsh anticommunist rhetoric of Nixon and Reagan. They were all persuaded that, sooner or later, American GIs would liberate their homelands from the red plague. But today east Europeans are beginning to realize that America had other fish to fry than liberating Hungary in 1956 or Poland in 1980.

The Passing of the American Age

After the fall of communism, the United States is still perceived by many east Europeans as the incarnation of good, a symbol of enormous wealth, and a place of boundless economic opportunity. To some extent, east European attitudes toward America resemble those of west Europeans following World War II. In their eyes, America was a myth that surpassed the often-gloomy American reality. Many east Europeans are now going through similar psychological convulsions and self-induced misperceptions. The first cracks in their imaginary image of America are beginning to appear.

On a political level, with the end of the bipolar system and the breakup of the Soviet Union, America has become the only role model in the neighborhood. Whether they like it or not, east European politicians know that entrance into the international community means, first and foremost, obtaining a certificate of good democratic behavior from Uncle Sam, and only much later a passing grade from the fledgling European Union (EU). Challenging and opposing U.S. foreign policy in this region is a luxury that no east European ruler can afford, short of paying a hefty price (as Serbia did a half-decade ago).

But contradictions, if not outright hypocrisy, abound on both sides of the Atlantic. Even a self-proclaimed anti-American in eastern Europe will accept with great mistrust EU arbitration of a regional or ethnic dispute or armed conflict. He will always turn his eyes first toward America. Even among America-haters, the unwritten rule is that only America, due to its historical detachment, can be an honest broker. Despite almost grotesque cravings to join the EU exhibited by the entire east European political class, in the back of everybody’s mind the quest is to join NATO first. The recent entry of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO had far more psychological significance for people in the region than the protractedly scheduled entry into the European Union. Even the most cultivated east European opponent of the American way of life or the harshest critic of U.S. foreign policy does not dispute the fact that America elicits more confidence and sympathy among east Europeans than does the next-door European neighbor, who is traditionally and historically suspected of double deals and treachery.

While western Europe is often decried and derided by European conservative intellectuals as a protectorate of America or a subject of U.S. cultural imperialism, the fact of the matter is that everybody finds something inexplicably attractive about America. One can rave and rant about its decadence, its highest per-capita prison population, poor educational system, or military overextension, but every citizen in Europe, both west and east, is subconsciously enamored with either the real or surreal image of America.

Even gloomy projections of an apocalyptic end of America must be taken with caution. Many erudite conservative authors depict America as the belated aftershock of the late Roman Empire, with a willful, albeit often dangerous, desire to export global democracy by means of paleo- puritan and neoliberal messianism. But features of globalism and political messianism were common to all great powers in Europe throughout centuries. The Jacobin and post-Jacobin France at the end of the eighteenth century, for example, was no less a globalist power than America is today. The case was similar with the now-defunct Soviet Union.

Many Europeans, let alone east Europeans, do not realize that America is not just a continent but a planet with enormous differences in lifestyles and worldviews–despite its often-derided “McDonaldization” or its “Have a nice day” daily discourse. One learns to appreciate the allegedly decadent American system only after great distance in time and space. The supreme paradox is that many ancient and traditional European values were better defended intellectually by the Confederates in 1863, than by conservative Europeans, then and now.

But is America still the same country today as it was just a decade ago? Certainly it has changed dramatically over the past ten years, not just due to a massive influx of non-European immigrants but also to an infusion of new role models and mindsets that they have brought with them. Only fifty years ago the overwhelming majority of American immigrants were Europeans, who saw in their newly adopted homeland an “extension,” albeit a distant one, of their unfulfilled European dream. The very geographic distance from Europe made them accept wholeheartedly their new American destiny, yet they continued to honor their old European customs, often better and more colorfully than they had done on the other side of the ocean. This hardly seems to be the case with the new immigrants today. Many of these immigrants, especially those coming from Latin America, do not experience a geographic gap from their abandoned homeland because they live in its close vicinity. What is more, due to the rising tide of globalism, their loyalty is often split between their old homeland and their new American one. They may often experience the American dream as just another passing journey, looking instead to whatever will bring them greater financial and economic success. Early America was grounded in the roots of the Western heritage and had no qualms about displaying the badge of traditional Christian and European values, such as chivalry, honor, and the sense of sacrifice. This seems increasingly difficult to preach to new would-be Americans whose religious customs, cultural roots, and historical memory often stretch to the different antipodes of the world.

Contradictions, paradoxes, and hypocrisies abound. Probably one of the best early observers of postmodernity, the conservative author and novelist Aldous Huxley, wrote in a little-known essay that America would be the future of the world–even if and when America, as a separate country and jurisdiction, fades into oblivion. The American system of soft ideology–that is, the dictatorship of well-being and the terror of consumerism–makes it globally appealing and yet so self-destructive. As an English sophisticate and aristocratic conservative, Huxley deeply resented the massification of America, in which he foresaw both a blueprint and a carbon copy of softened communist totalitarianism. But was he not a contradictory person himself, despite his visionary predictions? Did he not choose sunny, ahistorical, decadent, and uprooted California as his deathbed, not his own rainy England or somewhere else in rooted Europe? And did he not spend much of his later life on LSD-induced trips?

American vs. Soviet Man

Eastern Europe’s distorted image of America, coupled with an often ludicrous love of the imaginary America, was a logical response to the endless anti-American rhetoric propagated by its former communist masters. Even when communist apparatchiks aired slogans that carried some truth about racial discrimination, poverty, and high crime rates in the United States, the east European masses refused to believe them. This was understandable. How could they believe communist officials, given the fact that the communist system was founded on the big lie and could only function by lying on all wavelengths twenty-four hours a day. Instead, east Europeans opted for their own self-styled vision of America, which real Americans would have found hard to believe in. The gloomier the picture of America presented by the communists, the more east Europeans believed in its opposite pastoral and pristine side.

Ten years after the fall of communism, eastern Europeans are gradually toning down their illusions about quick Americanization–that is, a sudden outbreak of affluence–in their countries. Hence another paradox: Ten years ago, communist mendacity, police repression, and economic scarcity prompted them to kick out the red plague, but today it is American-style capitalism that makes them cry out for more communist-style security and economic predictability, saying to themselves, “Who says, after all, that totalitarianism cannot be democratic, and that an individual always knows what is in his own best interests? Sometimes a leader, a strongman, führer, caudillo, or vodj, best knows the answer.”

The legacy of communism in eastern Europe is hard to grasp even for scholars of substantial culture and intellectual probity. Communism created distinct patterns of behavior that will take longer to discard than the ideological or juridical legacy of communist repression. The shrewd traveler to eastern Europe, whether businessman, politician, or student, will notice that citizens of today’s Prague, Bucharest, Budapest, or Zagreb still display behavioral traits of the communist system. The communist culture of social leveling created a peculiar mind-set of base survivalism, visible today even among individuals who brag that they are ardent anticommunists. American businessmen are often amazed with the way the new postcommunist political elites conceptualize a free market, forgetting that beneath the style and rhetorical veneer of the new class, the substance of communism was never uprooted. Indeed, from the Balkans to the Baltics, the majority of politicians in eastern Europe are basically recycled communists, who for obvious geopolitical reasons converted to Americanophile opportunism. It is questionable to what extent they are true democrats now, and to what extent they were true communist democrats twenty years ago. Thus, there are many misunderstandings and misperceptions on both sides of the Atlantic.

The culture of postcommunist mediocrity and mendacity cannot be wished away by State Department officials or would-be UN Samaritans. Generally speaking, the American attitude toward eastern Europe is based on pragmatic (albeit too idealistic) models and schemes that foresee a solution, or at least a contingency plan, for every crisis. But formulas or models do not work in postcommunist eastern Europe. An average east European is still prone to irrational emotional outbursts and continues to harbor paranoid conspiracy theories. Given that he sees others, including Americans, as crooks, he will himself continue cheating and pilfering, and do his best to double-cross others.

In essence, past communist terror badly weakened what we might call the genetic pool of eastern Europeans. Therefore, many east Europeans accept the vaunted transition toward democracy–i.e., American-style capitalism–only on a purely rhetorical level. Initiative, commitment, and self-reliance, which are taken for granted by Americans, are nonexistent in eastern Europe. The imbedded communist practice of double deals presents a formidable barrier in east European–American business or political relationships. Numerous U.S. scholars and politicians think that these barriers will fade away with the brutal implemention of free markets, but they are wrong.

The primitive appeal of communism abided in the psychological security and economic predictability it provided. Most east Europeans would now like to have it both ways: They would like to retain the economic and political security of communism, while having all the imagined glitz and glory of projected Americanism. For eastern Europeans, the American dream basically boils down to transplanting themselves physically into the imaginary yet real soaps of Santa Barbara or Melrose Place. One may argue, as does Jean Baudrillard, a theorist of postmodernity, that America is utopia achieved. This is true in a sense, if we disregard the ever-increasing economic inequalities and growing social anonymity that could spell the end of the American dream. Conversely, eastern Europe today is a laboratory where different and sometimes obnoxious ideas are officially heralded one day, only to be discarded the next. Americans frequently observe that little can be achieved in this tragic part of Europe by role-modeling or preaching democracy.

Eastern Europe skipped the most important part of its modern history; it never carried out wholesale decommunization, and it never began educating its masses in civility. Consequently, a strong irrational element in human behavior will continue to exist in eastern Europe. Eastern Europe has already had too much of verbal democracy. What it needs is civility.

During the initial postcommunist phase, east Europeans became ardent anticommunists who thought that by hollering anticommunist slogans, they would immediately open up the road to rich America. It is no accident that the first governments in postcommunist eastern Europe were made up of radical anticommunist and nationalist spokesmen. Then, during the second phase, which is still in progress, east Europeans, particularly the political class, engaged in a grotesque mimicry of America. Everybody regurgitates the words economic growth, privatization, globalization, and Euro-Atlantic integration without knowing what they stand for. This phase is coming to an end, leaving a dangerous vacuum behind and a minefield of mass anxiety ahead.

The unpredictable nature of the European character is obvious. Who could have foretold the fall of the Berlin Wall, the brutal war between two similar peoples (Croats and Serbs), and the never-ending reshuffling of the EU? One may not rule out that after the experiment with “made in the U.S.A.” style ultraliberalism, east Europeans may suddenly, out of defiance, revert to ageless domestic hard-liners. Security comes first; democracy may be a distant second. The rapid process of Americanization of eastern Europe, with its self-induced, self-gratifying dreams, may have its nasty drawbacks. If Americans themselves start raising questions about the veracity of their elections and the honesty of their leaders, their poor imitators in eastern Europe will flock to the large trove of their own strongmen. A parallel could be drawn with former European colonies, which after the end of French and English colonial rule, reverted to their own often unsavory customs. Moreover, the surplus population they keep sending to open-armed Europe and America bears witness to the decline of the West.

Additional Reading :

Jean Baudrillard, America, translated by Chris Turner, Verso, New York, 1989.
Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy, Odonian Press, Tucson, 1994.
Tomislav Sunić, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 1990.
Alexander Zinoviev, The Reality of Communism, Victor Gollancz, London, 1985.

 

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Sunic, Tomislav. “America in the Eyes of Eastern Europe.” The World and I, Vol. 16, No. 11 (November 2001), p. 292. <http://www.tomsunic.com/?p=23 >. (See this essay in PDF format here: America in the Eyes of Eastern Europe).

Note: This essay was also republished in Tomislav Sunic’s Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity – Collected Essays (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).

We may also note that the Eastern European critical perspective of America may also be found in Valdas Anelauskas’s Discovering America As It Is (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, Inc., 2002). See webpage: <http://members.efn.org/~rolanda/discovering/america.html >.

 

Historical Dynamics of Liberalism – Sunic

Historical Dynamics of Liberalism: From Total Market to Total State

by Tomislav Sunic

The purpose of this essay is to critically examine the historical dynamics of liberalism and its impact on contemporary Western polities. This essay will argue a) that liberalism today provides a comfortable ideological “retreat” for members of the intellectual élite and decision makers tired of the theological and ideological disputes that rocked Western politics for centuries; b) that liberalism can make compromises with various brands of socialism on practically all issues except the freedom of the market place; c) that liberalism thrives by expanding the economic arena into all aspects of life and all corners of the world, thereby gradually erasing the sense of national and historical community which had formerly provided the individual with a basic sense of identity and psychological security. This essay will also question whether liberalism, despite its remarkable success in the realm of the economy, provides an adequate bulwark against non-democratic ideologies, or whether under some conditions it may actually stimulate their growth.

In the aftermath of the second world war, liberalism and Marxism emerged as the two unquestionably dominant ideologies following their military success over their common rival, fascism. This brought them into direct conflict with each other, since each contended, from their own viewpoint, that the only valid political model was their own, denying the validity of their opponent’s thesis. Beaud writes that when the liberal and socialist ideas began to emerge, the former quickly cloaked itself in science (“the law of supply and demand,” “the iron law of wages”), while the latter had the tendency to degenerate into mysticism and sectarianism.(1)

Some critics of liberalism, such as the French economist François Perroux, pointed out that according to some extreme liberal assumptions, “everything (that) has been happening since the beginning of time (can be attributed to capitalism) as if the modern world was constructed by industrialists and merchants consulting their account books and wishing to reap profits.”(2) Similar subjective attitudes, albeit from a different ideological angle, can often be heard among Marxist theorists, who in the analysis of liberal capitalism resort to value judgements colored by Marxian dialectics and accompanied by the rejection of the liberal interpretation of the concept of equality and liberty. “The fact that the dialectical method can be used for each purpose,” remarks the Austrian philosopher Alexander Topitsch, “explains its extraordinary attraction and its world-wide dissemination, that can only be compared to the success of the natural rights doctrine of the eighteenth century.”(3) Nevertheless, despite their real ideological discord, liberals, neo-liberals, socialists, and “socio-neoliberals,” agree, at least in principle, in claiming a common heritage of rationalism, and on the rejection of all non-democratic ideologies, especially racialism. Earlier in this century, Georges Sorel, the French theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, remarked with irony that “to attempt to protest against the illusion of rationalism means to be immediately branded as the enemy of democracy.”(4)

The practical conflict between the respective virtues of liberalism and socialism is today seemingly coming to a close, as some of the major Marxist regimes move in the direction of a liberalization of their economies, even though the ideological debate is by no means settled amongst intellectuals. Undoubtedly, the popularity of Marxist socialism is today in global decline amongst those who have to face the problem of making it work. In consequence, despite the fact that support for Marxism amongst Western intellectuals was at its height when repression in Marxist countries was at its peak, liberalism today seems have been accepted as a place of “refuge” by many intellectuals who, disillusioned with the failure of repression in the Marxist countries, nevertheless continue to hold to the socialist principles of universalism and egalitarianism.

As François B. Huyghe comments, welfare state policies accepted by liberals have implemented many of the socialist programs which patently failed in communist countries.(5) Thus, economic liberalism is not only popular among many former left-wing intellectuals (including numbers of East European intellectuals) because it has scored tangible economic results in the Western countries, but also due to the fact that its socialist counterpart has failed in practice, leaving the liberal model as the only uncontested alternative. “The main reason for the victories of economic liberalism,” writes Kolm, “are due to the fact that all defective functioning of the non-liberal model of social realization warrants the consideration of the alternative liberal social realization. The examples of such cases abound in the West as in the East; in the North as in the South.”(6) In the absence of other successful models, and in the epoch of a pronounced “de-ideologization” process all over Europe and America, modern liberalism has turned out to be a modus vivendi for the formerly embattled foes. But are we therefore to conclude that the eclipse of other models and ideologies must spell the end of politics and inaugurate the beginning of the Age of Liberalism?

Long before the miracle of modern liberalism became obvious, a number of writers had observed that liberalism would continue to face a crisis of legitimacy even if its socialist and fascist foes were miraculously to disappear. More recently, Serge-Christophe Kolm has remarked that liberalism and socialism must not be viewed in dialectical opposition, but rather as a fulfilment of each other. Kolm writes that the ideals of liberalism and Marxism “are almost identical given that they are founded on the values of liberty, and coinciding in the applications of almost everything, except on a subject which is logically punctual, yet factually enormous in this world: wage-earning, location of individuals and self.”(8) Some have even advanced the hypothesis that liberalism and socialism are the face and the counter-face of the same phenomenon, since contemporary liberalism has managed to achieve, in the long run and in an unrepressive fashion, many of those same goals which Marxian socialism in the short run, employing repressive means, has failed to achieve. Yet differences exist.

Not only do socialist ideologues currently fear that the introduction of free market measures could spell the end of socialism, but socialism and liberalism disagree fundamentally on the definition of equality. Theoretically, both subscribe to constitutional, legal, political and social equality; yet their main difference lies in their opposing views regarding the distribution of economic benefits/rewards, and accordingly, as to their corresponding definition of economic equality. Unlike liberalism, socialism is not satisfied with demanding political and social equality, but insists on equal distribution of economic goods. Marx repeatedly criticized the liberal definition of equal rights, for which he once said that “this equal right is unequal right for unequal labor. This right does not acknowledge class difference because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual talents, and consequently it holds individual skills for natural privileges.”(9) Only in a higher stage of communism, after the present subordination of individuals to capital, that is, after the differences in the rewards of labor have disappeared, will bourgeois rights disappear, and society will write on its banner: “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs.”(10)

Despite these differences, it may be said that, in general, socialist ideas have always surfaced as unavoidable satellites and pendants of liberalism. As soon as liberal ideas made their inroads into the European feudal scene, the stage for socialist appetites was set – appetites which subsequently proved too large to fulfil. As soon as the early bourgeoisie had secured its position, liquidating guilds and feudal corporations along with the landed aristocracy, it had to face up to critics who accused it of stifling political liberties and economic equality, and of turning the newly enfranchised peasant into a factory slave. In the seventeenth century, remarks Lakoff, the bourgeois ideas of equality and liberty immediately provided the fourth estate with ideological ammunition, which was quickly expressed by numerous proto-socialist revolutionary movements.(11) Under such circumstances of flawed equality, it must not come as a surprise that the heaviest burden for peasants was the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, which had hailed the rights of equality as long as it struggled to dislodge the aristocracy from power; yet the minute it acceded to power, prudently refrained from making any further claims about equality in affluence. David Thomson remarked with irony that “many of those who would defend with their dying breath the rights of liberty and equality (such as many English and American liberals) shrink back in horror from the notion of economic egalitarianism.”(12) Also, Sorel pointed out that in general, the abuse of power by an hereditary aristocracy is less harmful to the juridical sentiment of a people than the abuses committed by a plutocratic regime,(13) adding that “nothing would ruin so much the respect for laws as the spectacle of injustices committed by adventurers who, with the complicity of tribunals, have become so rich that they can purchase politicians.”(14)

The dynamics of liberal and socialist revolutions gathered steam in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, notably an epoch of great revolutionary ferment in Europe. The liberal 1789 revolution in France rapidly gave way to the socialist Jacobin revolution in 1792; “the liberal” Condorcet was supplanted by the “communist” Babeuf, and the relatively bloodless Girondin coup was followed by the avalanche of bloodshed under the Jacobin terror and the revolt of the “sans-culottes.”(15) Similarly, a hundred years later, the February Revolution in Russia was followed by the accelerated October revolution, replacing the social democrat, Kerensky, by the communist Lenin. Liberalism gobbled up the ancient aristocracy, liquidated the medieval trade corporations, alienated the workers, and then in its turn was frequently supplanted by socialism. It is therefore interesting to observe that after its century-long competition with socialism, liberalism is today showing better results in both the economic and ethical domains, whereas the Marxist credo seems to be on the decline. But has liberalism become the only acceptable model for all peoples on earth? How is it that liberalism, as an incarnation of the humanitarian ideal and the democratic spirit, has always created enemies on both the left and the right, albeit for different reasons?

Free Market: The “Religion” of Liberalism

Liberalism can make many ideological “deals” with other ideologies, but one sphere where its remains intransigent is the advocacy of the free market and free exchange of goods and commodities. Undoubtedly, liberalism is not an ideology like other ideologies, and in addition, it has no desire to impose an absolute and exclusive vision of the world rooted in a dualistic cleavage between good and evil, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the “chosen and the unchosen ones.” Moreover, the liberal ideal lacks that distinctive telos so typical of socialist and fascist ideologies. Contrary to other ideologies, liberalism is in general rather sceptical of any concentration of political power, because in the “inflation” of politics, and in ideological fervor, it claims to see signs of authoritarianism and even, as some authors have argued, totalitarianism. (16) Liberalism seems to be best fitted for a secularized polity, which Carl Schmitt alternatively called the “minimal state” (Minimalstaat), and stato neutrale.(17) It follows that in a society where production has been rationalized and human interaction is subject to constant reification (Vergegenständlichung), liberalism cannot (or does not wish to) adopt the same “will to power” which so often characterizes other ideologies. In addition, it is somewhat difficult to envision how such a society can request its citizens to sacrifice their goods and their lives in the interests of some political or religious ideal. (18) The free market is viewed as a “neutral filed” (Neutralgebiet), allowing only the minimum of ideological conflict, that aims at erasing all political conflicts, positing that all people are rational beings whose quest for happiness is best secured by the peaceful pursuit of economic goals. In a liberal, individualistic society, every political belief is sooner or later reduced to a “private thing” whose ultimate arbiter is the individual himself. The Marxist theoretician Habermas comes to a somewhat similar conclusion, when he argues that modern liberal systems have acquired a negative character: “Politics is oriented to the removal of dysfunctionalities and of risks dangerous to the system; in other words politics is not oriented to the implementation of practical goals, but to the solution of technological issues.”(19) The market may thus be viewed as an ideal social construct whose main purpose is to limit the political arena. Consequently, every imaginable flaw in the market is generally explained by assertions that “there is still too much politics” hampering the free exchange of goods and commodities.(20)

Probably one of the most cynical remarks about liberalism and the liberal “money fetichism,” came not from Marx, but from the Fascist ideologue Julius Evola, who once wrote: “Before the classical dilemma, your money or your life, the bourgeois will paradoxically be the one to answer: ‘Take my life, but spare my money.’” (21) But in spite of its purportedly agnostic and apolitical character, it would be wrong to assert that liberalism does not have “religious roots.” In fact, many authors have remarked that the implementation of liberalism has been the most successful in precisely those countries which are known for strong adherence to biblical monotheism. Earlier in this century, the German sociologist Werner Sombart asserted that the liberal postulates of economics and ethics stem from Judeo-Christian legalism, and that liberals conceive of commerce, money and the “holy economicalness” (“heilige Wirtschaftlichkeit”) as the ideal avenue to spiritual salvation.(22) More recently, the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, wrote that liberal individualism and economism are the secular transposition of Judeo-Christian beliefs, noting that “just as religion gave birth to politics, politics in turn will be shown to give birth to economics.”(23)

Henceforth, writes Dumont in his book From Mandeville to Marx, according to the liberal doctrine, man’s pursuit of happiness has increasingly come to be associated with the unimpeded pursuit of economic activities. In modern polities, he opines, the substitution of man as an individual for the idea of man as a social being was made possible by Judeo- Christianity: “the transition was thus made possible, from a holistic social order to a political system raised by consent as a superstructure on an ontological given economic basis.”(24) In other words, the idea of individual accountability before God, gave birth, over a long period of time, to the individual and to the idea that economic accountability constitutes the linchpin of the liberal social contract – a notion totally absent from organic and traditional nationalistically-organized societies. Thus Emanuel Rackman argues that Judeo-Christianity played an important role in the development of ethical liberalism in the USA: “This was the only source on which Thomas Paine could rely in his “Rights of Man” to support the dogma of the American Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. And this dogma was basic in Judaism.”(26) Similar claims are made by Konvitz in Judaism and the American Idea, wherein he argues that modern America owes much to the Jewish holy scriptures.(27) Feurbach, Sombart, Weber, Troeltsch, and others have similarly argued that Judeo-Christianity had a considerable influence on the historical development of liberal capitalism. On the other hand, when one considers the recent economic success of various Asian countries on the Pacific Rim, whose expansionary impetus often overshadows the economic achievements of the countries marked by the Judeo-Christian legacy, one must take care not to equate economic success solely with the Judeo-Christian forms of liberal society.

Equal Economic Opportunity or the Opportunity to Be Unequal?

The strength of liberalism and of free-market economics lies in the fact that the liberal ideal enables all people to develop their talents as they best see fit. The free market ignores all hierarchy and social differentiation, except those differences which result from the completion of economic transactions. Liberals argue that all people have the same economic opportunity, and that consequently, each individual, by making best use of his or her talents and entrepreneurship, will alone determine his or her social status. But critics of liberalism often contend that this formula is in itself dependent upon the terms and conditions under which the principles of “economic opportunity” can take place. John Schaar asserts that liberalism has substantially transformed the social arena into the economic field track, and that the formula should read: “equality of opportunity for all to develop those talents which are highly valued by a given people at a given time.”(28) According to Schaar’s logic, when the whims of the market determine which specific items, commodities or human talents are most in demand, or are more marketable than some others, it will follow that individuals lacking these talents or commodities will experience an acute sense of injustice. “Every society, Schaar continues, “encourages some talents and discourages others. Under the equal opportunity doctrine, the only men who can fulfil themselves and develop their abilities to the fullest are those who are able and eager to do what society demands they do.”(29) This means that liberal societies will likely be most content when their members share a homogeneous background and a common culture. Yet modern liberalism seeks to break-down national barriers and promote the conversion of hitherto homogeneous nation-states into multi-ethnic and highly heterogeneous political states. Thus, the potential for disputation and dissatisfaction is enhanced by the successful implementation of its economic policies.

It is further arguable that the success of liberalism engenders its own problems. Thus, as Karl Marx was quick to note, in a society where everything becomes an expendable commodity, man gradually comes to see himself as an expendable commodity too. An average individual will be less and less prone to abide by his own internal criteria, values or interests, and instead, he will tenaciously focus on not being left out of the economic battle, always on his guard that his interests are in line with the market. According to Schaar, such an attitude, in the long run, can have catastrophic consequences for the winner as well as the loser: “The winners easily come to think of themselves as being superior to common humanity, while the losers are almost forced to think of themselves as something less than human.”(30) Under psychological pressure caused by incessant economic competition, and seized by fear that they may fall out of the game, a considerable number of people, whose interests and sensibilities are not compatible with current demands of the market, may develop feelings of bitterness, jealousness and inferiority. A great many among them will accept the economic game, but many will, little by little, come to the conclusion that the liberal formula “all people are equal,” in reality only applies to those who are economically the most successful. Murray Milner, whose analyses parallel Schaar’s, observes that under such circumstances, the doctrine of equal opportunity creates psychological insecurity, irrespective of the material affluence of society. “Stressing equality of opportunity necessarily makes the status structure fluid and the position of the individual within it ambiguous and insecure.”(31) The endless struggle for riches and security, which seemingly has no limits, can produce negative results, particularly when society is in the throes of sudden economic changes. Antony Flew, in a similar fashion, writes that “a ‘competition’ in which the success of all contestants is equally probable is a game of chance or lottery, not a genuine competition.”(32) For Milner such an economic game is tiring and unpredictable, and if “extended indefinitely, it could lead to exhaustion and collapse.”(33)

Many other contemporary authors also argue that the greatest threat to liberalism comes from the constant improvement in general welfare generated by its own economic successes. Recently, two French scholars, Julien Freund and Claude Polin, wrote that the awesome expansion of liberalism, resulting in ever increasing general affluence, inevitably generates new economic and material needs, which constantly cry out for yet another material fulfilment. Consequently, after society has reached an enviable level of material growth, even the slightest economic crisis, resulting in a perceptible drop in living standards, will cause social discord and possibly political upheavals.

Taking a slightly different stance, Polin remarks that liberalism, in accordance with the much vaunted doctrine of “natural rights,” tends, very often, to define man as a final and complete species who no longer needs to evolve, and whose needs can be rationally predicted and finalized. Led by an unquenchable desire that he must exclusively act on his physical environment in order to improve his earthly lot, he is accordingly led by the liberal ideology to think that the only possible way to realize happiness is to place material welfare and individualism above all other goals.(34) In fact, given that the “ideology of needs” has become a tacit criterion of progress in liberalism, it is arguable that the material needs of modern anomic masses must always be “postponed,” since they can never be fully satisfied.(35) Moreover, each society which places excessive hopes in a salutary economy, will gradually come to view freedom as purely economic freedom and good as purely economic good. Thus, the “merchant civilization” (civilïzation marchande), as Polin calls it, must eventually become a hedonistic civilization in search of pleasure, and self-love. These points are similar to the views held by Julien Freund, who also sees in liberalism a society of impossible needs and insatiable desire. He remarks that “it appears that satiety and overabundance are not the same things as satisfaction, because they provoke new dissatisfaction.”(36) Instead of rationally solving all human needs, liberal society always triggers new ones, which in turn constantly create further needs. Everything happens, Freund continues, as if the well-fed needed more than those who live in indigence. In other words, abundance creates a different form of scarcity, as if man needs privation and indigence, “as if he needed some needs.”(37) One has almost the impression that liberal society purposely aims at provoking new needs, generally unpredictable, often bizarre. Freund concludes that “the more the rationalization of the means of production brings about an increase in the volume of accessible goods, the more the needs extend to the point of becoming irrational.”(38)

Such an argument implies that the dynamics of liberalism, continually begetting new and unpredictable needs, continually threatens the philosophical premises of that same rationalism on which liberal society has built its legitimacy. In this respect socialist theorists often sound convincing when they in effect argue that if liberalism has not been able to provide equality in affluence, communism does at least offer equality in frugality!

Conclusion: From Atomistic Society to Totalitarian System

The British imperialist, Cecil Rhodes, once exclaimed: “if I could I would annex the planets!” A very Promethean idea, indeed, and quite worthy of Jack London’s rugged individuals or Balzac’s entrepreneurs – but can it really work in a world in which the old capitalist guard, as Schumpeter once pointed out, is becoming a vanishing species?(39)

It remains to be seen how liberalism will pursue its odyssey in a society in which those who are successful in the economic arena live side by side with those who lag behind in economic achievement, when its egalitarian principles prohibit the development of any moral system that would justify such hierarchical differences, such as sustained medieval European society. Aside from prophecies about the decline of the West, the truism remains that it is easier to create equality in economic frugality than equality in affluence. Socialist societies can point to a higher degree of equality in frugality. But liberal societies, especially in the last ten years, have constantly been bedevilled by an uneasy choice; on the one hand, their effort to expand the market, in order to create a more competitive economy, has almost invariably caused the marginalization of some social strata. On the other hand, their efforts to create more egalitarian conditions by means of the welfare state brings about, as a rule, sluggish economic performance and a menacing increase in governmental bureaucratic controls. As demonstrated earlier, liberal democracy sets out from the principles that the “neutral state” and free market are the best pillars against radical political ideologies, and that commerce, as Montesqieu once said, “softens up the mores.” Further, as a result of the liberal drive to extend markets on a world-wide basis, and consequently, to reduce or eliminate all forms of national protectionism, whether to the flow of merchandise, or of capital, or even of labor, the individual worker finds himself in an incomprehensible, rapidly changing international environment, quite different from the secure local society familiar to him since childhood.

This paradox of liberalism was very well described by a keen German observer, the philosopher Max Scheler, who had an opportunity to observe the liberal erratic development, first in Wilhelmian and then in Weimar Germany. He noted that liberalism is bound to create enemies, both on the right and the left side of the political spectrum: On the left it makes enemies of those who see in liberalism a travesty of the natural rights dogma, and on the right, of those who discern in it the menace to organic and traditional society. “Consequently,” writes Scheler, “a huge load of resentment appears in a society, such as ours, in which equal political and other rights, that is, the publicly acknowledged social equality, go hand in hand with large differences in real power, real property and real education. A society in which each has the “right” to compare himself to everybody, yet in which, in reality, he can compare himself to nobody.”(40) In traditional societies as Dumont has written, such types of reasoning could never develop to the same extent because the majority of people were solidly attached to their communal roots and the social status which their community bestowed upon them. India, for example, provides a case study of a country that has significantly preserved a measure of traditional civic community, at least in the smaller towns and villages, despite the adverse impact of its population explosion and the ongoing conflict there between socialism in government and liberalism in the growing industrial sector of the economy. By contrast, in the more highly industrialized West, one could almost argue that the survival of modern liberalism depends on its constant ability to “run ahead of itself” economically.

The need for constant and rapid economic expansion carries in itself the seeds of social and cultural dislocation, and it is this loss of “roots” that provides the seedbed for tempting radical ideologies. In fact how can unchecked growth ever appease the radical proponents of natural rights, whose standard response is that it is inadmissible for somebody to be a loser and somebody a winner? Faced with a constant expansion of the market, the alienated and uprooted individual in a society in which the chief standard of value has become material wealth, may be tempted to sacrifice freedom for economic security. It does not always appear convincing that liberal societies will always be able to sustain the “social contract” on which they depend for their survival by thrusting people into material interdependence. Economic gain may be a strong bond, but it does not have the affective emotional power for inducing willing self-sacrifice in times of adversity on which the old family-based nation-state could generally rely.

More likely, by placing individuals in purely economic interdependence on each other, and by destroying the more traditional bonds of kinship and national loyalty, modern liberalism may have succeeded in creating a stage where, in times of adversity, the economic individual will seek to outbid, outsmart, and outmaneuver all others, thereby preparing the way for the “terror of all against all,” and preparing the ground, once again, for the rise of new totalitarianisms. In other words, the spirit of totalitarianism is born when economic activity obscures all other realms of social existence, and when the “individual has ceased to be a father, a sportsman, a religious man, a friend, a reader, a righteous man – only to become an economic actor.”(41) By shrinking the spiritual arena and elevating the status of economic activities, liberalism in fact challenges its own principles of liberty, thus enormously facilitating the rise of totalitarian temptations. One could conclude that as long as economic values remained subordinate to non-economic ideals, the individual had at least some sense of security irrespective of the fact his life was often, economically speaking, more miserable. With the subsequent emergence of the anonymous market, governed by the equally anonymous invisible hand, in the anonymous society, as Hannah Arendt once put it, man has acquired a feeling of uprootedness and existential futility.(42) As pre-industrial and traditional societies demonstrate, poverty is not necessarily the motor behind revolutions. Revolution comes most readily to those in whom poverty is combined with a consciousness of lost identity and a feeling of existential insecurity. For this reason, the modern liberal economies of the West must constantly work to ensure that the economic miracle shall continue. As economic success has been made the ultimate moral value, and national loyalties have been spurned as out of date, economic problems automatically generate deep dissatisfaction amongst those confronted with poverty, who are then likely to fall prone to the sense of “alienation” on which all past Marxist socialist success has been based.

One must therefore not exclude the likelihood that modern liberal society may at some time in the future face serious difficulties should it fail to secure permanent economic growth, especially if, in addition, it relentlessly continues to atomize the family (discouraging marriage, for example, by means of tax systems which favors extreme individualism) and destroys all national units in favor of the emergence of a single world-wide international market, along with its inevitable concomitant, the “international man.” While any faltering of the world economy, already under pressure from the Third World population explosion, might conceivably lead to a resurgence of right wing totalitarianisms in some areas, it is much more likely that in an internationalized society the new totalitarianism of the future will come from the left, in the form of a resurgence of the “socialist experiment,” promising economic gain to a population that has been taught that economic values are the only values that matter. Precisely because the “workers of the world” will have come to see themselves as an alienated international proletariat, they will tend to lean toward international socialist totalitarianism, rather than other forms of extreme political ideology.

NOTES

1. Michael Beaud, A History of Capitalism 1500-1980(Paris: New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 80.

2. François Perroux, Le capitalisme (Paris: PUF, 1960), p. 31.

3. Ernst Topitsch “Dialektik – politische Wunderwaffe?,”Die Grundlage des Spätmarxismus, edited by E. Topitsch, Rüdiger Proske, Hans Eysenck et al., (Stuttgart: Verlag Bonn Aktuell GMBH), p. 74.

4. Georges Sorel, Les illusions du progrès (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1947), p. 50.

5. François-Bernard Huyghe, La Soft-idéologie (Paris: Laffont, 1988). See also, Jean Baudrillard, La Gauche divine (Paris: Laffont, 1985). For an interesting polemics concerning the “treason of former socialists clerics who converted to liberalism,” see Guy Hocquenghem, Lettre ouverte à ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary(Paris: Albin Michel, 1986).

6. Serge-Christophe Kolm. Le libéralisme moderne (Paris: PUF, 1984), p. 11.

7. Carl Schmitt, Die geistegeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlametatarismus (München and Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker and Humblot, 1926), p. 23.

8. Kolm, op. cit., p. 96.

9. Karl Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms (Zürich: Ring Verlag A.G., 1934), p. 10.

10. Ibid. , p. 11.

11. Sanford Lakoff, “Christianity and Equality,” Equality,edited by J. Roland Pennock and J. W. Chapmann, (New York: Atherton Press, 1967), pp. 128-130.

12. David Thomson, Equality (Cambridge: University Press, 1949), p. 79. 13. Sorel, op. cit., p. 297.

14. Loc. cit.

15. Theodore von Sosnosky, Die rote Dreifältikeit(Einsiedeln: Verlaganstalt Benziger and Co., 1931).

16. cf. Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism(New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1969), p. 194 and passim.

17. Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (München and Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker and Humblot, 1932), p. 76 and passim.

18. Ibid. , p. 36.

19. Jürgen Habermas Technik and Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968), p. 77.

20. Alain de Benoist, Die entscheidenden Jahre, “In der kaufmännisch-merkantilen Gesellschaftsform geht das Politische ein,”(Tübingen: Grabert Verlag, 1982), p. 34.

21. Julius Evola, “Procès de la bourgeoisie,” Essais politiques (Paris: edition Pardès, 1988), p. 212. First published in La vita italiana, ”Processo alla borghesia,” XXV1II, nr. 324 (March 1940): 259-268.

22. Werner Sombart, Der Bourgeois, cf. “Die heilige Wirtschaftlichkeit”; (München and Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker and Humblot, 1923), pp. 137-160.

23. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx, The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), p.16.

24. Ibid., p. 59.

25. cf. L. Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1986).

26. Emanuel Rackman, “Judaism and Equality;’ Equality,edited by J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York: Atherton Press, 1967), p. 155.

27. Milton Konvitz, Judaism and the American Idea(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978). Also German jurist Georg Jellinek argues in Die Erklärung der Menschen-and Bürgerrechte (Leipzig: Duncker and Humbolt, 1904), p. 46, that “the idea to establish legally the unalienable, inherent, and sacred rights of individuals, is not of political but religious origin.”

28. John Schaar, “Equality of Opportunity and Beyond,” inEquality, op. cit. , 230.

29. Ibid., p. 236.

30. Ibid., p. 235.

31. Murray Milner, The Illusion of Equality (Washington and London: Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers, 1972), p. 10.

32. Antony Flew, The Politics of Procrustes (New York: Promethean Books, 1981), p. 111.

33. Milner, op. cit., p. 11.

34. Claude Polin, Le libéralisme, espoir ou péril (Paris: Table ronde, 1984), p. 211.

35. Ibid. p. 213.

36. Julien Freund, Politique, Impolitique (Paris: ed. Sirey, 1987), p. 336. Also in its entirety, “Théorie des besoins,” pp. 319-353.

37. Loc. cit.

38. Ibid., p. 336-337.

39. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 165 and passim.

40. Max Scheler, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (Abhandlungen and Aufsäzte) (Leipzig: Verlag der weissen Bücher, 1915), p. 58.

41. Claude Polin, Le totalitarisme (Paris: PUF, 1982), p.123. See also Guillaume Faye, Contre l’économisme(Paris: ed. le Labyrinthe, 1982).

42. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Book, 1958), p. 478.

 

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Sunic, Tomislav. “Historical Dynamics of Liberalism: From Total Market to Total State.” Journal of Social, Political, & Economic Studies, Vol. 13 No 4 (Winter, 1988). < http://www.tomsunic.com/?p=235 >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Historical Dynamics of Liberalism).

Note: This essay was also republished in Tomislav Sunic’s Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity – Collected Essays (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).

This essay is also available in Spanish translation as “Dinámica histórica del Liberalismo: del mercado total al Estado total”, published in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 28, “Contra el Liberalismo: El Principal Enemigo” (Junio 2012), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2012/06/elementos-n-28-contra-el-liberalismo-el.html/ >. (We have made Elementos N° 28 available for download on our site: Elementos Nº 28 – Contra el Liberalismo).

 

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft – Benoist & Sunic

“Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft”: A Sociological View of the Decay of Modern Society

By Alain de Benoist and Tomislav Sunic

 

The text is based on an original essay by Alain de Benoist. Translated and interpreted by Dr. Tomislav Sunic (then working at the Juniata College)

 Peaceful modern societies which respect the individual evolved from age-old familistic ties. The transition from band-type societies, through clan and tribal organizations, into nation-states was peaceful only when accomplished without disruption of the basic ties which link the individual to the larger society by a sense of a common history, culture and kinship. The sense of “belonging” to a nation by virtue of such shared ties promotes cooperation, altruism and respect for other members. In modern times, traditional ties have been weakened by the rise of mass societies and rapid global communication, factors which bring with them rapid social change and new philosophies which deny the significance of the sense of nationhood, and emphasize individualism and individualistic goals. The cohesion of societies has consequently been threatened, and replaced by multicultural and multi-ethnic societies and the overwhelming sense of lost identity in the mass global society in which Western man, at least, has come to conceive himself as belonging.

Sociologically, the first theorist to identify this change was the Arab scholar, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who emphasized the tendency for mass urban societies to break down when the social solidarity characteristic of tribal and national societies disappeared. Ibn Khaldun saw dramatically the contrast between the morality of the nationalistic and ethnically unified Berbers of North Africa and the motley collation of peoples who called themselves Arabs under Arabic leadership, but did not possess the unity and sense of identity that had made the relatively small population of true Arabs who had built a widespread and Arabic-speaking Empire. Later it was Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) who introduced this thought to modern sociology. He did so in his theory of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887). This theory revealed how early tribal or national (gemeinschaft) societies achieved harmonious collaboration and cooperation more or less automatically due to the common culture and sense of common genetic and cultural identity in which all members were raised. This avoided major conflicts concerning basic values since all shared a common set of mores and a common sense of destiny. However, as history progressed, larger multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies began to develop, and these Tönnies described as being united by gesellschaft ties. These were not united by any common set of values or historical identity, and collaboration was only maintained due to the need to exchange goods and services. In short, their existence came to depend on economic relations, and as a result of the diversity of cultural values, the lack of any “family feeling,” and the emphasis on economic exchange and economic wealth, conflict over wealth and basic values was likely to disrupt the harmony of such societies at any time. In political terms, liberalism developed to eulogize the freedom of individuals from claims to national loyalty and support for national destiny, while Marxism grew out of the dissatisfaction felt by those who were less successful in achieving wealth and power, which now came to represent the primary goals of the individuals who were left at the mercy of the modern mass gesellschaft society. Nationalism and any sense of loyalty to the nation as a distinct ethnic, kinship unit came to be anatomized by both liberals and Marxists.

“A specter is haunting Europe – a specter of communism” wrote Marx in the preface of The Manifesto. A century later this specter became a mere phantom, with liberalism the dominant force. Over the last several decades, liberalism used communism as a scarecrow to legitimize itself. Today, however, with the bankruptcy of communism, this mode of “negative legitimation” is no longer convincing. At last, liberalism, in the sense of the emphasis on the individual above and even against that of the nation, actually endangers the individual by undermining the stability of the society which gives him identity, values, purpose and meaning, the social, cultural and biological nexus to which he owes his very being.

Fundamentally, classical liberalism was a doctrine which, out of an abstract individual, created the pivot of its survival. In its mildest form it merely emphasized individual freedom of action, and condemned excessive bureaucratic involvement by government. But praiseworthy though its defense of individual freedom was, its claim that the ideal system is that in which there is the least possible emphasis on nationhood leads to situations which in fact endanger the freedom of the individual. In its extreme form, classical liberalism has developed into universal libertarianism, and at this point it comes close to advocating anarchy.

From the sociological standpoint, in its extreme form, modern internationalist liberalism defines itself totally in terms of the gesellschaft society of Tönnies. It denies the historical concept of the nation state by rejecting the notion of any common interest between individuals who traditionally shared a common heritage. In the place of nationhood it proposes to generate a new international social pattern centered on the individual’s quest for optimal personal and economic interest. Within the context of extreme liberalism, only the interplay of individual interests creates a functional society – a society in which the whole is viewed only as a chance aggregate of anonymous particles. The essence of modern liberal thought is that order is believed to be able to consolidate itself by means of all-out economic competition, that is, through the battle of all against all, requiring governments to do no more than set certain essential ground rules and provide certain services which the individual alone cannot adequately provide. Indeed, modern liberalism has gone so far along this path that it is today directly opposed to thee goals of classical liberalism and libertarianism in that it denies the individual any inalienable right to property, but still shares with modern liberalism and with libertarianism an antagonism toward the idea of nationhood. Shorn of the protection of a society which identifies with its members because of a shared national history and destiny, the individual is left to grasp struggle for his own survival, without the protective sense of community which his forebears enjoyed since the earliest of human history.

Decadence in modern mass multi-cultural societies begins at a moment when there is no longer any discernable meaning within society. Meaning is destroyed by raising individualism above all other values because rampant individualism encourages the anarchical proliferation of egotism at the expense of the values that were once part of the national heritage, values that give form to the concept of nationhood and the nation-state, to a state which is more than just a political entity, and which corresponds to a particular people who are conscious of sharing a common heritage for the survival of which they are prepared to make personal sacrifices.

Man evolved in cooperating groups united by common cultural and genetic ties, and it is only in such a setting that the individual can feel truly free, and truly protected. Men cannot live happily alone and without values or any sense of identity: such a situation leads to nihilism, drug abuse, criminality and worse. With the spread of purely egotistic goals at the expense of the altruistic regard for family and nation, the individual begins to talk of his rights rather than his duties, for he no longer feels any sense of destiny, of belonging to and being a part of a greater and more enduring entity. He no longer rejoices in the secure belief that he shares in a heritage which it is part of his common duty to protect – he no longer feels that he has anything in common with those around him. In short, he feels lonely and oppressed. Since all values have become strictly personal, everything is now equal to everything; e.g., nothing equals nothing.

“A society without strong beliefs,” declared Regis Debray in his interview with J.P. Enthoven in Le Nouvel Observateur, (October 10, 1981), ” is a society about to die.” Modern liberalism is particularly critical of nationalism. Hence, the question needs to be raised: Can modern liberal society provide strong unifying communal beliefs in view of the fact that on the one hand it views communal life as nonessential, while on the other, it remains impotent to envision any belief – unless this belief is reducible to economic conduct?

Moreover there seems to be an obvious relationship between the negation and the eclipse of the meaning and the destruction of the historical dimension of the social corpus. Modern liberals encourage “narcissism;” they live in the perpetual now. In liberal society, the individual is unable to put himself in perspective, because putting himself in perspective requires a clear and a collectively perceived consciousness of common heritage and common adherence. As Regis Debray remarks, “In the capacity of isolated subjects men can never become the subjects of action and acquire the capability of making history.” (Critique de la raison politique, op. cit. p. 207). In liberal societies, the suppression of the sense of meaning and identity embedded in national values leads to the dissolution of social cohesion as well as to the dissolution of group consciousness. This dissolution, in turn, culminates in the end of history.

Being the most typical representative of the ideology of equalitarianism, modern liberalism, in both its libertarian and socialist variants, appears to be the main factor in this dissolution of the ideal of nationhood. When the concept of society, from the sociological standpoint, suggests a system of simple ‘horizontal interactions,’ then this notion inevitably excludes social form. As a manifestation of solidarity, society can only be conceived in terms of shared identity – that is, in terms of historical values and cultural traditions (cf., Edgar Morin: “The communal myth gives society its national cohesion.”) By contrast, liberalism undoes nations and systematically destroys their sense of history, tradition, loyalty and value. Instead of helping man to elevate himself to the sphere of the superhuman, it divorces him from all ‘grand projects’ by declaring these projects ‘dangerous’ from the point of view of equality. No wonder, therefore, that the management of man’s individual well-being becomes his sole preoccupation. In the attempt to free man from all constraints, liberalism brings man under the yoke of other constraints which now downgrade him to the lowest level. Liberalism does not defend liberty; it destroys the independence of the individual. By eroding historical memories, liberalism extricates man from history. It proposes to ensure his means of existence, but robs him of his reason to live and deprives him of the possibility of having a destiny.

There are two ways of conceiving of man and society. The fundamental value may be placed on the individual, and when this is done the whole of mankind is conceived as the sum total of all individuals – a vast faceless proletariat – instead of as a rich fabric of diverse nations, cultures and races. It is this conception that is inherent in liberal and socialist thought. The other view, which appears to be more compatible with man’s evolutionary and socio-biological character, is when the individual is seen as enjoying a specific biological and culture legacy – a notion which recognizes the importance of kinship and nationhood. In the first instance, mankind, as a sum total of individuals, appears to be “contained” in each individual human being; that is, one becomes first a “human being,” and only then, as by accident, a member of a specific culture or a people. In the second instance, mankind comprises a complex phylogenetic and historic network, whereby the freedom of the individual is guaranteed by the protection of family by his nation, which provide him with a sense of identity and with a meaningful orientation to the entire world population. It is by virtue of their organic adherence to the society of which they are a part that men build their humanity.

As exponents of the first concept we encounter Descartes, the Encyclopaedists, and the emphasis on “rights”; nationality and society emanate from the individual, by elective choice, and are revokable at any time. As proponents of the second concept we find J.G. Herder and G.W. Leibniz, who stress the reality of cultures and ethnicity. Nationality and society are rooted in biological, cultural and historical heritage. The difference between these two concepts becomes particularly obvious when one compares how they visualize history and the structure of the real. Nationalists are proponents of holism. Nationalists see the individual as a kinsman, sustained by the people and community. which nurtures and protects him, and with which he is proud to identify. The individual’s actions represent an act of participation in the life of his people, and freedom of action is very real because, sharing in the values of his associates, the individual will seldom seek to threaten the basic values of the community with which he identifies. Societies which lack this basic sense of national unity are inherently prone to suffer from repeated situations wherein the opposing values of its egotistical members conflict with each other.

Furthermore, proponents of nationhood contend that a society or a people can survive only when: a) they remain aware of their cultural and historical origins; b) when they can assemble around a mediator, be it individual, or symbolic, who is capable of reassembling their energies and catalyzing their will to have a destiny; c) when they can retain the courage to designate their enemy. None of these conditions have been realized in societies that put economic gain above all other values, and which consequently: a) dissolve historical memories; b) extinguish the sublime and eliminate subliminal ideals; c) assume that it is possible not to have enemies.

The results of the rapid change from national or tribal-oriented societies to the modern, anti-national individualism prevalent in contemporary “advanced” societies have been very well described by Cornelius Castoriadis: “Western societies are in absolute decomposition. There is no longer a vision of the whole that could permit them to determine and apply any political action . . . Western societies have practically ceased to be [nation] states . . . Simply put, they have become agglomerations of lobbies which, in a myopic manner, tear the society apart; where nobody can propose a coherent policy, and where everybody is capable of blocking an action deemed hostile to his own interests.” (Liberation, 16 and 21 December, 1981).

Modern liberalism has suppressed patriotic nationhood into a situation in which politics has been reduced to a “delivery service” decision-making process resembling the economic “command post,” statesmen have been reduced to serving as tools for special interest groups, and nations have become little more than markets. The heads of modern liberal states have no options but to watch their citizenry being somatized by civilizational ills such as violence, delinquency, and drugs.

Ernst Jünger once remarked that the act of veiled violence is more terrible than open violence. (Journal IV, September 6, 1945). And he also noted: “Slavery can be substantially aggravated when it assumes the appearance of liberty.” The tyranny of modern liberalism creates the illusion inherent in its own principles. It proclaims itself for liberty and cries out to defend “human rights” at the moment when it oppresses the most. The dictatorship of the media and the “spiral of silence” appear to be almost as effective in depriving the citizenry of its freedom by imprisonment. In the West, there is no need to kill: suffice it to cut someone’s microphone. To kill somebody by silence is a very elegant kind of murder, which in practice yields the same dividends as a real assassination – an assassination which, in addition, leaves the assassin with good conscience. Moreover, one should not forget the importance of such a type of assassination. Rare are those who silence their opponents for fun.

Patriotic nationhood does not target the notion of “formal liberties, ” as some rigorous Marxists do. Rather, its purpose is to demonstrate that “collective liberty,” i.e., the liberty of peoples to be themselves and to continue to enjoy the privilege of having a destiny, does not result from the simple addition of individual liberties. Proponents of nationhood instead contend that the “liberties” granted to individuals by liberal societies are frequently nonexistent; they represent simulacra of what real liberties should be. It does not suffice to be free to do something. Rather, what is needed is one’s ability to participate in determining the course of historical events. Societies dominated by modern liberal traditions are “permissive” only in so far as their general macrostability strips the populace of any real participation in the actual decision-making process. As the sphere in which the citizenry is permitted to “do everything” becomes larger, the sense of nationhood becomes paralyzed and loses its direction.

Liberty cannot be reduced to the sentiment that one has about it. For that matter, both the slave and the robot could equally well perceive themselves as free. The meaning of liberty is inseparable from the founding anthropology of man, an individual sharing a common history and common culture in a common community. Decadence vaporizes peoples, frequently in the gentlest of manners. This is the reason why individuals acting as individuals can only hope to flee tyranny, but cooperating actively as a nation they can often defeat tyranny.

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De Benoist, Alain & Sunic, Tomislav. “‘Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft’: A Sociological View of the Decay of Modern Society.” Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1994). <http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain6.html >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft).

 

Critique of Liberal Ideology – Benoist

A Critique of Liberal Ideology

By Alain de Benoist

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

Translator’s Note: In “A Critique of Liberal Ideology,” Alain de Benoist uses the term “liberalism” in the broad European sense of the term that applies not just to American liberalism but also to American libertarianism and mainstream conservatism, insofar as all three share a common history and common premises. I wish to thank Alain de Benoist for permission to translate and publish this essay, Michael O’Meara for checking the translation, and Arjuna for help with French idioms.

***

Not being the work of a single man, liberalism was never presented in the form of a unified doctrine. Various liberal authors have, at times, interpreted it in divergent, if not contradictory, ways. Still, they share enough common points to classify them all as liberals. These common points also make it possible to define liberalism as a specific school of thought. On the one hand, liberalism is an economic doctrine that tends to make the model of the self-regulating market the paradigm of all social reality: what is called political liberalism is simply one way of applying the principles deduced from these economic doctrines to political life. This tends to limit the role of politics as much as possible. (In this sense, one can say that “liberal politics” is a contradiction in terms.) On the other hand, liberalism is a doctrine based on an individualistic anthropology, i.e., it rests on a conception of man as a being who is not fundamentally social.

These two characteristic features, each of which has descriptive and normative aspects (the individual and the market are both described as facts and are held up as models), are directly opposed to collective identities. A collective identity cannot be analyzed in a reductionistic way, as if it were the simple sum of the characteristics possessed by the individuals of a given community. Such an identity requires the collectivity’s members to be clearly conscious that their membership encompasses or exceeds their individual being, i.e., that their common identity is a product of this composition. However, insofar as it is based on individualism, liberalism tends to sever all social connections that go beyond the individual. As for the market’s optimal operation, it requires that nothing obstruct the free circulation of men and goods, i.e., borders must be treated as unreal, which tends to dissolve common structures and values. Of course this does not mean that liberals can never defend collective identities. But they do so only in contradiction to their principles.

* * *

Louis Dumont has shown Christianity’s role in Europe’s passage from a traditional holist society to a modern individualistic society. Right from the start, Christianity presented man as an individual who, prior to any other relationship, has an inner relationship to God and who thus seeks salvation through personal transcendence. In this relationship with God, man’s value as an individual is affirmed, and by comparison the world is necessarily degraded or devalued. Moreover, the individual is made equal to all other men, who also have individual souls. Egalitarianism and universalism are thus introduced on a higher plane: the absolute value the individual soul receives from its filial relationship with God is shared by all humanity.

Marcel Gauchet takes up the theme of a causal link between the emergence of a personal God and the birth of an inner man, whose fate in the beyond depends solely on his individual actions, and whose independence is already present in the possibility of an intimate relationship with God, i.e., of a relationship that involves God alone. “The more remote God becomes in his infinity,” Gauchet writes, “the more the relationship with him tends to become purely personal, to the point of excluding any institutional mediation. Raised to the absolute, the divine subject has no legitimate terrestrial counterpart other than intimate presence. Thus the original interiority leads directly to religious individuality.”[1]

The Pauline doctrine reveals a dualistic tension that makes the Christian, in his relationship to God, an “otherworldly individual”: to become Christian implies in some way giving up the world. However, in the course of history, the “otherworldly” individual gradually contaminated worldly life. To the extent that he acquired the power to make the world conform to his values, the otherworldly individual progressively returned to the world, immersing himself in it and transforming it profoundly.

The process was carried out in three main stages. Initially, secular life was no longer rejected but relativized: this is the Augustinian synthesis of the two cities. In the second stage, the papacy secularized itself by assuming political power. Finally, with the Reformation, man invested himself completely in the world, where he worked for the glory of God by seeking material success that he interpreted as the very proof of his election.

In this way, the principle of equality and individuality—which initially functioned solely in the relationship with God and thus could still coexist with an organic and hierarchical principle structuring the social whole—was gradually brought down to earth, resulting in modern individualism, which represents its secular projection. “In order for modern individualism to be born,” writes Alain Renaut explicating the theses of Louis Dumont, it was necessary for the individualistic and universalist component of Christianity “to contaminate,” so to speak, modern life to such an extent that gradually the two orders were unified, the initial dualism was erased, and “life in the world was reconceived as being able to conform completely to the supreme value”: at the end of this process, “the otherworldly individual became the modern worldly individual.”[2]

Organic society of the holist type then disappeared. In contemporary terms, one passed from community to society, i.e., to common life conceived as simple contractual association. The social whole no longer came first, but rather individual holders of individual rights, bound together by self-interested rational contracts.

An important moment of this evolution was the fourteenth century nominalism of William of Ockham, who held that nothing exists but particular beings. Another key moment was Cartesianism, which philosophically established the conception of the individual later presupposed by the legal doctrine of the rights of man and the intellectual perspective of the Enlightenment. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the emancipation of the situated individual from his natural attachments was routinely interpreted from the perspective of universal progress as marking the accession of humanity to “adulthood.” Sustained by this individualistic impulse, modernity was characterized first and foremost as the process by which local and kinship groups, and broader communities, are gradually broken down to “liberate the individual,” and all organic relations of solidarity are dissolved.

* * *

From time immemorial, to be human meant to be affirmed both as a person and as a social being: the individual dimension and the collective dimension are not identical, but are inseparable. In the holist view, man develops himself on the basis of what he inherits and in reference to his social-historical context. It is to this model, which is the most common model in history, that individualism, which one must regard as a peculiarity of Western history, directly comes to be opposed.

In the modern sense of the term, individualism is the philosophy that regards the individual as the only reality and takes him as the principle of every evaluation. The individual is considered in himself, in abstraction from his social or cultural context. While holism expresses or justifies existing society in reference to values that are inherited, passed on, and shared—i.e., in the last analysis, in reference to society itself—individualism establishes its values independently of society as it finds it. This is why it does not recognize the autonomous status of communities, peoples, cultures, or nations. For it sees these entities as nothing but sums of individual atoms, which alone have value.

This primacy of the individual over the community is simultaneously descriptive, normative, methodological, and axiological. The individual is assumed to come first, whether he is prior to the social in a mythical representation of “prehistory” (the anteriority of the state of nature), or simply has normative primacy (the individual is what is worth more). Georges Bataille asserts that, “at the basis of every being, there exists a principle of insufficiency.” Liberal individualism, on the contrary, affirms the full sufficiency of the singular individual. In liberalism, man can apprehend himself as an individual without reference to his relationship to other men within a primary or secondary sociality. Autonomous subject, owner of himself, moved solely by his particular interests, the individual is defined, in opposition to the person, as a “moral, independent, autonomous and thus primarily nonsocial being.”[3]

In liberal ideology, the individual possesses rights inherent in his “nature” entirely independent of social or political organization. Governments are obligated to guarantee these rights, but do not establish them. Being prior to all social life, they are not immediately correlated to duties, because duties imply precisely that social life already exists: there are no duties toward others if there are no others. Thus the individual himself is the source of his own rights, beginning with the right to act freely according to the calculation of his private interests. Thus he is “at war” with all other individuals, since they are supposed to act the same way in a society conceived as a competitive market.

Individuals may well choose to associate with one another, but the associations they form are conditional, contingent, and transitory, since they remain dependent on mutual assent and have no other goal than to better satisfy the individual interests of each party. Social life, in other words, is nothing but an affair of individual decisions and interested choices. Man behaves like a social being, not because it is in his nature, but because it is to his advantage. If he no longer finds it advantageous, he can always (in theory at least) break the pact. Indeed, this rupture best expresses his freedom. In opposition to ancient freedom, i.e., the possibility of participating in public life, modern freedom is, above all, the right to withdraw from public life. This is why liberals always tend to define freedom as synonymous with independence.[4] Thus Benjamin Constant extols “the peaceful pleasure of private individual independence,” adding that “men, to be happy, need only to be left in perfect independence, in all that relates to their occupations, their companies, their sphere of activity, their dreams.”[5] This “peaceful pleasure” is to be understood as the right of secession, the right to be constrained neither by duty of membership nor by any of those allegiances that, in certain circumstances, can indeed appear incompatible with “private independence.”

Liberals insist particularly on the idea that individual interests should never be sacrificed to the collective interest, the common good, or the public safety, concepts that they regard as inconsistent. From this idea it follows that only individuals have rights, while communities, being only collections of individuals, have none of their own. Thus Ayn Rand writes, “Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression ‘individual rights’ is a redundancy.”[6] Benjamin Constant also affirmed that, “Individual independence is the primary modern need. Consequently, one never should ask it to be sacrificed to establish political freedom.”[7] Before him, John Locke declared that “a Child is born a Subject of no Country or Government,” since, having become an adult, he is “at liberty what Government he will put himself under; what Body Politick he will unite himself to.”[8]

Liberal freedom thus supposes that individuals can be abstracted from their origins, their environment, the context in which they live and where they exercise their choices, i.e., from everything that makes them who they are, and not someone else. It supposes, in other words, as John Rawls says, that the individual is always prior to his ends. Nothing, however, proves that the individual can apprehend himself as a subject free of any allegiance, free of any determinism. Moreover, nothing proves that in all circumstances he will prefer freedom over every other good. Such a conception by definition ignores commitments and attachments that owe nothing to rational calculation. It is a purely formal conception, that makes it impossible to understand what a real person is.

The general idea is that the individual has the right to do everything he wants, so long as his use of his freedom does not limit the freedom of others. Freedom would thus be defined as the pure expression of a desire having no theoretical limits other than the identical desire of others, the whole of these desires being mediated by economic exchanges. It is what Grotius, the theorist of natural right, already asserted in the seventeenth century: “It is not against the nature of human society to work for one’s own interest, provided that one does so without wounding the rights of others.”[9] But this is obviously an irenic definition: almost all human acts are exercised in one way or another at the expense of the freedom of others, and it is, moreover, almost impossible to determine the moment when the freedom of one individual can be regarded as hindering that of others.

In fact, liberal freedom is, above all, the freedom to own. It does not reside in being, but in having. Man is called free insofar as he is an owner—first of all, an owner of himself. The idea that self-ownership fundamentally determines freedom will later be adopted by Marx.[10]

Alain Laurent defines self-realization as an “ontological insularity whose primary goal is the search for one’s own happiness.”[11] For liberal writers, the “search for happiness” is defined as the unhampered freedom to try always to maximize one’s best interest. But immediately we encounter the problem of understanding “interests,” especially since those who take interests as axiomatic seldom care to speak of their genesis or describe their components, any more than they wonder whether all social actors are at bottom driven by identical interests or if their interests are commensurable and compatible. When cornered, they tend to give the term a trivial definition: for them an “interest” becomes synonymous with a desire, a project, an action directed towards a goal, etc. Anything can become an “interest.” Even the most altruistic or disinterested action can then be defined as egoistic and interested, since it corresponds to the voluntary intention (the desire) of its author. In reality, though, it is clear that for liberals, an interest is defined initially as a material advantage which, to be appreciated as such, has to be calculable and quantifiable, i.e., to be expressible in terms of the universal equivalent which is money.

It should, therefore, be no surprise that the rise of liberal individualism initially entailed a progressive dislocation of the organic structures of existence characteristic of holist society, then a generalized disintegration of the social bonds, and finally a situation of relative social anomie, in which individuals were increasingly estranged from and even enemies of one other, which is part and parcel of the modern version of the “war of all against all,” that is, generalized competition. Such is the society Tocqueville described in which each member, “retired to the sidelines, is like a foreigner to all the others.” Liberal individualism tends everywhere to destroy direct sociability, which for a long time impeded the emergence of the modern individual and the collective identities that are associated with him. “Liberalism,” writes Pierre Rosanvallon, “to some extent makes the depersonalization of the world a condition of progress and freedom.”[12]

* * *

Liberalism is nevertheless obliged to recognize the existence of the social. But rather than wonder why the social exists, liberals are instead concerned with how it is established and maintained, and how it functions. After all, society for them is nothing more than the simple sum of its members (the whole being nothing but the sum of its parts), merely the contingent product of individual wills, a simple assembly of individuals all seeking to defend and satisfy their private interests. Society’s essential goal, therefore, is to regulate exchange relations. Such a society can be conceived either as the consequence of an initial rational voluntary act (the fiction of the “social contract”) or as the result of the systemic play of the totality of projects produced by individual agents, a play regulated by the market’s “invisible hand,” which “produces” the social as the unintentional result of human behavior. The liberal analysis of the social rests, thus, either on contractualism (Locke), recourse to the “invisible hand” (Adam Smith), or the idea of a spontaneous order, independent of any intention (F. A. Hayek).

Liberals developed the whole idea of the superiority of regulation by the market, which is supposed to be the most effective, most rational, and thus also the most just means to harmonize exchanges. At first glance, the market is thus presented above all as just a “technique of organization” (Henri Lepage). From an economic standpoint, it is at the same time an actual place where goods are exchanged and a virtual entity where in an optimal way the conditions of exchange—i.e., the adjustment of supply and demand and the price level—are formed.

But liberals do not wonder about the origin of the market either. Commercial exchange for them is indeed the “natural” model for all social relations. From this they deduced that the market itself is also a “natural” entity, establishing an order prior to any deliberation and decision. Being the form of exchange most in harmony with human nature, the market would be present at the dawn of humanity, in all societies. One finds here the tendency of every ideology to “naturalize” its presuppositions, i.e., to present itself, not for what it is, in fact a construction of the human spirit, but as a simple description, a simple transcription of the natural order. The state being correlatively rejected as an artifice, the idea of the “natural” regulation of the social by means of the market can then be imposed.

In understanding the nation as a market, Adam Smith brings about a fundamental dissociation between the concept of space and that of territory. Breaking with the mercantilist tradition, which still identified political territory and economic space, he shows that the market cannot by nature be contained within specific geographical limits. The market is indeed not so much a place as a network. And this network is destined to extend to the ends of the earth, since its only limit in the final analysis lies in the ability to exchange. “A merchant,” Smith writes in a famous passage, “. . . is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another.”[13] These prophetic lines justify the judgment of Pierre Rosanvallon, who sees Adam Smith as “the first consistent internationalist.” “Civil society, conceived as a fluid market,” adds Rosanvallon, “extends to all men and allows them to transcend national and racial divisions.”

The main advantage of the concept of the market is that it allows liberals to solve the difficult problem of how to make obligation part of the social pact. The market can indeed be regarded as a law—a principle regulating the social order—without a legislator. Regulated by the action of an “invisible hand,” which is inherently neutral because it is not incarnated in concrete individuals, the market establishes an abstract mode of social regulation based on allegedly objective “laws” that make it possible to regulate the individual relations where no forms of subordination or command exist. The economic order would thus have to establish the social order, both orders being conceived as emerging without being instituted. The economic order, says Milton Friedman, is “the nonintentional and nondesired consequence of the projects of a great number of people driven solely by their interests.” This idea, abundantly developed by Hayek, is inspired by the formula of Adam Ferguson (1767) who referred to social facts that are “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”[14]

Everyone knows the Smithian metaphor of the “invisible hand”: In commerce, the individual “intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”[15] This metaphor goes far beyond the altogether banal observation that the results of a one’s actions are often quite different from what one expected (what Max Weber called the “paradox of consequences”). Smith indeed frames this observation in a resolutely optimistic perspective. “Each individual,” he adds, “always makes every effort to find the most advantageous employment for all the capital at his disposal; it is quite true that he envisions his own benefit, not that of society; but the care that is given to finding his personal advantage leads him naturally, or rather necessarily, to precisely prefer the kind of employment that is most advantageous to society.” And further: “All while seeking only his personal interest, he often works in a much more effective manner for the interest of society than if his purpose really were to work for it.”

The theological connotations of this metaphor are obvious: the “invisible hand” is only a secular avatar of Providence. It should also be emphasized that, contrary to what is often believed, Adam Smith does not assimilate the very mechanism of the market to the play of the “invisible hand,” because he utilizes the latter only to describe the end result of the confluence of commercial exchanges. Besides, Smith still accepts the legitimacy of public intervention when individual projects alone fail to realize the common good.

But this qualification would soon disappear. Neo-liberals now dispute the very concept of the public good. Hayek prohibited any comprehensive approach to society on principle: no institution, no political authority ought to set objectives that might question the efficiency of the “spontaneous order.” Given this view, the only role that most liberals agree to allow the state is guaranteeing the conditions necessary for the free play of economic rationality to work in the market. The state can have no goal of its own. It exists only to guarantee individual rights, freedom of exchange, and respect for law. Equipped more with permissions than with prerogatives, it must in all other domains remain neutral and renounce proposing a model of the “good life.”[16]

The consequences of the theory of the “invisible hand” are decisive, particularly at the moral level. In some passages, Adam Smith indeed rehabilitates the very behaviors that previous centuries always condemned. By subordinating the social interest to individual economic interests, Smith makes selfishness the best way to serve others. While seeking to maximize our best personal interest, we work—without knowing it, indeed without even having to want it—for the interest of all. The free confrontation of egoistic interests in the market “naturally, or rather necessarily,” allows their harmonization by the play of the “invisible hand,” thus making them contribute to the social optimum. Thus there is nothing immoral in seeking one’s own interest first, since in the final analysis the egoistic action of each leads, as if by accident, to the interest of all. It is what Frédéric Bastiat summarized in a formula: “Each one, while working for himself, works for all.”[17] Egoism is thus nothing but altruism properly understood. By contrast, it is the schemes of the public authorities that deserve to be denounced as “immoral,” whenever, in the name of solidarity, they contradict the right of individuals to act according to their own interests.

Liberalism links individualism and the market by stating that the free operation of the latter is also the guarantor of individual freedom. By ensuring the best return on exchanges, the market in effect guarantees the independence of each agent. Ideally, if the market’s performance is unhindered, this adjustment takes place in an optimal way, making it possible to attain an ensemble of partial equilibriums that ensure an overall equilibrium. Defined by Hayek as a “catallaxy,” the market constitutes a spontaneous and abstract order, the formal instrumental support for the exercise of private freedom. The market thus represents not just the satisfaction of an economic ideal of optimality, but the satisfaction of everything to which individuals, considered as generic subjects of freedom, aspire. Ultimately, the market is identified with justice itself, which leads Hayek to define it as a “game that increases the chances of all the players,” stipulating that, under these conditions, losers would be ill-advised to complain, for they have only themselves to blame. Finally, the market is intrinsically “pacifying” because, based on “gentle commerce,” it substitutes the principle of negotiation for conflict, neutralizing both rivalry and envy.

Note that Hayek reformulates the theory of the “invisible hand” in “evolutionary” terms. Hayek indeed breaks with any sort of Cartesian reasoning, such as the fiction of the social contract, which implies the opposition (standard since Hobbes) between the state of nature and political society. On the contrary, in the tradition of David Hume, he praises custom and habit, which he opposes to all “constructivism.” But at the same time he affirms that custom selects the most effective and rational codes of conduct, i.e., the codes of conduct based on commercial values, whose adoption results in rejecting the “tribal order” of “archaic society.” This is why, invoking “tradition” all the while, he criticizes traditional values and firmly condemns any organicist vision of society. Indeed, for Hayek the value of tradition derives above all from what is spontaneous, abstract, impersonal, and thus inappropriable. It is this selective character of custom that explains why the market was gradually imposed. Hayek thus thinks that any spontaneous order is basically “right” in the same way that Darwin asserts that the survivors of the “struggle for life” are necessarily “the best.” The market order thus constitutes a social order that prohibits by definition any attempt to reform it.

Thus one sees that, for liberals, the market concept goes well beyond the merely economic sphere. The market is more than a mechanism for the optimal allocation of scarce resources or a system regulating the pathways of production and consumption. The market is also and above all a sociological and “political” concept. Adam Smith himself, insofar as he turned the market into the principal agent of social order, was led to conceive human relations on the economic model, i.e., as relations between merchandise. Thus a market economy leads quite naturally to a market society. “The market,” writes Pierre Rosanvallon, “is primarily a way of representing and structuring social space; it is only secondarily a decentralized mechanism for regulating economic activities through the pricing system.”[18]

For Adam Smith, generalized exchange is the direct consequence of the division of labor: “Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.”[19] Thus, from the liberal perspective, the market is the dominant paradigm in a society that defines itself through and through as a market society. Liberal society is only a realm of utilitarian exchanges by individuals and groups all driven solely by the desire to maximize their self-interest. A member of this society, where everything can be bought and sold, is either a merchant, or an owner, or a producer, and in all cases a consumer. “The superior rights of consumers,” writes Pierre Rosanvallon, “are to Smith what the General Will is to Rousseau.”

In the modern age, liberal economic analysis was gradually extended to all social facts. The family was assimilated to a small business, social relations to a network of competing self-interested strategies, political life to a market where the voters sell their votes to the highest bidder. Man is perceived as capital, the child as a consumer good. Economic logic was thus projected onto the social whole, in which it was once embedded, until it entirely encompassed it. As Gerald Berthoud writes, “society can then be conceived starting from a formal theory of purposeful action. The cost-benefit analysis is thus the principle that rules the world”[20] Everything becomes a factor of production and consumption; everything is supposed to result from the spontaneous adjustment of supply and demand. Everything is worth its exchange value, measured by its price. Correlatively, all that cannot be expressed in quantifiable and calculable terms is held to be uninteresting or unreal. Economic discourse thus proves profoundly reifying of social and cultural practices, profoundly foreign to any value that cannot be expressed in terms of price. Reducing all social facts to a universe of measurable things, it finally transforms men themselves into things—things substitutable and interchangeable from the monetary point of view.

* * *

This strictly economic representation of society has considerable consequences. Completing the process of secularization and “disenchantment” of the world characteristic of modernity, it leads to the dissolution of peoples and the systematic erosion of their distinct characteristics. On the sociological plane, privileging economic exchange divides society into producers, owners, and sterile classes (like the former aristocracy), through an eminently revolutionary process that Karl Marx was not the last to praise. On the plane of the collective imagination, it leads to a complete inversion of values, while raising to the pinnacle commercial values that from time immemorial had been regarded as the very definition of inferior, since they were matters of mere necessity. On the moral plane, it rehabilitates the spirit of self-interested calculation and egoistic behavior, which traditional society has always condemned.

Politics is regarded as intrinsically dangerous, insofar as it concerns the exercise of power, which is considered “irrational.” Thus liberalism reduces politics to the guarantee of rights and management of society solely by technical expertise. It is the fantasy of a “transparent society” coinciding immediately with itself, outside any symbolic referent or concrete intermediation. In the long run, in a society entirely governed by the market and based on the postulate of the self-sufficiency of “civil society,” the state and related institutions are supposed to decay as surely as in the classless society imagined by Marx. In addition, the logic of the market, as Alain Caillé shows, is part of a larger process tending toward the equalization, even the interchangeability, of men, by the means of a dynamic that is observed already in the modern use of currency. “The juggling act of the liberal ideology,” according to Caillé, “. . . resides in the identification of the legal state with the commercial state, its reduction to an emanation of the market. Consequently, the plea for the freedom of individuals to choose their own ends in reality turns into an obligation to have only commercial ends.”[21]

The paradox is that liberals never cease affirming that the market maximizes the chances of each individual to realize his own ends, while affirming that these ends cannot be defined in advance, and that, moreover, nobody can better define them than the individual himself. But how can they say that the market brings about the optimum, if we do not know what this optimum is? In fact, one could just as easily argue that the market multiplies individual aspirations much more than it gives them the means to achieve them, that it increases, not their satisfaction, but their dissatisfaction in the Tocquevillian sense of the term.

Moreover, if the individual is always by definition the best judge of his own interests, then what obliges him to respect reciprocity, which would be the sole norm? Liberal doctrine would no longer base moral behavior upon a sense of duty or the moral law, but upon self-interest, rightly understood. While not violating the liberty of others, I would dissuade them from violating mine. Fear of the police is supposed to take care of the rest. But if I am certain that, by transgressing the rules, I incur only a very small risk of punishment, and reciprocity does not matter to me, what prevents me from violating the rules or the law? Obviously nothing. On the contrary, taking into account nothing but my own interests encourages me to do so as often as I can.

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith writes frankly:

. . . though among the different members of the society there should be no mutual love and affection, the society, though less happy and agreeable, will not necessarily be dissolved. Society may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation.[22]

The meaning of this passage is clear. A society can very well economize—this word is essential—on any form of organic sociality, without ceasing to be a society. It is enough for it to become a society of merchants: the social bond will merge with the feeling of its “utility” and the “mercenary exchange of good offices.” Thus to be human, it is sufficient to take part in commercial exchanges, to make free use of one’s right to maximize one’s best interest. Smith said that such a society will certainly be “less happy and agreeable,” but the nuance was quickly forgotten. One even wonders if, for certain liberals, the only way to be fully human is to behave like merchants, i.e., those who were formerly accorded an inferior status (not that they were not regarded as useful, and even necessary, but for the very reason that they were nothing but useful—and their vision of the world was limited by the sole value of utility). And that obviously raises the question of the status of those who do not behave like that, either because they lack the desire or the means. Are they still men?

* * *

The logic of the market actually imposed itself gradually, beginning at the end of the Middle Ages, when long-distance and local trade started to be unified within national markets under the impetus of the emerging nation-states, eager to monetize and hence tax formerly untaxable forms of noncommercial intra-community trade. Thus, far from being a universal fact, the market is a phenomenon strictly localized in time and space. And, far from being “spontaneous,” this phenomenon was in fact instituted. Particularly in France, but also in Spain, the market was by no means constructed in spite of the nation-state, but rather thanks to it. The state and the market are born together and progress at the same pace, the former constituting the latter at the same time as it institutes itself. “At the very least,” Alain Caillé writes, “it is advisable not to consider market and state as two radically different and antagonistic entities, but as two facets of the same process. Historically, national markets and nation-states are built at the same pace, and one is not found without the other.”[23]

Indeed, both develop in the same direction. The market amplifies the movement of the national state which, to establish its authority, cannot cease to destroy methodically all forms of intermediate socialization which, in the feudal world, were relatively autonomous organic structures (family clans, village communities, fraternities, trades, etc.). The bourgeois class, and with it incipient liberalism, sustained and aggravated this atomization of society, insofar as the emancipation of the individual it desired required the destruction of all involuntary forms of solidarity or dependence that represent as many obstacles to the extension of the market. Pierre Rosanvallon observes:

From this perspective, nation-state and market reflect the same type of socialization of individuals in space. They are conceivable only within the framework of an atomized society, in which the individual is understood to be autonomous. Thus both the nation-state and the market, in both the sociological and economic sense of these terms, are not possible where society exists as an encompassing social whole.[24]

Thus the new form of society that emerged from the crisis of the Middle Ages was built gradually, starting from the individual, from his ethical and political standards, and from his interests, slowly dissolving the coherence of political, economic, legal, and even linguistic realms that the old society tended to sustain. Until the seventeenth century, however, state and civil society continued to be one and the same: the expression “civil society” was still synonymous with politically organized society. The distinction begins to emerge late in the seventeenth century, notably with Locke, who redefines “civil society” as the sphere of property and exchanges, the state or “political society” being henceforth dedicated to protecting economic interests alone. Based upon the creation of an autonomous sphere of production and exchanges, and reflecting the specialization of roles and functions characteristic of the modern state, this distinction led either to the valorization of political society as the result of a social contract, as with Locke, or to the exaltation of civil society based on the spontaneous adjustment of interests, as with Mandeville and Smith.[25] As an autonomous sphere, civil society creates a field for the unrestricted deployment of the economic logic of interests. As a consequence of the market’s advent, “society,” as Karl Polanyi writes, “is managed as an auxiliary of the market. Instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in economic relations.”[26] This is the very meaning of the bourgeois revolution.

At the same time, society takes the form of an objective order, distinct from the natural or cosmic order, which coincides with the universal reason to which the individual is supposed to have immediate access. Its historical objectivation initially crystallizes in the political doctrines of rights, the development of which one can follow from the time of Jean Bodin to the Enlightenment. In parallel, political economy emerges as a general science of society, conceived as a process of dynamic development synonymous with “progress.” Society henceforth becomes the subject of a specific scientific knowledge. To the extent that it achieves a supposedly rational mode of existence, and its practices are subject to an instrumental rationality as the ultimate principle of regulation, the social world falls under a certain number of “laws.” But due to this very objectivization, the unity of society, like its symbolization, becomes eminently problematic, the more so as the privatization of membership and attachment leads quickly to the fragmentation of the social body, the multiplication of conflicting private interests, and the onset of de-institutionalization. New contradictions soon appear, not only between the society founded by the bourgeoisie and remnants of the Old Regime, but even within bourgeois society, such as class struggle.

The distinction between the public and the private, state and civil society, was still acute in the nineteenth century, generalizing a dichotomic and contradictory view of social space. Having extended its power, liberalism, henceforth promoted a “civil society” identified with the private sphere alone and denounced the “hegemonic” influence of the public sector, leading it to plead for the end of the state’s monopoly on the satisfaction of collective needs and for the extension of commercial modes of intrasocial regulation. “Civil society” then took on a largely mythic dimension. Being defined less and less in its own terms than in opposition to the state—its contours fuzzily defined by what was theoretically subtracted from the state—it seemed more an ideological force than a well-defined reality.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, adjustments had to be made to the purely economic logic of society’s regulation and reproduction. These adjustments were less the result of conservative resistance than of the internal contradictions of the new social configuration. Sociology itself arose from real society’s resistance to political and institutional changes as well as those who invoked a “natural order” to denounce the formal and artificial character of the new mode of social regulation. For the first sociologists, the rise of individualism hatched a double fear: of “anomie” resulting from the disintegration of social bonds (Émile Durkheim) and of the “crowd” made up of atomized individuals suddenly brought together in an uncontrollable “mass” (Gustave Le Bon or Gabriel Tarde, both of whom reduce the analysis of social facts to “psychology”). The first finds an echo among counter-revolutionary thinkers in particular. The second is mainly perceptible among the bourgeoisie concerned above all with protecting itself from the “dangerous classes.”

While the nation-state supported and instituted the market, antagonism between liberalism and the “public sector” grew in tandem. Liberals never cease fulminating against the welfare state, without realizing that it is precisely the market’s extension that necessitates ever-increasing state intervention. The man whose labor is subject solely to the market’s play is indeed vulnerable, for his labor might find no takers or have no value. Modern individualism, moreover, destroyed the organic relations of proximity, which were above all relations of mutual aid and reciprocal solidarity, thus destroying old forms of social protection. While regulating supply and demand, the market does not regulate social relations, but on the contrary disorganizes them, if only because it does not take into account demands for which one cannot pay. The rise of the welfare state then becomes a necessity, since it is the only power able to correct the most glaring imbalances and attenuate the most obvious distresses. This is why, as Karl Polanyi showed, every time liberalism appeared to triumph, it has been paradoxically assisted by the addition of official interventions necessitated by the damage to the social fabric caused by the logic of the market. “Without the relative social peace of the welfare state,” Alain Caillé observes, “the market order would have been swept away altogether.”[27] This synergy of market and state has long characterized (and in certain regards continues to characterize) the Fordist system. “Social protection,” concludes Polanyi, “is the obligatory accompaniment of the self-regulating market.”[28]

Insofar as its interventions aim at compensating for the destructive effects of the market, the welfare state in a certain manner plays a role in “de-marketizing” social life. However, it cannot completely replace the forms of community protection destroyed by industrial development, the rise of individualism, and the expansion of the market. Compared to these old forms of social protection, it indeed has as many limitations as benefits. Whereas the old solidarity rested on an exchange of mutual services, which implied responsibility for all, the welfare state encourages irresponsibility and turns citizens into dependents. Whereas the old solidarity fell under a network of concrete relations, the welfare state takes the form of an abstract, anonymous, and remote machinery, from which one expects everything and to which one thinks one owes nothing. The substitution of an impersonal, external, and opaque solidarity for an old, immediate solidarity is thus far from satisfactory. It is, in fact, the very source of the current crisis of the welfare state which, by its very nature, seems doomed to implement only a solidarity that is economically ineffective because it is sociologically maladjusted. As Bernard Enjolras writes, “to go beyond the internal crisis of the welfare state presupposes . . . rediscovering the conditions that produce a solidarity of proximity,” which are also “the conditions for reforging the economic bond to restore synchronism between the production of wealth and the production of the social.”[29]

* * *

“All the degradation of the modern world,” wrote Péguy, “i.e., all lowering of standards, all debasement of values, comes from the modern world regarding as negotiable the values that the ancient and Christian worlds regarded as nonnegotiable.”[30] Liberal ideology bears a major responsibility for this “degradation,” insofar as liberalism is based on an unrealistic anthropology entailing a series of erroneous conclusions.

The idea that man acts freely and rationally in the market is just a utopian postulate, for economic facts are never autonomous, but relative to a given social and cultural context. There is no innate economic rationality; it is only the product of a well-defined social-historical development. Commercial exchange is not the natural form of social relations, or even economic relations. The market is not a universal phenomenon, but a localized one. It never realizes the optimal adjustment of supply and demand, if only because it solely takes into account the demand of those who can pay. Society is always more than its individual components, as a class is always more than the elements that form it, because it is that which constitutes it as such, and that from which it is thus logically and hierarchically distinct, as shown in Russell’s theory of logical types (a class cannot be a member of itself, no more than one of its members on its own can constitute the class). Finally, the abstract conception of a disinterested, “decontextualized” individual who acts upon strictly rational expectations and who freely chooses his identity from nothing, is a totally unsupportable vision. On the contrary, communitarian and quasi-communitarian theorists (Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel) have shown the vital importance for individuals of a community that necessarily constitutes their horizon, their episteme—even to forge a critical representation of it—for the construction of their identity as well as for the satisfaction of their goals. The common good is the substantial doctrine that defines the community’s way of life and thus its collective identity.

The whole current crisis arises from the contradiction that is exacerbated between the ideal of the abstract universal man (with its corollary atomization and depersonalization of all social relationships) and the reality of the concrete man (for whom social ties continue to be founded on emotional ties and relations of proximity, along with their corollaries of cohesion, consensus, and reciprocal obligations).

Liberal authors believe society can be based solely on individualism and market values. This is an illusion. Individualism has never been the sole foundation of social behavior, and it never will be. There are also good reasons to think that individualism can appear only insofar as society remains to some extent holist. “Individualism,” writes Louis Dumont, “is unable to replace holism completely and reign over all society. . . . Moreover, it cannot function without holism contributing to its life in a variety of unperceived and surreptitious ways.”[31] Individualism is what gives liberal ideology its utopian dimension. Thus it is wrong to see holism as only a doomed legacy of the past. Even in the age of modern individualism, man remains a social being. Holism reappears the moment liberal theory posits a “natural harmony of interests,” in effect recognizing that the common good takes precedence over private interests.

Notes

[1] Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 77. In English: The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

[2] Alain Renaut, L’ère de l’individu. Contribution à une histoire de la subjectivité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 76–77. In English: The Era of the Individual: Contribution to a History of Subjectivity, trans. M. B. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

[3] Louis Dumont, Homo æqualis. Genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 17.

[4] Certain liberal authors, however, endeavored to distinguish independence and autonomy, while others (or the same ones) endeavored to differentiate between the subject and the individual, or even between individualism and narcissism. Unlike independence, autonomy is compatible with submission to supra-individual rules, even when they come from a self-grounding normativity. This is, for example, the point of view Alain Renaut defends (L’ère de l’individu, 81–86), but it is not very convincing. Autonomy is indeed quite different from independence (in certain connections, it even represents the opposite of it), but that is not the essential question. The essential question is to know what, from a liberal point of view, can force an individual to adhere to any limitation of his freedom, whenever this limitation conflicts with his self-interest.

[5] Benjamin Constant, De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes (1819).

[6] Ayn Rand, “Collectivized ‘Rights’,” in her The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1964), 101.

[7] Constant, De la liberté des Anciens.

[8] John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), ch. viii, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 347.

[9] Hugo Grotius, Du droit de la guerre et de la paix (1625).

[10] Besides supporting the “mechanism” characteristic of liberal ideology, which is given a fundamental epistemological value, Marx himself adheres to a metaphysics of the individual, which led Michel Henry to see him as “one of the leading Christian thinkers of the Occident” (Michel Henry, Marx [Paris: Gallimard, 1991], vol. 2, 445). The reality of Marxist individualism, beyond its collectivist façade, was established by many authors, beginning with Louis Dumont. “Marx’s entire philosophy,” Pierre Rosanvallon writes, “can . . . be understood as an effort to enhance modern individualism. . . . The concept of class struggle itself has no meaning outside the framework of an individualistic representation of society. In a traditional society, by contrast, it has no significance” (Le libéralisme économique. Histoire de l’idée de marché [Paris: Seuil, 1989], 188–89). Marx certainly challenged the fiction of Homo economicus that developed beginning in the eighteenth century, but only because the bourgeoisie used it to alienate the real individual and bind him to an existence narrowed to the sphere of self-interest alone. However, for Marx, self-interest is merely an expression of a separation between the individual and his life. (It is the basis of the best part of his work, namely his criticism of “reified” social relations.) But he by no means intends to substitute the common good for private interests. There is not even a place for class interests.

[11] Alain Laurent, De l’individualisme. Enquête sur le retour de l’individu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 16.

[12] Rosanvallon, Le libéralisme économique, vii.

[13] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), vol. 1, book III, ch. iv, 426.

[14] Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), third part, section II, p. 119.

[15] Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, book IV, ch. ii, p. 456.

[16] With respect to the role of the state, this is the most current liberal position. The libertarians known as “anarcho-capitalists” go further, since they refuse even the “minimal state” suggested by Robert Nozick. Not being a producer of capital, though it consumes labor, for them the state is necessarily a “thief.”

[17] Frederic Bastiat, Harmonies économiques (1851). This is the well-known thesis that Mandeville defends in his Fable of the Bees: “Private vices, public virtue.”

[18] Rosanvallon, Le libéralisme économique, 124.

[19] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, book I, ch. iv, p. 37.

[20] Gerald Berthoud, Vers une anthropologie générale. Modernité et altérité (Geneva: Droz, 1992), 57.

[21] Alain Caillé, Splendeurs et misères des sciences sociales. Esquisse d’une mythologie (Geneva: Droz 1986), 347.

[22] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 86.

[23] Caillé, Splendeurs et misères, 333–34.

[24] Rosanvallon, Le libéralisme économique, 124.

[25] Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714).

[26] Karl Polanyi, La grande transformation. Aux origines politiques et économiques de notre temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 88. In English: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).

[27] Caillé, Splendeurs et misères, 332.

[28] Polanyi, La grande transformation, 265.

[29] Bernard Enjolras, “Crise de l’Etat-Providence, lien social et associations : éléments pour une socio-économie critique,” Revue du MAUSS, 1^er semestre 1998, 223.

[30] Charles Péguy, “Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne,” Note conjointe (Paris: Gallimard, 1935).

[31] Dumont, Homo æqualis.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “A Critique of Liberal Ideology.” The Occidental Quarterly, Winter 2007-2008, vol. 7, No. 4, 9-30. <www.toqonline.com/archives/v7n4/743BenoistLiberalismrevised.pdf >. (PDF version also downloadable from our site: A Critique of Liberal Ideology)

Note: For those who are interested, a more extensive critique specifically of Friedrich Hayek’s liberal theories was made by Alain de Benoist in “Hayek: A Critique,” Telos, Vol. 1998, No. 110 (December 1998), pp. 71-104. Made available for download from our site: Hayek: A Critique.

Notes on translations: The original French version of “A Critique of Liberal Ideology” was “Critique de l’idéologie libérale”, published in Critiques – Théoriques (Lausanne & Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 2003). It is available in German translation as “Die Kritik am Liberalismus” (published in Aufstand der Kulturen [Berlin: Edition Junge Freiheit, 1999]), in Italian translation as “Il liberalismo contro le identità collettive” (published in Le sfide della postmodernità [Casalecchio: Arianna, 2003]), in Spanish translation as “Crítica de la ideología liberal” (published online: InfoKrisis, 1 August 2009, <http://infokrisis.blogia.com/2009/080103-critica-de-la-ideologia-liberal-ii-de-iv-alain-de-benoist.php >), in Portuguese translation as “Crítica da ideologia liberal” (published online: Legio Victrix, 23 October 2012, <http://legio-victrix.blogspot.com/2012/10/critica-da-ideologia-liberal.html >), in Russian translation as “Критика либеральной идеологии” (published in Против либерализма [Санкт-Петербург: Амфора, 2009]), and in Slovakian translation as “Kritika ideológie liberalizmu” (Filozofia, No. 63, Vol. 9,2008, pp. 817-829).