Hegel [and Marx] on labor and freedom — Daniel Little

So does labor fulfill freedom or create alienation? Likewise, does technology emancipate and fulfill us, or does it enthrall and disempower us? Marx's answer to the first question is that it does both, depending on the social relations within which it is defined, managed, and controlled.

It would seem that we can answer the second question for ourselves, in much the same terms. Technology both extends freedom and constricts it....

Adding to what David Little says in this post, Hegel and Marx were chiefly interested in the expansion of human freedom, although they provided different analyses that appear to be at odds. Marx was writing in reaction to Hegel but also operating strongly under Hegel's influence, adopting his dialectical method, for example.

Daniel Little draws a connection between them through Alexandre Kojève's commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology, specifically the master-slave passage that he regarded as highly influential on Marx. When I was studying Hegel in grad school, I recall the professor strongly emphasizing this. We were expected to know that passage from the Phenomenology in detail.

Hegel, following the ancient Greeks, distinguished freedom from constraint, freedom to chose, and freedom for self-determination. Hegel emphasized that genuine freedom requires only freedom from constraint and freedom to chose but also freedom for self-determination. Human's share "natural freedom" — freedom from and freedom to — with other animals. This is the "law" of the jungle as set forth by Hobbes. The human challenge is to reach ethical and political freedom and this requires the application of rationality. This occurs in the liberal state.  (This is obviously a thumbnail sketch that needs elaboration. Here is short article on this. Hegel's view is still quite relevant to contemporary liberal societies.)

Hegel held that these conditions are met in the rational state, ideally in a state governed by the rule of law based on due deliberation. Self-determination occurs in a state in which those governed by the rule of law chose the laws in contrast to a state governed by dictate. Hegel is thinking here of the Greek polis or "city-state," and more specifically of Athens, where citizens voted after debating the issues publicly in the agora.

A central question in Greek political thought was, what does it mean to be a good person in a good society. Greeks considered themselves not only individuals but also citizens. Or better, they could not consider themselves other than as citizens. This distinguished the civilized as those that lived in city states from those that did not – the barbarians.

While Greeks provided the foundation for the subsequent Western intellectual tradition, a considerable superstructure was erected on this foundation based on may influences whose interaction were aspects of a historical dialectic, which Hegel attempted to trace. (Incidentally, the American founding fathers also read the Greeks and Romans on politics, and they were familiar with the great orators and statesmen as well as thinkers. The American founding documents and the debates that led up to their writing and adoption show this influence.)

For the Greeks it was not a great challenge between a person's will as individual and as a citizen. This was not so in modern times. Then the challenge became one of reconciling personal liberty with community. The motto of the French revolutionaries was liberty, egality and fraternity, where egality means absence of privilege, and fraternity means solidarity in community. This is still a driving force in the historical dialectic and far from resolved. Hegel did not think that the Prussian state was "the end of history," as many American exceptionalists do of the US. He saw the Prussian state only as the epitome of the time, to be transcended as the concept of freedom expanded through the historical dialectic and became objectified in ongoing historical moments.

Marx rejected Hegel's view that the individual wills of the members of a society merge, so to speak, into the collective will of the society that is expressed in the rational state. Marx viewed Hegel's rational state being the locus of a people's ethical and political life as inherently bourgeois.

In this sense, Hegel was a liberal in the broad sense, albeit a German one that presaged the later German adoption of ordoliberalism, while Marx was a left libertarian.

While Hegel was a "liberal" in the broad sense of the Enlightenment, he would likely be regarded as conservative like Edmund Burke. But both Hegel and Burke sought to synthesize and harmonize liberalism and conservatism. As did John Maynard Keynes. Conversely, Marx rejected the assumption that all are equal as persons before the law but are so varied as individuals that only the most qualified should govern as essentially a bourgeois rationale for the continued rule of a few on the shaky ground of "rationality."

But while the analyses differed, the objective of expanding human freedom was essentially the same as the "Zeitgeist." This remains true in the West, but now it is beginning to be questioned as liberalism and traditionalism clash on the world stage.

Marx presents somewhat of a dilemma that needs to be mentioned. On one hand, he agreed with Hegel that the historical dialectic was foundational and events are dependent on the timing owing to changing conditions. On the other hand, he also assumed that this process could be commanded by working actively on changing mode of production that he viewed as foundational. Since this is a historical process, "only time will tell."

But at least we can say that Marx apparently got the timing wrong in that he looked for this to happen in the capitalist (industrialized) countries in the near future. That did not happen. On the other hand, the march of time was accompanied in the expansion of freedom, the remnants of the feudal era of aristocracies were all but eradicated in the West post-WWI.

In my view, Hegel and Marx are not necessarily far apart in terms of the ideal. They both viewed the direction of history as involving the expansion of freedom, with the contradiction between individual will and social requirements resolved by expansion of collective consciousness toward altruism as expressed in the golden rule that Kant made rational in his categorical imperative to act on the principle of universal reciprocity. This has a scientific basis now as research shows that reciprocity is an evolutionary trait and that human morality is a rational form of it.

Recurring to David Little's post, the labor-technology dichotomy is directly relevant to the degree that increased productivity and technological innovation make greater distributed leisure possible, and leisure is foundational for the expansion of freedom as the uniting of freedom from, freedom to, and freedom for. The future of humankind is bright if we can get beyond the challenges emerging with the opportunities. This will require concerted action and coordination in adapting to swiftly changing conditions.

Understanding Society
Hegel [and Marx]  on labor and freedomDaniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Rob Larson — Capitalist Freedom Is a Farce

Milton Friedman was wrong. Capitalism doesn't foster freedom — it produces autocratic workplaces and tyrannical billionaires....

Another paradox of liberalism that arises from economic liberalism and affects social and political liberalism, too.

Jacobin
Capitalist Freedom Is a Farce

Rob Larson

Zero Hedge — "Your Pet Will Be Confiscated!": A Shocking Glimpse Inside China's New Social Credit System

Singapore has had an even more "draconian" (from the US perspective) social policy than China for many years. Ever hear of it in the US media that trumpet the "Singapore miracle"?

The fact is that Asians are traditionally much more social than Americans, who are the most highly individualistic people in the world. One nation's "liberty" is another's "license." This is also the case internally in the US, and it is one factor in the extreme divisiveness that the US is now experiencing socially and culturally. Even has a name — "the culture wars."

There is no genuine personal freedom without responsibility, and responsibility is a social phenomenon.

A friend of mine who lived in Switzerland for a while told me that he received two tickets and was fined for the infractions. The first was when someone came by and measured the tread in his tires and found them insufficient. The second was for leaving fruit that had fallen from fruit trees in his yard on the ground and not picking them up. In some European towns, it is also an finable infraction not to have flowers growing in the window flower boxes.

I recall being appalled being in Europe in the Sixties and being subject to show ID to police without cause. On the other hand, Europeans were shocked that Americans had to have driver's licenses and were subject to speed limits or drive with their headlights on at night.

Zero Hedge
"Your Pet Will Be Confiscated!": A Shocking Glimpse Inside China's New Social Credit System

Tyler Durden

Frank Li — “All Men Are Created Equal,” Really?

Frank Li begins up many interesting points and, in my view, gets a lot right in this post. It is worth considering in that it is comparison of systems by a person that knows both the Chinese and American.

But Li omits some of the key Western thinking about the philosophical basis of liberalism, which distinguishes individuality from personhood. 

A dilemma arises between individuality and personhood. On one hand, individuality is unique and varied and all individuals are clearly not equal in many respects. On the other hand, "personhood" is held to be the basis of equality among all humans in terms of what makes one human. In the West, all persons are "equal before the law, for example. This is a key fundamental of Western liberalism and "American values."

The reasoning for this is that all natural persons "born of the union of man and woman" are human beings and are therefore assumed to share the same nature. Persons are "equal" in the sense that as as human beings, persons share in the same nature and thus have the same dignity, as well as the same inherent potential for self-discovery, self-actualization and self-realization. 

To paraphrase Emmanuel Kant, being rational and moral agents, persons are ends in themselves; therefore, it is never proper to treat persons instrumentally as means. This is the basis for universal human rights, for example, a concept that has been adopted globally in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights voted on by the UN General Assembly.

This philosophical distinction of individual from person is derived from the Western religious conception of soul, the history of which in the West is traced by to God's breathing life into Adam. The Hebrew term for breath is "ruach," which may also translated into English as "spirit." The Latin root of "spirit" is "spiritus," which means both "breath" as a natural phenomenon and "spirit" as a metaphysical one. 

In this view, all humans inherit that original breath of God or "holy spirit" (Hb. ruach ha qodesh) through Adam. This "breath of life" is common to all. It is the immanence of God in the world as "the spirit of truth." But this "holy spirit" is God in exile, as were. until a human realizes his or her true nature. 

A similar notion of breath and spirit is found Eastern traditions as chi (qi) in Chinese, ki in Japanese, and prana in Sanskrit. 

According to perennial wisdom, this truth is discoverable by anyone at time. For an interesting story of such self-discovery by a contemporary Vietnamese Confician, see the preface to The Monistic Tradition.

With the transition from the mythological age to the philosophical age that occurred in the West with the rise of modernity, the mythological concept was found to be lacking and the Enlightenment thinkers. Descartes made a bold stab at it with the "cogito." "I think therefore I am" is "Cogito ergo sum" in Latin. This was the beginning of modern rationalism. Hume countered with his "fork," which assumes that all knowledge is either empirical, derived from sense perception, or logical operators, which are empty of content. Hume's analysis found no trace of a "soul."

Kant attempted to synthesize Descartes' rationalism with Hume's empiricism and skepticism of "metaphysics." Kant essentially agreed with Hume that metaphysics is unscientific. But regarding Hume's fork as unsatisfactory, he attempted to show why. The Critique of Pure Reason provides a deeper analysis than Hume did, and one that some view as a harbinger of cognitive science. 

But in showing that neither God nor soul could be proved by argument, Kant was left reliant on faith for belief in metaphysical objects like God and soul unless he could show some rational basis. Kant thought he could show a rational basis for agency that is both rational and moral based on pure duty to act universally. He set this forth in The Critique of Practical Reason in terms of the universality of pure duty based on a rational justification of the Golden Rule as morally compelling for a rational agent.

In the transition from the philosophical age to the scientific age that began in earnest in the 19th century, Hume's fork prevailed as the basis for scientific naturalism as a methodological principle, e.g., expressed as positivism and empiricism. However, many equated this methodological principle of naturalism with the metaphysical principle of materialism, which is make an illegitimate jump in reasoning based on its own assumptions. Concluding from absence of evidence naturalistically obtained to non-existence is "magical thinking" in that it exceeds the scope and scale of the assumptions.

But assuming naturalism as exclusive removes not only the mythological basis for equality of persons in the religious notion of soul but also the philosophical basis for personhood in the notion of person as rational and moral agents. A logical conclusion of this train of thought was B. F. Skinner's behavioristic psychology that views humans interns of stimulus-response mechanism, like other organisms pursuing "utility" and contending for "scarce resources." That provoked a reaction as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, for instance.

When materialistic determinism replaces free will, the concepts of freedom and responsibility become cultural artifacts. The notion of equality of persons underlying the rule of law rather than men looses its basis. In this case, instrumentality takes over, and individuals become means. "Might makes right" as a "fact of nature." 

A double standard of justice is not an issue here, since the mighty can privilege themselves, e.g., based on demonstrated "merit" and controlling the levers of power. "The little people" are, well, little people, unless they have the impetus and wherewithal to stand up and join together. The challenge of the "mighty" is to make sure this doesn't happen by smashing threats as it arises, or by creating conditions that permanently weaken any opposition to prevent threats.

This question of equality is one of the enduring questions with which humanity is struggling now, although most people have no idea of the issues, the stakes, or the history of the debate surrounding them. This results in some of the paradoxes of contemporary liberalism and the confrontation of liberalism with traditionalism globally, and humanity at this stage of its development lacking the means to deal with this without conflict of ideologies and interests. 

In addition, the current debate about inequality is framed in terms of individuality and unequal distribution, when the important issues lie much deeper in terms of personhood and rights.

economicintesect.com
“All Men Are Created Equal,” Really?
Frank Li | Chinese ex-pat, Founder and President of W.E.I. (West-East International), a Chicago-based import & export company, B.E. from Zhejiang University (China) in 1982, M.E. from the University of Tokyo in 1985, and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1988, all in Electrical Engineering

Monmouth University Polling Institute — Public Troubled by ‘Deep State’

A majority of the American public believe that the U.S. government engages in widespread monitoring of its own citizens and worry that the U.S. government could be invading their own privacy. The Monmouth University Poll also finds a large bipartisan majority who feel that national policy is being manipulated or directed by a “Deep State” of unelected government officials. Americans of color on the center and left and NRA members on the right are among those most worried about the reach of government prying into average citizens’ lives.

Just over half of the public is either very worried (23%) or somewhat worried (30%) about the U.S. government monitoring their activities and invading their privacy. There are no significant partisan differences – 57% of independents, 51% of Republicans, and 50% of Democrats are at least somewhat worried the federal government is monitoring their activities. Another 24% of the American public are not too worried and 22% are not at all worried.

Fully 8-in-10 believe that the U.S. government currently monitors or spies on the activities of American citizens, including a majority (53%) who say this activity is widespread and another 29% who say such monitoring happens but is not widespread. Just 14% say this monitoring does not happen at all. There are no substantial partisan differences in these results.

“This is a worrisome finding. The strength of our government relies on public faith in protecting our freedoms, which is not particularly robust. And it’s not a Democratic or Republican issue. These concerns span the political spectrum,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute....

Few Americans (13%) are very familiar with the term “Deep State;” another 24% are somewhat familiar, while 63% say they are not familiar with this term. However, when the term is described as a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy, nearly 3-in-4 (74%) say they believe this type of apparatus exists in Washington. This includes 27% who say it definitely exists and 47% who say it probably exists. Only 1-in-5 say it does not exist (16% probably not and 5% definitely not). Belief in the probable existence of a Deep State comes from more than 7-in-10 Americans in each partisan group, although Republicans (31%) and independents (33%) are somewhat more likely than Democrats (19%) to say that the Deep State definitely exists. ...

Monmouth University Polling Institute

Public Troubled by ‘Deep State’

John W. Whitehead — America Breaks Down: The Anatomy of a National Psychosis

Whitehead founded The Rutherford Institute to preserve and defend human rights and civil liberties in a non-partisan way. He issues a stark warning to Americans.

Unless we can learn to live together as brothers and sisters and fellow citizens, we will perish as tools and prisoners of the American police state.

Counterpunch
America Breaks Down: The Anatomy of a National Psychosis

John W. Whitehead | President, The Rutherford Institute

Tony Smith — Is Liberal Internationalism Dead?

History lesson. Woodrow Wilson versus Donald Trump.

Does the global progress depend on American leadership?

Project Syndicate
Is Liberal Internationalism Dead?
Tony Smith, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Tufts University

See also

But if the revolutionaries take their war against the state too far, they face a different problem, because members of the old establishment are the only people who know enough about specific government programs to get anything done. Ultimately, the revolutionaries must try to strike a balance between betraying their supporters’ radical wishes and escalating their conflict with the state to the point that no other policy goals can be achieved.

This is the crux of the problem. The modern bureaucratic state arose in Prussia at the time that Germany was being unified into a nation the late 19th century.

The problem with the bureaucratic state is that it is highly effective and efficient in comparison with other types of state organization, but it is also the basis for a shadow government that is the actual government that persists across changes in political power.

The first question is whether Trump-Bannon can "deconstruct the administrative state." The second what will replace it and how effective and efficient it will be in comparison.

Trump’s Revolutionary Dilemma
Harold James | Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation

Brad DeLong — Must-Read: Quentin Skinner: Liberty Before Liberalism and All That

The Roman conception of the free state, assumed later by Marx, is contrasted with the liberal conception of freedom based on Hobbes's adoption of the scientific/engineering meaning of freedom as freedom of motion (action).

WCEG — The Equitablog
Must-Read: Quentin Skinner: Liberty Before Liberalism and All That
Brad DeLong

John Locke is considered to be the "father" of English liberalism. His view of freedom is freedom of action rather than legal status.

T]he Idea of Liberty, is the Idea of a Power in any Agent to do or forbear any Action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferr’d to the other. (E1-4 II.xxi.8: 237) — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Miles Kimball — The Complexity of Liberty: How Equality Enters into a Good Definition of Liberty

Having blogged through to the end of On Liberty, I know that what John Stuart Mill claims in the 9th paragraph of the “Introductory” to On Liberty is simple is anything but simple…

Liberalism deals with harmonizing freedom, egality, and community, another one of those pesky trifectas.

Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal
The Complexity of Liberty: How Equality Enters into a Good Definition of Liberty
Miles Kimball | Professor of Economics and Survey Research at the University of Michigan

Lord Keynes — Karl Popper on the Paradox of Tolerance

Can liberalism be illiberal in self-defense?

The 21St Century: Social Democracy For Post Keynesian Perspective
Karl Popper on the Paradox of Tolerance
Lord Keynes

This drama is presently being played out in Europe.

Sputnik
Erdogan Dreaming to 'Revive New Ottoman Caliphate'… in Europe

Ian Welsh — Capitalism and Good Post-Capitalism

Ian reflects on the forced transition from feudalism to capitalism through enclosure and urbanization, and what the transition to post-capitalism needs to involve. At least, the peasants, serfs, and tenant farmers were self-sufficient under feudalism. Under capitalism they became wage serfs and debt slaves. Post capitalism is about fixing that.

Ian Welsh
Capitalism and Good Post-Capitalism

Chris Dillow — Marxists & Libertarians

I would put in terms of right Libertarian/anarcho-capitalist/ and left libertarian/Marxist/libertarian-socialist/anarcho-syndicalist/communalist rather than simply "Marxists and Libertarians."

Marxists and libertarians have much in common. We both believe that freedom is a – the? – great good; Marxists, though, more than right-libertarians, are also troubled by non-state coercion. We are both sceptical about whether state power can be used benignly. And for both of us, the ideal is a withering away of the state. In these regards, Marxists probably have more in common with right-libertarians than with social democrats [who accept capitalism as the base line].

The thinking on the left is broader than Marxism. Left libertarians of all stripes are in general agreement that the issue is concentrated power, regardless of who wields it, and that concentrated wealth results in concentrated power.

Individual liberty requires distributed power, which implies distributed wealth, information, etc.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Marxists & Libertarians
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Erik Olin Wright — Capitalism and Freedom

Meaningful freedom and democracy aren’t compatible with capitalism.

As I have been saying. 

Jacobin
Capitalism and Freedom
Erik Olin Wright | professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison

Elisa Pinna — Head of Syrian TV [Diana Jabbour] calls for resumption of diplomatic relations with Italy, presents "real Syrian women, secular and free"

Whatever else one wants to say, women are free in non-sectarian secular Islamic states like Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria, unlike sectarian Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Western allies.

Inquiring liberal minds would like to know why the West lead the the US as the "bastion of freedom" is trying to end the freedom of these women? This is craziness.

Jabbour for ten years directed Syria's film and television system and does not hesitate to admit that the government in Damascus has unfortunately been losing the "media war:"

"There was a total boycott of Syrian media. Suffice it to say that the Syrian television channel has been removed from the European and Arab satellite platforms. " In the meantime," she adds, "the Western media have spread propaganda -- that is driven and also subsidized by some fundamentalist countries in the region -- about what was happening in Syria" and "voices from outside of the choir are rare."

"It is not credible," she observes, "that Assad is the enemy of the whole world, while the West relies on extremist regimes, Wahhabis, where people get decapitated, just like in the Caliphate."

"It is a paradox" - she said - "that these regimes are invited to debate democracy in Syria."

"I ask Western journalists to come to our country, to look with their own eyes, and then to write what they want. It's not fair that they base their information on sites that are not even in Syria and that spread false propaganda," she says. .

Inside Syria, the national television reaches the areas controlled by jihadis, but people are forbidden see it, on pain of death. "Ten days ago in Raqqa, a woman was stoned to death because they accused her of connecting to the Internet," says Diana Jabbour. 

"The militiamen of Isis," she comments, "are not not actually fighting against a certain type of regime, but against a culture and that is why, in addition to destroying archaeological sites and our memory, they often attack television crews." "This is what we try to counter-act in continuing in our production." The war has cut their activity in half, and "from the 60 TV shows of 2010, we have moved now to thirty." "But the important thing is to continue to film, to make culture."

One of the most popular series is called "Haraer", an Islamic term widely used by ISIS to define the role of women in society. "Here, in this series, we represent the real Syrian women, those who fought for national independence against the Turks and the French, the women who founded schools and newspapers. Women secular and free."…

What she wants for the future.

"And first the jihadists' supply of money and weapons from the outside has to stop. As for Assad, I do not know what he has in mind to do, whether to run again or not. But as a Syrian, I don't not want anyone else to decide this for me. There must be an international effort to get to free elections, where the Syrians themselves could elect their representatives. "

Fort Russ

Head of Syrian TV [Diana Jabbour] calls for resumption of diplomatic relations with Italy, presents "real Syrian women, secular and free"

Elisa Pinna
In ANSA-med November 23, 2016
Translated from Italian by Tom Winter, November 26, 2015

Sandwichman — The Strange Cult of Henry George

Interesting quote from a Libertarian about abolishing property tax as necessary to secure freedom.

Libertarians hold that taxes are simply a substitute for the direct confiscation of property that governments used to impose. Taxation, even with representation is a fig leaf for that.

This is relevant to the Chartalist and MMT view that taxes drive state money by creating a demand for it, allowing governments to transfer private resources to public use, and that the tax power is coercive, enforced by state power.

Libertarianism is based on freedom from coercion.

The radical right libertarian position — anarcho-capitalism — is to end coercion by making private property rights absolute. Governance is through natural spontaneous order.

The radical left libertarian position — anarcho-socialism — is to abolish private property rights and return to the commons. Governance is by consensus.

Both see their view as the fair way to deal with this issue.

Econospeak
The Strange Cult of Henry George

Sandwichman

Jeff Deist — Four Ways to Build a Free Society

If there is one principle, and only one principle, that libertarians ought to apply when considering strategy, it is this: radical decentralization of state power must be our relentless goal.…

…democracy as a concept must be attacked and ridiculed whenever possible. Private property forms the basis for a free society, while majority rule — i.e., the system that permits the theft of private property — forms the antithesis of a free society.

Worth a read.

Four Common Strategies

When libertarians talk about what must be done, the discussion tends to revolve around four common strategy options. None of them are mutually exclusive necessarily and there can be plenty of overlap between them.

1. The Political Option

The first, we’ll call the political option, or to borrow a tired phrase, “working within the system.”…

2. Strategic Withdrawal

A second approach libertarians often consider might be loosely termed strategic withdrawal. You may have heard of the “Benedict option” being discussed by Catholics unhappy with the direction of the Church and the broader culture.…

This approach involves separating, withdrawing, or segregating in some way from the larger society and political landscape..…

3. Hearts and Minds

A third tactic that libertarians often advocate we might call “winning hearts and minds.” This approach is multi-pronged, involving education, academia, traditional and social media, religion, books and articles, literature, and even pop culture. …

4. Resistance

Of course another strategy often discussed among libertarians involves simple resistance to the state, whether open or covert. This tactic contemplates actions like civil disobedience, tax protests, evading or ignoring regulations, and engaging in agorism and black markets.

It also contemplates the use of technological advances to advance freedom. “Third way” libertarian technologists promote this approach, citing advances like encryption, cybercurrencies, and platforms like Uber — all of which when first developed existed in a sort of grey area as regards their legality.…

Mises Dailies

Four Ways to Build a Free Society
Jeff Deist

Jenna McLaughlin — Laura Poitras Sues U.S. Government to Find Out Why She Was Repeatedly Stopped at the Border

Government intimidation and harassment to suppress dissent. Welcome to US democracy.

The Intercept
Laura Poitras Sues U.S. Government to Find Out Why She Was Repeatedly Stopped at the Border
Jenna McLaughlin

Noah Smith — The Forsaken

Not about economics. Or maybe it is, if Marx is right about economic infrastructure being socially determinative.

Noahpinion
The forsaken
Noah Smith | Assistant Professor of Finance, Stony Brook University

Peter Radford — Natural Liberty or Democracy?

There seems to be a lot of angst as to why standard macroeconomics ignores the government in its analysis. Or, rather, that when the government slips into the picture it is almost invariably in the form of an evil presence mucking up the sweet operation of market magic and thus stalling us all on our way to the happy place economists love to call equilibrium. 

This is quite simple to answer: economists of the standard ilk are opposed to democracy.
Why? 

Because, since its very inception, modern economics in most its forms has been the study of the private economy...

Once this hostility to the state found its way into the bedrock of economics it stayed there. Moreover this anti-government perspective, that colored all subsequent economic theorizing, attracted to it analysts who were like minded. We thus find a positive feedback between the anti-state foundations of economics and those who then carry the theory forward.

In contemporary terms this has profound consequences. One of which, as I mentioned at the beginning, is that standard economists are openly and brazenly opposed to democracy.

Why?

Because, apparently unbeknownst to economists, the social and political milieu within which the economy sits, has undergone radical change since the 1700’s. We nowadays have far fewer autocratic monarchs prone to meddling in popular affairs, and significantly more democracies where the people who are the erstwhile agents of the economy are also the agents of self-government. Regular people, unlike economists, admit of more than one social domain. They operate in many all at once. The notion that we the people actually govern ourselves has been born and adopted around the world. But it hasn’t seeped into economic theory, where the government is resolutely presented as a hostile and incompetent force just as it was two hundred or more years ago.

What this implies is that economics is stuck in the 18th and 19th centuries while the rest of the knowledge world has moved on for the most part. This begs the question why? Could it be that business is naturally adverse to government, which it views as a competitor, on one hand, and a potential tool in the hands of a rabble under popular sovereignty?

The Radford Free Press

Natural Liberty or Democracy?
Peter Radford

Chris Dillow — Hating libertarians

Chris Dillow makes some good points.

Opponents of libertarianism sometimes fail to see that freedom leads not to anarchy and chaos but to spontaneous order. Demands for immigration control, for example, are often demands for government control in itself, because people don't see how uncontrolled processes can be welfare-enhancing. They fail to see how, in John Kay's words, our goals can sometimes be better achieved obliquely.

This habit is rooted in some common cognitive biases: the illusion of knowledge and overconfidence causes us to exaggerate the benefits of state control whilst the salience heuristic leads us to see the benefits of restricting freedom more than the costs. As Hayek said:

When we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. (Law Legislation and Liberty Vol I, p57.) 

But here's the problem. Sometimes, a benign spontaneous order doesn't occur. Emergent processes can sometimes produce inequality and exploitation: much depends upon initial conditions and institutional frameworks. If libertarians' critics overstate this, they themselves understate it.

All this might sound rather abstract, but it's not. It bears directly upon the question of how public services should be organized..

Here is how I see it. Most people that disagree with libertarian thought don't "hate" libertarians. They just think that they are wrong and their assumptions are even stupid. As a result, some see libertarianisms rising as political forces on either left or right as damaging if not dangerous.

It seems to me that the fundamental offending assumption is that of spontaneous order resulting from freedom. Libertarianisms of the left and right assume that freedom implies spontaneous order, that is, order is natural. However, there is no good evidence for this assumption and a lot of historical evidence that speaks against it. History is the record of the triumph of organization. Military, political, and economic success have all come as a result of superior organization.

As a libertarian of the left, I realize that for libertarianism to be taken seriously, the assumption of spontaneous order being natural must be confronted and the obvious objections to it considered. Rousseau's noble savage versus Hobbes's law of the jungle, for example.

The problem, I believe, lies in the concept of natural. There are two meanings of natural. The first is  that which is found operating in nature (reality). It is evidence-based. The second is theoretical. It is based on the view that individual entities fall into different categories based on their "nature" or "essence," which can be intuited. This latter notion is not based on evidence, but rather on introspection, abstraction, and generalization. It is assumed.

Evidence seems to contradict the assumption of spontaneous order arising from freedom. Whence then does the assumption arise? The answer is quite evident in the case of economics — the invisible hand of market forces. In a free market with no asymmetries, the outcomes are "natural." It is assumed that these outcomes cannot be improved upon.

Hayek gave an account for this in "The Use of Knowledge in Society," arguing that information is too complex to allow for organization being imposed. I do not wish to contest Hayek's argument about the price system being fundamental. Rather, it is the shift from economic liberalism to neoliberalism, that  is, that economic liberalism is the foundation for political and social liberalism. Or as Margaret Thatcher put it, "there is no alternative."

The "mistake" that Hayek makes is the excluded middle. He assume that there is no range between the poles of free market economy with near perfect competition and a command economy on the model of the USSR, for example. His response to the objection that there are many examples along the range is that the tendency is toward the poles and if economic freedom is compromised, then the tendency is toward extreme collectivism under state control.

The result of this "mistake" is the view that economic liberalism based on property rights is the foundation for political liberalism and therefore political rights, and also social liberalism and therefore civil rights. I put "mistake" in quotation marks above to indicate that Hayek himself did not always go this far and allowed for some government involvement in social welfare, for example, but he has often been read this way, especially The Road to Serfdom.

There is no empirical evidence to show that the middle is actually excluded, and European social democracy since WWII would argue against it. Historical evidence also shows that the extreme economic liberalism of 18th  early 19th century classical liberalism was subsequently modified to take political and social liberalism into account by balancing property rights with political rights and civil liberties, and to add social welfare. European economies did reasonably well and there was no tendency toward extreme collectivism or limitation of individual rights other than with regard to property rights, e.g., in the form of taxation and business regulation, which extreme libertarianisms summarily reject.

Homo economicus is a fiction and homo socialis operates on the basis of both independence and interdependence, competition and cooperation, and that coherence and cohesion of a social fabric are based on institutional arrangements, that is, organization. Even so-called free markets are based on legal institutions that provide organization, including the system of property rights. Far from being natural, property is based on legal rights embedded in social organization and social cohesion.

The question then becomes whether libertarianism is a viable social, political and economic theory at all. My conclusion to this is neither yes not no, but maybe. It depends on the level of collective consciousness. Spontaneous order arises from freedom to the degree that individuals are conscious of interdependence individually and in large enough numbers to be collectively conscious of interdependence.

The question then becomes one of raising the level of collective consciousness culturally to the degree that interdependence is strongly evidenced in a society's institutional arrangements. Quite evidently this begins with early childrearing and education.

Every parent soon realizes that children left "free to choose" will pursue their own perceived self-interest even when it is detrimental to themselves and others. Childrearing and education are about the process of socialization that humans go through to fit them for social life as individuals. This requires realizing that one's boundaries don't stop at one's body. Life is a web, or as we would now say, a "network" or "system."

Societies are functional to the degree this learning process is successful and dysfunctional to the degree that the socialization process fails. This is also true of parts of society since societies are organized systems in which the parts — elements and nested subsystem — affected the whole and vice versa. Societies are wholes and the dysfuctionality even one subsystem affects the holism of the entire system.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts owing to the relationships that provide its organization, and each part affects the whole. Societies are collectively autocatalytic either functional or dysfunctional and based on the reactions. It is difficult to be a good person in a bad society, and also difficult to be a bad person in a good society, where quality is a function of social norms embedded in cultural and institutions.

Western civilization is based on the Greek idea that individuals freely choose the laws under which they live. This assumes the ability of citizens to choose wisely. In this view, therefore, a free society is a based on wisdom. This idea was later melded with the Christian view, which was derived from the Jewish Law, that love is a law unto itself (Deuteronomy 6:5, Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27). As Augustine summarized the teaching:  "Love and do what you will." Love is the great unifier. Spiritually, unconditional love takes on beyond the point value of ego to realization of what lie beyond the horizon of limited ego.

The other foundation of Western civilization, along with the rise of science and technology, is Roman law, order and organization. The West was able to dominate the world based on these latter two influences. However, Western soft power arises from the former two influences, which can be summarized as freedom, truth, and love.

In this view, freedom as the pursuit of self-interest or rational utility maximization is "natural" in the sense of what the animal nature in human being is guided by whereas life in a civilized society requires transcending one's animal nature to become truly human. This is the work of a lifetime. The Greeks called it philosophia meaning "love of wisdom" as the progressive unfolding of full potential, both as an individual and as a human being. It Aristotle's view of virtue ethics it involved building character. Order is spontaneous, therefore, to the extent that it is cultured. This implies that it must be enculturated.

There is no single optimal culture that is natural. Different people will approach the challenge of becoming truly human individually and as a society differently. However, freedom is not the outcome of a 'free society," but individual freedom and a free society are the outcome of a good society as one in which citizens are striving to live a good life in harmony. There is no one best way to life a good life. Every individual and every society has to deal with its own characteristics and the opportunities and challenges that arise in the course of individual and social life.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Hating libertarians
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle