Ango-american liberalism runs out of puff

A September post was devoted to a book called Fantasy Land - how America lost its Mind (2017) which was a highly readable intellectual history of that country – emphasising its Puritanical beginnings and the role this has played in American exceptionalism.

A few weeks ago, the author, Kurt Andersen, published a sequel to the 2017 book - “Evil Geniuses - the unmaking of America, a recent history” (2020) - which explains how conservative forces, horrified by what the 1960s had released, got their act together to forge an agenda and bankroll a reaction which brought us neoliberalism.

I’ve seen this story told many times - of how the Mont Pelerin Society spawned a multiplicity of neoliberal ThinkTanks but this is the first time I’ve seen such a clear explanation of the connection with the polarisation of American society…..

And it’s a nuanced story too – giving due recognition to the (generally ignored) anti-government streak I so well remember in the 1960s and early 1970s – which attracted even a “young leftist” like me to writers such as Saul Alinsky and Ivan Illich. 

More to the point it was the sentiment that drove the US Young Democrats of the late 1970s and 1980s (like Clinton and Hart) to break with the “oldies” who had been carrying the torch for the New Deal and to side with the new economic right….  

It was, after all, a Democratic House which gave Reagan the licence to drive forward deregulation. The full story of the implications of the Democrats’ disowning of the leftist/populist tradition is told in Goliath – the hundred year old war between monopoly and democracy; Matt Stoller (2019) 

There were two things I particularly appreciated about Andersen's book –

- First the element of mea culpa. Andersen is writing the book as an economic liberal who has been slow to understand how a non-stop process of marginal and largely unnoticed adjustments has amounted over 4-5 decades to a dramatic socio-economic shift. At several points in the narrative, he pauses to make a very useful summary of these changes.

 - his skill in summarising key books to give us a superb intellectual history 

I had promised this would be the follow-up to my last post about the direction the United States has taken in the last fifty years – but a short article by Pankaj Mishra has persuaded me to widen the thrust of the post beyond America’s shores to the bastions of liberalism everywhere.

Strongly critical, as always, of Western ethnocentricity, Mishra starts in typical vein 

The late Tony Judt, born in 1948, once spoke of the “pretty crappy” generation he belonged to, which

 

“grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political.”

 

In Judt’s view, too many of his intellectual peers moved from radical postures into the “all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security” in the 1970s and 1980s as the postwar consensus in favor of the welfare state gave way to neoliberalism; they were especially quick to internalize the popular belief when the Berlin Wall fell that liberal democracy and capitalism had “won.”

A similar worldview prevails among a still younger generation than Judt’s. Its members, beneficiaries of an even more complacent era, the end of the cold war, are entrenched in senior positions in the periodicals, television channels, think tanks, and university departments of Anglo-America. Growing up during the triumphalist 1990s, they assumed that American-style democracy and capitalism had proven their superiority;

 

……A newspaper columnist from India, China, Ghana, or Egypt is unlikely to be recognized as an authority on global affairs unless she can demonstrate some basic knowledge of Euro-American political and intellectual traditions. But most Western scholars, let alone newspaper reporters, do not have even a passing acquaintance with (the richness of) Indian, Chinese, African, and Arab history and thought.

I don’t pretend to know (or care) much about political philosophy but I am aware that, in 1971, the American liberal analytical philosopher John Rawls published “A Theory of Justice” in which he laid out the apparatus of justice theory that became the dominant conceptual framework for subsequent theorizing about politics among philosophers and many political theorists in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. 

The impact of Rawls’s theory on the landscape and language of political philosophy was immense. Only a decade after the publication of “A Theory of Justice”, one bibliography listed 2,512 books and articles engaging with Rawls’s thought. For his followers, Rawls became a patron saint, the visionary behind an egalitarian dream of distributive justice. Among his critics, he was known as a neo- Kantian individualist who adapted the toolkit of rational choice and decision theory and viewed individuals as at once self- interested economic agents and autonomous moral persons.

They saw him as providing a philosophical rationalization of a liberal welfare state or, worse, a defence of the conservative status quo that implicitly framed America as a land of liberty and civic freedom.

 

In his wake, political philosophy was remade. Philosophical liberalism became synonymous with Rawls, and political philosophy synonymous with a kind of liberalism born of postwar America. Even many who opposed it were shaped by it. By the late twentieth century, Anglophone political theorists operated in the shadow of justice theory

I’m quoting from a new book “In the Shadow of Justice – postwar liberalism and the remaking of political philosophy” which looks an important and highly accessible critique for these times when anglo-americans at least are questioning the future of the liberal part of our tradition. The LSE review blog which I value gave it a useful review - 

Using the core liberal question – whether a society can be justified to all its members in light of inequalities – as a point of departure, she traces the emergence of two liberal principles: firstly, the principle of civil liberties and personal rights; and secondly, the principle of equality. The key assumption underpinning the latter principle is that economic inequalities should be tolerated if they improve the situations of the least advantaged in a society.

The particular focus of the book is on the revival of political thought brought about by Rawls’s justice theory following a period of economic depression and World War II that had left philosophers unable to think about justice.

The bulk of the book is made up of critical commentaries on political events and intellectual debates that shaped political liberalism in the US and Britain in the post-war era.

 

There are several powerful arguments animating the eight chapters of Forrester’s book.

In Chapter Four the author grapples with some of the attempts to reconstruct and rethink Rawls’s framework, before turning to the problem of the future (6) and the New Right and New Left (7), Forrester brings into the conversation concepts of markets, choice and responsibility. In Chapter Eight, she conclusively shifts attention to the limitations of political philosophy and makes a strong point for questioning the currency of liberal thought to understand the times in which we live.

Forrester illuminates how Rawls’s justice theory survived the radical protests and the rise of the New Left of the 1960s, the hollowing out of the welfare state in the 1970s and the New Right’s assumptions about the nature of politics, institutions, personhood and the individual in the 1980s.

Notably, what appears as a conflict at first glance – the idea of distributive justice pitted against neoliberal pledges for privatisation, financialisation and institutional interdependence – is revealed by Forrester to have become a story of profound philosophical success. As many political theorists deployed ideas surrounding markets, choice and responsibility within a Rawlsian framework, liberal egalitarianism subsequently became the dominant mode of theorising by the 1980s.

Engaging with a number of influential critics, such as Bernard Williams, Judith Shklar, Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, Forrester shows how liberal thought increasingly came to be detached from concrete political experiences