Frontpaged at My Left Wing.
Part 2 in a series based on the entry for Liberalism in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas.
In the introductory diary, I made a series of big points. In this two-part entry, there is really just one big point: that liberalism developed as a pragmatic response to the context of the modern state.
Although many abstract thinkers contributed to the development of modern liberalism, it was not primarily an ideology from above, but from below, from the experience of living in a changing world with specific challenges, needs, and emerging norms and desires. And the central fact of this changing world was that of the modern state.
Libertarians today often attack liberals as “statists,” and in this fundamental sense they are 100% correct: modern liberalism is inextricably linked with the modern state. They are totally mistaken, however, in claiming that today’s liberals are alienated from the liberal tradition. It is the anti-statist libertarians who are profoundly alienated, from the actual history of the West, from the state itself (of course) which is a central actor in that history, and from the liberal tradition, whose bones they relentless pick in search of stolen ideological sustenance.
Libertarians, developmentally trapped in a 13-year old’s “you’re not the boss of me” mindset [Article / “Critiques of Libertarianism” Site / TMBG song / Malcolm], see the state as overgrown parental ogre, bent on stripping them of all their precious liberties. Historically, however, the reality is quite the opposite–the modern state was the source of the very rights they cherish, even of the very mindset they inhabit.
Traditional societies did not even have a developed sense of the individual as we now experience ourselves, much less practices that accorded rights to individuals. People did things not as they individually wished and decided, but as they had always been done. This situation changed radically with the birth of the modern era. The central agent of this change was the modern state. Rather than being the omnipresent great thief of individual rights, historically it was their first guarantor.
That’s the short-and-sweet radio-ready version. Here’s the rough-and-ready extended dance remix:
I. HISTORICAL CAUSES
The liberal idea of freedom arose slowly with the rise of the modern state and the gradual acceptance of religious diversity in a part of the world where the church was a unique institution and personal faith of peculiar importance.
This diary and the next cover the section dealing with the modern state. Liberty of conscience and religious tolerance are dealt with after that. “Man (sic) as a social being” is the third section of part I, and will be covered next after that.
This section begins by describing what is distinctive about the modern state, in contrast to empires and earlier city-states.
1. The Modern State.
The modern state, as no political community before it, is both highly centralized and highly populated; its authority is extensive and pervasive. The modern state includes millions of persons. So, too, did many of the old empires; but these empires were bureaucracies superimposed on a vast number of small communities having a large measure of autonomy, while the modern state controls closely the lives of all its citizens.
The old empires were chiefly tax-gathering and military organizations, though they also maintained some important public works, such as roads and water supplies, and administered justice between persons from different communities or enjoying a special status. These local communities were self-governing even where the authority of the supreme ruler was held to be absolute-as, for example, in the Ottoman Empire. Thus, in these empires, supreme authority, though extensive, was not pervasive, for most people most of the time were not directly affected by it, whereas in the modern state it is extensive and pervasive.
In the city-states, in Greece, Italy, and elsewhere, supreme authority, though pervasive, was not extensive; and quite often a considerable minority of the persons subject to it took part in deciding how it should be exercised or who should exercise it. Supreme authority was “close” to the persons over whom it was exercised.
Thus, the modern state differs both from earlier, authoritarian empires, and from democratic-or at lease republican-city-states.
Next, we encounter a characteristic contradiction, of the sort that peppers the entire history of liberalism. The good old days of simple, binary oppositions are gone forever (if, indeed, they ever existed at all).
Of the modern state it is often said that its authority is “remote.” This is true or false, depending on how we take it. The holders of supreme authority are not personally known to the vast majority of the citizens, or are known to them only as much advertised public figures, and to that extent are remote from them. But there are state officials everywhere, and the citizen has more to do with them than ever before. Though he rarely meets any of the men who take the important decisions, he sees pictures of them and reads or hears their words repeatedly. The “state” in one way or another is very present to him.
The tone set here is crucial. A commonplace is presented, and shown to be both true and false. The entire history of liberalism repeats this again and again. We must not simply rely on easy formulations. Liberalism came out of complex situations, in which simple descriptions pointing to one truth quite often obscured another, contrary one.
Again and again we will see that liberalism is a response to tensions. Refusing to take one side is not an endorsement of the other-it is recognition that both sides exist, and neither can be done away with, even if we would fervently wish to do so. This is not an abstract, theoretical, elitist response, but a deeply practical one. In this case, both the remoteness and the immediacy of state authority mattered in the emergence of liberalism.
This state, even where it is federal, is a tightly knit organization in which everyone’s rights and duties are clearly defined. It is also quickly changing. To do what is expected of it, it must be highly adaptable and must have elaborate and precise rules for the guidance of its officers. It could not be adaptable unless procedures, powers, and obligations inside it were carefully defined.
So, individual rights get a big initial lift because of the needs of the state.
In the modern state the rights and obligations of the mere citizen, of the man without public authority, are also well defined. He has a variety of social roles; and his rights and duties in them, as a husband or father, as an employer or hired worker, as a man with a particular trade or profession, are defined not only–nor even principally–by custom but also by statute and by contract. He sees himself, and is seen by others, as a bearer of rights and obligations that are or ought to be definite and yet liable to change since he belongs to a changing society and his roles in it also change. Apart from the rights and duties attaching to some particular occupation or role, he has others that he shares with all citizens, or with all of his sex or age; or he has rights and obligations merely because he resides within the jurisdiction of the state.
He is ordinarily more mobile socially and geographically than his ancestors were: he is more likely to enter a profession or trade different from his father’s, more likely also to change it, and more likely to move from one place to another. Some of his rights and obligations change with his occupation or place of residence, while others remain the same. His right to choose his occupation and to change it, and his right to move from place to place, are not tied to any particular status or role; they are rights he shares with everyone, or at least with many, in his state.
So, the fact of dynamic change produces a wide range of rights, from the quite specific to the virtually universal. And this is not exclusive to modern liberal states:
Thus, even in the most authoritarian or “illiberal” of modern states, men and women have a variety of rights and duties that they share with everyone, or with most people. These rights and duties are not justified, as are other narrower ones, by appeals to custom or to needs peculiar to an occupation, social role, or locality.
Increased mobility, social and geographical, is associated historically with two developments: with the rise of the modern state, a highly centralized structure of authority which is both “remote” from and “close” to the persons subject to it, and with the emergence of an elaborate legal system in which the rights and obligations of the mere citizen, or of the mere human being, are distinguished as never before from rights and obligations attaching to particular occupations and roles.
The authority of the modern state is “impersonal” in the sense that the persons who exercise it are not concerned with the persons subject to it as unique individuals but rather as belonging to some category or other. This authority differs, therefore, not only from that of parents over their children, but also from that of elders or chiefs in small custom-bound communities.
Here, again is another one of those delicious contradictions. The most context-free, universal personal rights generated by authority that is impersonal in a way that authority has never been before.
Moreover, where it exists, it affects the exercise of authority in the smaller communities within the larger one, even though in them personal ties are still close. It does so partly, but only partly, because the individual is freer to move out of whatever small communities he belongs to. For example, he is freer to leave the parental home.
This, of course, is the thing that conservatives hate the most about modernity–the erosion of their local authority, that which is based, ultimately, on the inability of people to escape from their coercive confines.
State’s rights, anyone?
(It’s a white thing. You wouldn’t understand.)
Though the authority of the state can be the more oppressive for being “impersonal,” this “impersonality” is also, as we shall see, a condition of freedom as the liberal understands it, a necessary but by no means sufficient condition. The individual is treated as someone to whom a certain description applies; he is “categorized.” Therefore, all he need do to make good his claims is to show that a certain description does indeed apply to him. The quality of intercourse between the possessor of authority and whoever is subject to it is not what it is in intimate and custom-bound communities; it allows both of new kinds of freedom and new kinds of oppression.
Again with the duality. “New kinds of freedom and new kinds of oppression.”
