One of the tasks of philosophy.com is to provide a philosophical pathway out of the neo-liberal economics, which is now the hegemonic public philosophy in the world of public affairs. Let me sketch some.
In contrast to neo-liberalism's free market talk of consumers, prices, competition, efficiency and economic reform (eg., to create a national electricity market) and competive market solutions for public policy problems, we have the political talk of citizenship, public reason, democracy, political disagreement, the common good and the good life.
That contrast can be seen in the way we talk about the subject. For the utilitarian economist the subject is taken to be an economic one; a machine motivated by self-interest. This subject stands outside history, has no culture and is indifferent to the concerns of moral community. It's an axiomatic conception, designed to get the deductive logic machine working in terms of working up the mathematical equations to create a model of the competitive economy.
The political understanding of the subject has two pathways away from the economic one.
The first is a realistic move: the human subject is not abstract and disembodied. The political subject---the citizen---is embodied or gendered, belongs to a social class, and is a embedded in a historical and national form of ethical life (family, civil soceity and the state).
The second pathway is to concentate on the character of the historical embodied subject in a liberal society. A liberal society is only going to work if the subject has a character that upholds the values of a liberal society; has been educated in some way to acquire the liberal virtues; and has the dispositions that would enable him or her to live in a liberal society as a citizen, rather than treat the other members as objects to be robbed. This is the pathway that leads to some kind of virtue ethics.
These pathways intersect with the broad critique of the self-assertive, self-grounding autonomous subject of modern metaphysics. You could say that liberalism has a liberal conception of the good life that is grounded on a particular liberal conception of character as the good liberal citizen. This makes explicit what liberalism officially denies but tacitly affirms: namely that it is neutral between different and competing individual conceptions of the good life whilst affirming the liberal way of life as the best form of the good life. Liberalism is not truly neutral with regard to substantive theories of the good as it says it is, since it necessarily presupposes some views of the good and rule out others. It presupposes a liberal conception of the good and rules out non-liberal ones.
The implication is that the liberal state intervenes to promote or shape a substantive vision of human development for the liberal market order it is creating through economic reforms. This intervention (through competition policy privatisation, deregulation etc) qualifies the liberal state's respect for individual liberty, over and above the standard exception when the exercise of individual liberty exercise jeopardizes the rights and interests of other individuals. So the liberal state is in the business of shaping the character required for a liberal market order in a big way.
Liberalism has a tacit understanding on the sort of person the agent is in a liberal order. Though neo-liberalism works a competitive market lightly regulated with rules, it also has a conception of character. It places a big emphasis on the entrepreneur who takes advantage of the opportunities provided by the competitive marketplace to increase wealth. The good or successful entrepreneur needs to have certain characteristics or virtues to be capable of acting in the required innovative, free wheeling manner in the market order. Here the entrepreneurial character sizes up practical situation in the market order properly, and then exhibits the virtue called for by the situation.
A similar move is done by political liberalism. This place the emphasis on the character of citizen, and to say that a good citizen in a republic requires specific virtues such as autonomy/independence, critical thinking and the capacity to understand the different views of others. A good citizen, for instance, is one who is capable of balancing their self-interest with the common good of the republic; and can do so in our current multifaceted moral landscape where there are many layers of moraland political issues at stake.
This pathway of character criss-crosses with the Foucauldian emphasis on forms of governance to shape a free subject's capacity to be be a cetrtain kind of person. It criss-crosses the "postmodern"pathway carved out by Emmanuel Levinas and the ethical turn of criticism in thinkers such as Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and John D. Caputo. This postmodern pathway recoils from the modern idolatry of the ego and it argues that this idolatry often involves injustice to the other. This injustice is frequently enacted in cultural practices of scapegoating, the projection of repressed instincts into the forms of demons and monsters, and the reduction of the foreign other to the same in laws of immigration.
It also criss-crosses with a virtue ethics that figures out how we can do the right thing in specific situations without the rigid following of a moral code to the letter (rule-based and duty-based ethical systems) that leaves open only one possible ethical choice. It is a practical understanding of the singular situation confronting us in the here and now; one based on a making sense of the singular situations in which life is lived by telling stories to locate them in a broader narrative.
Underpinning this emphasis on character is a virtue ethics that includes the emotions in human rationality and which holds that virtue is a character trait one needs for Eudaimonia, to flourish or live well. When this ethics is linked to the political (political conflict and political participation) one character trait is a welcoming of alterity, and an openness to the alteration of the (character of the self) through political debate and dialogue with others. This opens up into deliberative democracy.
So there are many pathways out of the neo-liberal economics that reduces politics to economics.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 9, 2003 04:23 PM | TrackBack