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February 16, 2003
If philosophy takes leave of the world of high scientific theory in academia and returns to the common life, then it is generally seen as returning to a world of ignorance, prejudice or bigotry and superstition. It is commonly argued by academic (analytic) philosophers that it has turned away from the sunny world of the enlightenment to the dark world of Plato's cave, where it has become ensnarred in darkness.
That account from the timeservers in the academy unnerves many who would like philosophy to be different and more in touch with things. This Enlightenment blackmail frightens them, and so they quickly retreat back into the safety of a nookdwelling within philosophy as science in the university. There they try and make do as best they can in a ruined institution. Others with more courage make the shift away fom scientific philosophy and go over to the literary institution, where they commonly practice a form of cultural criticism that has its roots in aesthetics and romanticism.
What if we ex-scholars, wanted to, and did, return to our common life ----as suggested by Hume, Burke, Nietzsche, Wittengstein----and that we also wanted to continue to practice philosophy within athe common life. Is that an option? A possibility? How could it be done? Can it be done?
For this pathway to be a possiblity it is necessary that academic philosophy is reinvented or transformed Philosophy would need to displace its old modernist identity of being the theoretical part of big science (its metaphysics) and become a critical interpretive philosophy within our common life. Let us grant that this can be done for the sake of the argument. (It can be done if philosophy recovers the long forgotten rhetorical tradition of the classical Romans).
If so, can we then do philosophy within our political institutions? Many say no firmly. They say that it is not possible because you have to give up the critical aspect of philosophy in politics. Criticism is the lifeblood of philosophy and criticism is what is blocked or denied in political life. By stepping into political life you sell out philosophy and become a cheap skate carpet-bagger.
I reckon that objection is far too quick. It is widely acknowledged there has been a deep current of criticism based in our common life, which has resisted and challenged the neo-liberal policies embraced by governments over the last two decades. This popular political criticism has become known as populism and it has a very negative image.
The neo-liberal ruling policy elite and politicians have mocked, scorned and abused it as a nationalism that closes the borders of the nation-state and rejects the global market in the name of protectionism. Left liberals have denounced this subversive populism as a form of right wing racism with fascist tendencies. Academics say populists are full of emotion, vomit up their prejudices in public, won't listen to criticism and do not argue. Populism is a world of unreason.
If philosophy is to be able to operate in public life, then it must be able to prove its case on the terrain populism. It is a good test to see whether this be done? With this in mind I have gone back to a post I did on my old Public opinion weblog over Xmas. Few would have read it then, and I introduce it now to show that philosophy can critically work within the common life. It does so by redescribing populism as being against liberalism, and then unpacking what this 'contra liberalism' can mean. Here is the old post.
Populism Contra Liberalism
I see that the ace OZ weblogger John Quiggin has just started a dictionary of modern thought. What an excellent idea to help foster public debate, counter the depoliticization of public discussion and contest the showbizzing of politics.
The fool would like to contribute some big thoughts that have been tucked in his back pocket for some time. As the fool in the world of public policy I am putting in a plug for 'populism' to be an entry in the dictionary.
Here are some musings to mull over during the holiday break. These musings are written from the perspective of a philosophy in political life that contests the way that the enterprise of philosophy is no longer taken very seriously in the corporate university nor accorded much recognition in the broader public culture. This philosophy contests its marginalisation in the culture of liberal democracies by recovering, then defending, a sense of the democratic res publica through engaging with unsettling questions. Putting populism on the table raises some troubling questions about liberalism.
Populism in Australia is usually seen in negative terms---as a backlash by the people at a regional level to the neo-liberal economic restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s. It takes the form of those who lost out from, or been disadvantaged by the opening to a global market being critical of the politicians who have imposed these reforms on them in the name of economic necessity. This protest says that the politicians and the elites have not listened to what the people want, need and say, and it works from the lifestyle, beliefs and values of the common life of the liberal nation-state. Hence populists feel alienated from our liberal political institutions and the major political parties---Liberal, National and Labor.
Pauline Hanson's One Nation Movement in the 1990s is a classic Australian example of this populist protest. Pat Buchanan is the US example and Le Pen is the French one. It was dismissed as an irrational, resentful expression of grievance, blame and protest with conspiratorial overtones to economic reform and change to reshape Australia in terms of the neo-classical model of a competitive market economy. This populism had a cultural dimension---and opposition to multiculturalism, Asian immigration, affirmative action for Aborigines, job snobs and welfare bums and cosmopolitanism---and an affirmation of ethnic, religions and local/regional traditions.
This rightwing populism was roughly dismissed by the liberal mass media as short-sighted, right wing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic and irrational. Liberals saw in this regional populism the resurgence of traditional prejudice; and even the face of fascist racism on the march from the countryside to take out the enlightened elites living in the cities.
There things currently stand in Australia. Hansonism as a political movement died in the late 1990s after John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, successfully incorporated populism into his populist conservatism. Roughly speaking we are left with Australian liberalism's understanding of populism----it is stereotyped as an inarticulate and useless theoretical mishmash. It has no place in a dictionary of modern thought because, in being raw violent emotion directed at Canberra bashing, it is not a systematic thinking or reasoning.
This is where we can unsettle or loosen things up. True, populism does not have a rich theoretical political tradition, but something more is going on underneath the surface than the liberal interpretation of populism as a hostile right-wing reaction to modernity. This 'something more' is more than a reactionary defence of pre-modern superstition, prejudice, ignorance and dogma. It is a recognition that the two decade long defence of the competitive market has more to do with protecting the profitability of capital and providing high paid jobs for New Class technocrats than safeguarding the interests of ordinary Australians. This 'something more' highlights the narrowness of the liberal interpretation of populism.
Hence my plug for populism. It deserves an entry in because of the political impact it has had in liberal democracies. From my perspective of philosophy in political life---a public reason--populism has the following features:
---populism reaffirms and vindicates existing community norms and really existing regional cultures, traditions and customs. Hence it can take different forms---eg., the SA movement to 'Save the River Murray' is an eco-populism. This re-surfacing of populism indicates the unraveling of the national consensus that once underpinned the massive nation building projects of the late twenieth century (eg., the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electricity Scheme in Australia or the New Deal in the US) and its replacement by consumerism, property rights and self-seeking, upwardly-mobile, aspirational indivdualism.
----populism is a grass roots rejection of the technocratic centralized state developed by a statist liberalism after WW2 and its elitist and managerial ideology, eg., the 'New Deal' in the US.
---populism is a political expression of the popular dissatisfaction with economic progress and unlimited economic development advocated by both statist and free market liberalism;
---populism places liberalism into question by articulating a deep tension or contradiction between a deep-seated contradiction of political modernity—between the liberal ideal of universal rights, freedom and equality and the collective self-determination of specific national groups. Populism articulates the way that collective aspirations to national self-determination through the liberal state (eg, economic reform to ensure the wealth of nations) can led to discrimination against regional minorities and even their political and economic disenfranchisement;
----populism's ethos of popular sovereignty shows up the failure of liberalism to deliver on its democratic promise and highlights the democratic deficit of liberal democracy. Populsoim addresses this deficit through a particpatory democracy based on the federalisation of the nation-state into more autonomous regions/states.
So philosophy is not so breathtakingly irrelevant after all. In contesting the liberal stereotype of populism it discloses the significance of populism to be in its challenge to liberalism and its highlighting the limits of liberalism. By calling a self-congratulatory liberalism into question, populism has put its finger on what can be called the identity crisis of liberalism. This crisis is currently expressed in the conflict between social and market liberalism.
Liberalism is in crisis because of the gap between the human needs for a flourishing life and official policies, and between our everyday lived values and a utilitarian, economic rationality centred in Canberra. When liberalism relies exclusively on the state and market as steering mechanisms---as it has done over the previous two decades---then the inherited social norms and beliefs of our everyday living traditions are eroded. There is an undermining of the very cultural preconditions for the functioning of a liberal social order and the unitary culture of a liberal social order that existed during the Cold War disintegrates.
Liberalism cannot provide the national consensus or values (trust, compassion, care, belonging) that are sufficiently strong and binding to anchor any viable project of reconstruction---eg., repairing an ecologically devastated Murray-Darling Basin. All the conservative political talk about moral and mutual obligation deployed by the Howard Government---or the compassionate conservatism of the Bush Administration won't do the trick.
Since the crisis of liberalism is barely acknowledged in Australia, the fool has to state it. And the fool adds: many Australians are no longer seduced by the sirens of liberalism. So the political significance of populism is that it gives voice to the growing public unease with a triumphal liberalism and the disintegration of Australia as a unitary nation-state.
That was the Xmas post. It indicates enough to make my case that philosophy can critically operate within our common life and offer something useful through its process of disclosing what has been hidden from view. It gives us a way of standing outside liberalism; gives us a critical perspective on liberalism which constitutes the universe of policy makers; and undercuts the science verus irrationality claim of the economic "enlighteners."
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