January 23, 2007
This post is based on comments I made to a post by Don Arthur entitled Martin Amis and the agonies of ‘wet’ liberalism over at Club Troppo. Though that post was concerned with relativism, it also referred to earlier debate on a post by Don entitled Mad, bad or just plain stupid?, which explored the tensions between liberalism and democracy.
These tensions had been explored by Schmitt in terms of different logics. Schmitt argued that the pluralist logic of liberalism refers to each individual having the freedom to pursue their own happiness as they see fit, to set their own goals and to achieve them in their own way. What is abandoned is the substantive conception of the common good and that of eudaemonia. The logic of identity of democracy refers to the logic of identity between governors and governed, between the law and popular will, that has its basis in the sovereignty of the people.
The two logics joined in the 19th century and they can separate again. When they joined liberalism wasn’t all that keen on democracy and some strands still aren’t. Witness Hayek, or the reduction of democracy to procedures to elect political elites, or market liberals who think that political governance should be constructed on corporate lines with the PM as CEO. The ‘restrict democracy’ is the heritage of liberalism, whether it be the strands represented by J.S. Mill, T.H. Green, F.A. Hayek, or R. Rorty.
Liberals like Ludwig von Mises and Max Weber argued that the social and economic institutions of liberal capitalism were the essence of modernity, could not be transcended, and that there was only one viable form of modernity. that leaves us with Weber’s iron cage , which includes the structures of liberal democratic regime, as in our current political system. which is not really designed to function in a directly democratic way. The combination of representative democracy, the party system, cabinet government, prime ministerial power and the permanent ‘impartial or neutral’ public bureaucracy gives us a curious oligarchic-democratic hybrid, which is specifically intended not to open up ‘genuine substantial power’ to the sovereignty of the people.
Currently liberalism is under attack from conservatives from within the liberal democratic regime, so then we place the emphasis on democracy—its got more potential. The place to begin is to make the liberal democratic institutions more democratic by addressing executive dominance. Don Arthur, in contrast, places the emphasis on liberalism, as do classical liberals and libertarians. Both of the latter, unlike social liberals, want to limit what any democracy can do. As Jason Soon says in the comments to the Mad, bad or just plain stupid?:
Politics is ...the sphere which disproportionately attracts the mediocre and the banal, it is a necessary evil and something everyone should hold their nose doing. Libertarians only enter politics in the hope of eradicating as much of it as possible by substituting voluntarist institutions like markets.
Hence their emphasis on negative liberty to limit the state, the division of liberalism into two camps (classical and social), and the rejection of social liberalism as an authentic or true liberalism .
Introducing morality---individual conscience, autonomy, equality–---into the liberal democratic equation does put into question the libertarian claim that liberalism is based on negative liberty. Once individual freedom becomes an end in itself --as many liberals accept, then the principles of self-determination and self-realization become central, and are used to modify the self-interest foundation of classical liberalism based on the interests (and or rights) of property owners. Individuals as responsible agents and equals lies at the heart of the project of modernity that has developed (evolved?) within Western civilization.
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Gary - If we reintroduce a "substantive conception of the common good" and put democracy above liberalism then what?
Unless there's some way of reaching a consensus over rival conceptions of the good then the state becomes a perpetual battle ground. Representative democracy combined with unlimited state power leads to a cycle of shifting coalitions that impose their moral vision on other, unwilling citizens.
It seems to me that there's no way of reaching consensus. We can deliberate all we like but on some issues we'll always disagree.
Liberalism is a strategy for living with this disagreement.