David Wood in the Introduction to Surveillance and Society's issue on Foucault and Surveillance says that for Surveillance Studies, Foucault is a foundational thinker and his work on the
development of the modern subject, in particular Discipline and Punish), remains a touchstone for this nascent transdisciplinary field. Wood adds:
This work gave us Foucault’s interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’, an Eighteenth Century design for an ideal reformatory, which will not be dwelt upon here as it has been considered many times before and is present to varying degrees in most of the pieces in this issue. For Foucault the Panopticon represented a key spatial figure in the modern project and also a key dispositif3 in the creation of modern subjectivity, in other words in the remaking of people (and society) in the image of modernity. Panopticism, the social trajectory represented by the figure of the Panopticon, the drive to selfmonitoring through the belief that one is under constant scrutiny, thus becomes both a driving force and a key symbol of the modernist project.
In Against the New Authoritarianism: Politics after Abu Ghraib Henry Giroux argues that under the Presidency of George W. Bush, the United States is approaching a proto-fascist state; the second that a critical education is a vital strategy for resisting such developments. The new authoritarianism is not arriving in swastika emblazoned brown shirts; instead, it uses the discourse of democracy, even when it undermines it.
In his review of this text Benjamin Franks says that Giroux draws out eight central elements of the new authoritarianism:
....first, reactionary modernism, in which an alliance of free-marketeers, extremist evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives build a sustained social order based upon, and perpetuating, class, gender and ethnic hierarchies (pp. 37-38). The second feature is the corporatization of civil society, in which the democratic social spaces where people create their own social relationships are instead placed into service for the business sector and the administrative arm of the state.....The third feature of proto-fascism is the developing discourse of patriotism and nationalism and the culture of fear that supports it. A continual battery of jingoism on the news media, which includes the fluttering flags of the media idents, the label badges of the TV newsreaders, and the marginalisation or silencing of governmental critics as ‘unpatriotic’, are indicative of the strong current of nationalism used to bolster domestic and foreign policy (pp. 40-42).
This incessant promotion of a militarised, chauvinistic discourse goes alongside a fourth characteristic: that of control of mass media through a combination of oligarchical corporate ownership and significant state regulation..... Giroux accuses G. W. Bush’s executive of going further than any previous government in intertwining his administration with the mass media and manipulating the Fourth Estate.This deterioration in journalism has an impact on the fifth element – the rise of an Orwellian version of Newspeak.The sixth element of US proto-fascism is the collapse of the separation of church and state. Rather than the tenets of democracy justifying governmental decisions, appeals are made to unknowable deities and their institutional supporters....The final two features are the ones Giroux spends greater time on discussing – Militarization at home and abroad and the replacement of democratic institutions by neo-liberal ones.
Franks points out that Giroux identifiication of neo-liberalism as not only being compatible with fascism, but a necessary
feature of the new authoritarianism is highly controversial, as the orthodoxy of conservative and liberal opinion, propagated by influential theorists like Kirkpatrick, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Karl Popper and Roger Scruton, is
that the determining feature of totalitarianism was state intervention in the economy.
An interesting journal--Surveillance and Society and an interesting issue--Foucault and Panopticism Revisited
Daniel Bell in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) argued that the contradictions of contemporary capitalism resulted from the unraveling of the threads which had once held the culture and the economy together, and from the influence of the hedonism which has become the prevailing value in our society. He unpacked this by saying that the Protestant ethic was becoming sundered from bourgeois society leaving only the hedonism Work was no longer a calling, but a mere means of seeking pleasure as a way of life.
In this reworking of Max Weber Bell argued that the restraints of the Protestant ethic on unrestrained economic impulses and acquisitiveness were undercut by capitalism itself through such innovations as installment buying, instant credit, mass production, and mass consumption. While the business corporation wants its employees to work hard, pursue a career, and delay gratification, at the same time its products and advertisements promote the vision of pleasure, instant joy, relaxing, and letting go.
This is freedom as self-fulfillment and self-realization. For Bell it signifies an unrestrained self that seeks to supplant rationality and restraint with sensation, simultaneity, immediacy, and impact.His example is the 1960s.
This is pretty much the cultural conservative's diagnosis of liberal capitalism--today they point to the way that the cinema, the magazine rack, and the Internet are swamps of pornography and sexual obsessions. Thus Keith Windschuttle, on becoming the new editor of Quadrant, says that he will target the arts:
I’ve become concerned in recent years about the cynicism and decadence that you get in the opera, in the theatre, in other parts of high culture - even the dance companies. Consider Wagner’s Tannhauser, that myth of the sacred and profane now on show at the Sydney Opera House. There’s a guy painted in gold (who) stands there with a giant erection - symbolises lust or something. That kind of gratuitous offensiveness is almost everywhere.
In The Republic of the Moderns: Paine’s and Madison’s Novel Liberalism Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelsons argue that the relationship between republicanism and liberalism has emerged as a central issue for students of political thought.
Neo-republican scholars in particular have advanced a stark conceptual opposition between two competing intellectual and political projects, and have claimed that liberalism decisively defeated and replaced republicanism. By contrast, in exploring the writings of Thomas Paine and James Madison, this article shows how they initiated a radical and unexpected reconfiguration within the republican tradition that fashioned a surprisingly liberal doctrine for a modern republic. Their ‘‘republic of the moderns,’’ we argue, altered he contours and content of classical republicanism, transmuting it into an important strand of liberal political thought and institutions.
In this review of Raymond Aron's Defense of Political Reason: Essays in First Things Brian C. Anderson highlights Aron's critique of Hayek. This critique is found in Aron's review essay of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty entitled "The Liberal Definition of Liberty."
Aron says that Hayek's classic work, which was part of his revival of classical liberalism, had set forth two foundational principles for a free society: the existence of a realm of noncoercion and the universality and generality of law. To these two principles Hayek wedded classical liberal political economy- the free market and the "catallaxy" of economic exchange. While impressed with the rigor of Hayek's thought and imbued with the same love of liberty, Aron maintained that Hayek had, like most liberal thinkers, neglected the political.
Anderson says that Aron argued that this his neglect manifested itself in four distinct ways.
First, a free society depends on an inescapable dimension of coercion, particularly in its "federative power." As Aron puts it, "the direction of foreign relations remains the task of men and not of laws." In the partially Hobbesian world of international relations, statesmanship is inescapable. Foreign policy cannot be engaged in without the sovereign liberty of the statesman, but such sovereign liberty is unavoidably coercive-it can send people to their deaths, it can withhold information from the populace, it can transgress the day-to-day laws of the community.
Secondly, liberty as universality and generality of law cannot be a substitute for moral and political judgment. Laws may be universal and yet still discriminate, as Mahoney notes: "Rule of law is at best an ideal but it loses its undoubted dignity when it takes on a formulaic character, when it is presented as a replacement for politics and prudence."
Thirdly, Hayek never discusses the necessity of solid mores for the maintenance of civic life. Aron, like the neoconservatives, stresses the need for civic education; Hayek, like most libertarian and contemporary liberal thinkers, takes for granted the continuance of premodern traditions of virtue that provide the moral capital of liberal civilization but are in danger of being squandered when liberty decays to license.
Finally, Aron is prudent about the welfare state. Like Hayek, he feels that beyond a certain point the welfare state becomes suffocating and poses a threat to liberty. But unlike Hayek, Aron believes a limited welfare state is compatible with liberty and could even preserve it. In any modern democracy, Aron argues, there is a welfare function for government, entailed by the very logic of industrial society. This prudential critique of the welfare state is taken up by neoconservatives, who seek to limit, not to eliminate, the welfare system. As Mahoney points out, "Aron's is the rarest of liberalisms-a politic and political liberalism."
In The Future of Conservatism: Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Reagan Era (edited Charles W. Dunn) George H. Nash identifies four braided but distinct strands of modern American conservatism. Traditionalists value continuity, order and hierarchy; libertarians prize personal freedom and social spontaneity; neoconservatives blend the New Deal’s idealistic spirit with conservatism’s muscular nationalism; and religious conservatives fight relativism, secularism and immorality. These four stands come together to form one political movement---under Ronald Reagan in the US. Similarly with John Howard in Australia.
I understand Australian conservatism to increasingly be a marriage of convenience between "libertarian" (really classical liberal) fiscal conservatives and traditionalist (mostly Christian) social conservatives. I see the cultural contradictions-- eg., between libertarians and traditionalists--coming to the fore.
Tom Switzer, the opinion page editor of the Australian has article in Quadrant- entitled Conservatives are no longer losing the culture wars---that addresses the Australian situation. Switzer provides an overview of the last decade from within the trenches, and he argues that a more conservative and diverse cultural landscape has formed as a result of the culture wars.
Does he thrown any light on the nature and meaning of conservatism in Australia?
Switzer does go beyond the red-meat right-wingers and the triumphalist tub-thumper for capitalism. He says that:
The tide is turning in Australia’s culture wars. When you look at the way opinion in this country has surged back and forth over the last decade or so, I would suggest that there has been something of a political and cultural realignment of the nation. It’s a point that those on the broad Left are conceding, albeit grudgingly, but it’s also a point that too many on the Right have not fully realised. Conservatives may not have won the culture wars, but they are certainly not losing any more.
For decades, media sophisticates were able to control the political debate by all kicking in the same direction, like the Rockettes. In recent years, however, it is increasingly clear that the cultural landscape is no longer as flat and unvaried as that proverbial Australian sheep station. Whereas once conservative ideas were swept aside as being outside the boundaries of serious (and morally respectable) consideration, today they represent the political mainstream.
On the great battlefields of history, economics, education, citizenship, national sovereignty and values generally, conservative ideas and those of classical liberalism increasingly, although not of course completely, prevail.
To dig deeper we need to return to Dunn's outline of the “10 Canons of Conservatism” in the introduction to The Future of Conservatism: Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Reagan Era:
1. Continuity — high value placed on social order from one generation to the next; social and political changes are often, although not always, possible from within
2. Authority — limited federal government; its role is defined by Constitution and should be followed
3. Community — countervailing force against power concentrated in government; individual participation in private, voluntary organizations facilitates human flourishing
4. Deity — Natural and Divine law trump those of man, who is accountable to God above all else; emphasis on traditional moral values, with a distrust of corruptible human nature
5. Duty — personal responsibility more important than individual’s rights; “What can you do for your country?” Not “What can it do for you?”
6. Democracy — must be within context of constitutional order; must be carefully designed to limit and separate power; each branch should do their job and respect a strict interpretation of the constitution
7. Property — ability to own is what defines a free and humane society; gives citizens a “stake” in the country and land
8. Liberty trumps Equality — we’ve a right to opportunity, not outcome; arbitrary standards stifle and numb desire of individual to create and excel; guaranteed freedom, not idyllic standard of living, is paramount
9. Meritocracy — “natural aristocracy” based on talent and ability, not wealth and title; some people are more qualified than others to lead
10. Antipathy toward Centralized government — strong opposition to Socialism and Communism
The first five of these can be deemed as Conservative, with 1 + 3 forming the Burkean strand of conservatism.
In Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents ’ Brian Anderson explores what troubles democratic capitalism today. Anderson is the author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, which explored the idea that the traditional mass media in the United States are biased against conservatives, but through new media, such as the Internet, cable television, and talk radio, conservatives are slowly gaining some power in the world of information.
In Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents Anderson defends democratic capitalism from its ideological opponents but also tries to be open-eyed about what existential weaknesses erode democratic capitalist societies from within. In the first chapter he turns to the work of late French historian François Furet, who argued that liberal democracy has two weaknesses. According to Anderson Furet says that the first weakness is that:
liberal democracy had set loose an egalitarian spirit that it could never fully tame. The notion of the universal equality of man, which liberal democracy claims as its foundation, easily becomes subject to egalitarian overbidding. Equality constantly finds itself undermined by the freedoms that the liberal order secures. The liberty to pursue wealth, to seek to better one's condition, to create, to strive for power or achievement-all these freedoms unceasingly generate inequality, since not all people are equally gifted, equally nurtured, equally hardworking, equally lucky. Equality works in democratic capitalist societies like an imaginary horizon, forever retreating as one approaches it.
Furet says that:
The second weakness of liberal democracy is more complex, though its consequences are increasingly evident: liberal democracy's moral indeterminacy. The "bourgeois city," as Furet terms it, is morally indeterminate because, basing itself on the sovereign individual, it constitutes itself as a rebellion against, or at least as a downplaying of, any extra-human or ontological dimension that might provide moral direction to life. For all the inestimable benefits of the bourgeois city-its threefold liberation, in Michael Novak's formulation, from tyranny, from the oppression of conscience, and from the pervasive material poverty of the premodern world-its deliverance from the past has come at a price.
Milton Friedman, is a consequentialist libertarian. His moral vision is one of a society where people are free to choose for themselves. Such a society requires individuals to be free to use their own resources in their own way. The goal of social policy is to permit as many individuals as possible to pursue their own interests as fully as possible. This means the smallest, least intrusive government compatible with the optimal freedom for each person to pursue his own projects and follow his own values as long as he does not interfere with any other person's like freedoms.
Consequently, Friedman holds that the basic essential functions of government are to:
(1) to defend the nation from coercion from the outside and to defend individuals from coercion by others within the country;
(2) to enable the free market by establishing rules for exchange and by providing the medium of exchange; and
(3) to respond to neighborhood effects.
He says that the government should do only what markets cannot do and should enforce the "rules of the game." Specifically, the government should maintain law, order, and policy to prevent coercion; preserve the peace and provide for national defense; adjudicate disputes and enforce contracts voluntarily entered into; define the meaning of property rights and provide the means for modifying them and the other "rules of the game"; provide a monetary framework; foster competitive markets and overcome technical monopolies; and address neighborhood effects which are actions affecting others (e. g., pollution) where it is not feasible to charge or reward them.
Friedman explains that where the actions of one person affect another, and where the range and value of the effects can be controlled and determined, those involved should pay the price or receive the benefits or compensation for the actions.
In American conservatism 1945 in the Public Interest, Fall, 1995 Irving Kristol decribes the impact of the 1960s. He says that in
the student rebellion of the late 1960s, a rebellion aimed primarily at the liberal professoriate - the small minority of conservative professors were largely ignored. This assault reminded many liberal professors that their liberalism had implicit limits, beyond which lay some quite conservative assumptions about the nature of authority in general, and in a university in particular. There is nothing like the utopian idiocies of the extreme left - the "infantile" left, as Lenin called it - to stir thoughts of moderation among the centrist majority. And from such thoughts of moderation, some second thoughts about the implications of moderation are bound to develop, and these second thoughts will always, in that context or that situation, turn out to involve a conservative modification of the original liberalism.
The student rebellion had, of course, close ties with the emerging counterculture, which set out to scandalize and delegitimize the regnant liberalism in its own bold and brash way. Liberal professors and liberal intellectuals liked, at that time, to think of themselves as "broad-minded," but they were nevertheless shocked. It's one thing to give scholarly approval to historical, sociological, and psychological studies that demonstrated our conventional family structure to be less universal, more "culture bound," than one had realized. It is quite another thing to see one's children enticed into sexual promiscuity, drugs, and suicide. The liberal professoriate, and many members of the intellectual community, had always kept its distance from "bourgeois society," and always tried to be "objective" about bourgeois mores. Now, a great many discovered, albeit reluctantly, that they had been bourgeois all along.This was seen in terms of extreme hedonism, antinomianism, personal and sexual individualism and licentiousness. Hence the turn to authority and the neoconservative critique of contemporary liberalism. Interestingly, Kristol highlights the importance of an active religion-based conservatism in this critique, as it's activism was provoked by militant liberalism and the militant secularism associated with it:
This liberalism and this secularism, in the postwar years, came to dominate the Democratic party, the educational establishment, the media, the law schools, the judiciary, the major schools of divinity, the bishops of the Catholic Church, and the bureaucracies of the "mainline" Protestant denominations. One day, so to speak, millions of American Christians - most of them, as it happens, registered Democrats - came to the realization that they were institutionally isolated and impotent. They quite naturally wanted their children to be raised as well-behaved Christians but discovered that their authority over their own children had been subverted and usurped by an aggressive, secular liberalism that now dominated our public education system and our popular culture.The conservative Christians began to seek links with traditional conservatives, since they shared common enemies - liberal government, a left-liberal educational establishment, a judiciary besotted with liberal dogmas. But this alliance worked smoothly only up to a point, as there is a difference between the kind of liberty" dear to the hearts of economic conservatives and leaders of the business community, and the "ordered liberty" of serious religion. However, the merger of neoconservatism and traditional conservatism that has been underway since the election of Ronald Reagan, is largely complete.
From the ABC's Lateline programme An excerpt of a debate that was organized around Paul Kelly's criticism of Australia's public intellectuals within the so-called culture wars. Virginia Trioli, the presenter, refers to Kelly's article the Australian Literary Review, where Kelly claimed that Australia's public intellectuals are second rate. An example Kelly gives is Indigenous affairs. He says:
I think here we have been very ill-served by the quality of debate of our public intellectuals. I think they've focused far too much on symbolic reconciliation, on political, legal and land rights and that they obscured and overlooked for far too long the reality of life in Aboriginal communities and in Aboriginal Australia.
ROBERT MANNE: To some extent. It's quite wrong to think that public intellectuals were the main or only bearer of the ideas to do with reconciliation. Oddly enough, the person who convinced me of reconciliation was Paul Kelly in a piece he wrote in about 1992 but we'll leave that aside.
VIRGINIA TRIOLI: A nice bit of detente. That is nice.
ROBERT MANNE: Many Aboriginal intellectuals don't agree with Noel Pearson. I, in fact, think there is a great deal to be said for the Pat Dodson way of looking at the world, which is to think spiritual and symbolic matters are fundamentally important.
I also think it's true to think, as Noel Pearson does, that the left, including left-wing Aboriginal leadership, hasn't produced a way out of the terrible malaise of the community. I don't disagree with that thought. I think it's true the left in general and public intellectuals as well, during the period of the Keating Government in particular and on from that, didn't sufficiently concentrate on the crisis of living. I am sympathetic, actually, to both Pat Dodson and Noel Pearson and I think John Howard's Government has been unnecessarily uninterested in the questions of respect and questions of reconciliation and so on. But I also do think it's true, as Paul said, that a lot of people on the left are still finding hard to come to terms with the crisis of the communities.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno published Dialectic of Enlightenment, their exploration of the Enlightenment's self-destruction. Throughout the book, Horkheimer and Adorno explore the ways in which the Enlightenment tradition of critical thought turns back onto itself, changing from a social force that aims to emancipate humanity from oppression to one that undermines individual sovereignty and that contributes to the reign of economic and bureaucratic domination over humanity. The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." Dialectic of Enlightenment is replete with such savage bon-mots
Many have argued that the traditional idea of the university is in jeopardy, due to the contemporary political moves to transform the Australian university by subjecting it to the values of the market Freedom to teach, the unity of teaching and research, and academic self-governance--the key values associated with the traditional idea-- are under threat and have little currency in a neo-liberal mode of governance.
The last decade has witnessed sharp divides being drawn in a battle over values --the culture wars---that many have argued has distracted our political attention and energies from questions of economics and equity. This struggle between progressive and conservative values in Australia has became the political battlefield since 1996, as the conservatives created a picture of a divided, angry, unhappy society so as to deploy the language of denial, division and abuse.
A key target of this conservative rhetoric is education, especially the universities as it was that progressive values centrally placed and defended. The sustained assault on the high education institutions have undermined public confidence in them and created a certain kind of defensiveness about academia and the role of universities in a market economy.
Margaret Thornton in her 'The Idea of the University and the Contemporary Legal Academy' in the Sydney Law Review reworks the traditional defensiveness of the liberal university.
She says that within a contemporary neo-liberal setting, knowledge is the revolutionary trading commodity and that the university is not only a primary site of the production of new knowledge, but also of new knowledge workers....
Accordingly, it is expected to play a key role in the process of transforming society and ensuring acceptance of the discourse of the market, which has been described as the ‘metanarrative of our time’....Comporting with the neo-liberal imperative to privatise public goods and promote competition, a university degree itself has become a commodity like any other to be sold within the contemporary marketised environment.
hey are compromising, if not overtly forsaking, the traditional values associated with collegiality, public good and the disinterested pursuit of learning in favour of a constellation of values associated with entrepreneurialism and the market. The eagerness of universities to become market players is largely attributable to the funding crisis besetting Australian higher education. The paradox is that at the very moment the state placed pressure on universities to increase their student intake, the per capita funding of higher education places was curtailed. Universities responded by taking in more students— and an endless spiral was set in motion.
Thornton's response to this state of affairs is to defend the liberal law school and a liberal legal education by which she means the interrogation of the knowledge purveyed, which necessarily involves far more than a set of technocratic rules:
Those wishing to educate enlightened lawyers for the future have insisted that students continue to ask the imponderable questions as to the how, the why and the ought of law. However, the market embrace is causing Australian law schools to discourage such questioning.
David Burchell gives a talk on social exclusion at the State Library of Queensland in association with Griffith Review. The talk works off an essay Burchell wrote entitled Trying to find the sunny side of life' in the Review issue entitled Divided Nation. Burchell says:
I think all Australian cities to some extend or another are prone to the phenomenon of having bits of them drop off the map and the residents of those areas feel disconnected from the whole. The term social exclusion while it is used in all sorts of different ways and has a variety of theoretical backgrounds that don’t always have to go with it, I think conveys that reasonably well. In that sense I think social exclusion identifies issues not simply to do with the absence of wealth in communities but to do with the sense that the community concerned has been cut off from the wider society in one or more ways.
Burchell is referring to dysfunctional places such as Glenquarie Estate in Macquarie Fields in western Sydney. He says that:
Citizenship was in my mind when I wrote the essay because it struck me that what clearly people in Macquarie Fields had been deprived of most obviously were elements of their citizenship in the wider community. They felt unable to participate in wider community activities. They didn’t as a whole travel much out of the locality. They never much went to the centre of Sydney and they didn’t feel that the kind of public amenities available in the centre of Sydney were theirs. I think that was not just a problem with the Glenquarie Estate but it’s a problem geographically and spatially in our cities more broadly. And it’s a problem I think in that respect of citizenship if you like, rather than simply social and economic inequality in itself.
citizens of areas that you would call massively disadvantaged...are not necessarily fragile, vulnerable creatures. They are often battle hardened, tough creatures looking for a way out of the situation, ready to seize it and in a sense perhaps more practically able to extricate themselves from their difficulties than many more affluent people are..... It is not simply a matter of damage, you are not simply dealing with wounded individuals but also with resourceful people who have abilities to get out of situations and presented with alternatives very often will take them and run with them.