A central concern in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is how the process of enlightenment in modernity---what Hegel called the leap from darkness into new found clarity--has a dark side. A blog on the Frankfurt School states:
For Kant, Enlightenment liberates us from authority. Those who hold authority—have mystery. The priest has special access to the mystery of religion; it is through him where God comes towards us. The Enlightenment says that human reason is capable of answering all the questions that the previous authority had answers to. When you have a rational claim, you’ve laid a path that someone else can easily follow to the same conclusion. The light of the Enlightenment leads to knowledge in this respect. For Kant, this frees us from authoritarianism; we now understand the light of the world from our own reason.
The big fear of this dominant positivist mode of rationality (a rigid dry formalism in Hegel's terms) is that going beyond the given will entail a lapse back to myth--back to the older forms of metaphysics, theology and magic. A fall back into the darkness or irrationality.
The reigning paradigm in political science in the 1970s--1980s was a form of liberal democracy that assumed conflict among the citizens and prescribed handling those conflicts by apportioning power equally among the citizens in a vote or in the pluralist contest of interests. The emphasis was on bargaining and negotiation, to voting, and to the use of power.
It was then replaced by “deliberative democracy,” that is based on dialogue, mutual justification and persuasion. In On Revolution Hannah Arendt describes the process as follows:
Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate.... The same is not true for questions of interest and welfare, which can be ascertained objectively, and where the need for action and decision arises out of the various conflicts among interest groups. Through pressure groups, lobbies and other devices, the voters can indeed influence the actions of their representatives with respect to interest, that is, they can force their representatives to execute their wishes at the expense of the wishes and interests of other groups of voters. In all these instances the voter acts out of concern with his private life and well-being, and the residue of power he still holds in his hands resembles rather the reckless coercion with which a blackmailer forces his victim into obedience than the power that arises out of joint action and joint deliberation
Her basic thesis is that both liberal democrats and Marxists have misunderstood the drama of modern revolutions because they have not understood that what was actually revolutionary about these revolutions was their attempt to create a constitutio libertatis - a repeatedly frustrated attempt to establish a political space of public freedom in which people, as free and equal citizens, would take their common concerns into their own hands.
Both the liberals and the Marxists harbored a conception of the political according to which the final goal of politics was something beyond politics - whether this be the unconstrained pursuit of private happiness, the realization of social justice, or the free association of producers in a classless society.
Against liberals, Arendt disputes the claim that these revolutions were primarily concerned with the establishment of a limited government that would make space for individual liberty beyond the reach of the state. Against Marxist interpretations of the French Revolution, she disputes the claim that it was driven by the “social question,” a popular attempt to overcome poverty and exclusion by the many against the few who monopolized wealth in the ancien regime.
Rather, Arendt claims, what distinguishes these modern revolutions is that they exhibit (albeit fleetingly) the exercise of fundamental political capacities – that of individuals acting together, on the basis of their mutually agreed common purposes, in order to establish a tangible public space of freedom. It is in this instauration, the attempt to establish a public and institutional space of civic freedom and participation, that marks out these revolutionary moments as exemplars of politics qua action.
This understanding of deliberation was subsequently modified and expanded. Participants in deliberation advance “considerations” that others “can accept” -- that are “compelling” and “persuasive” to others and that “can be justified to people who reasonably disagree with them” . Disagreement, conflict, arguing, and the confrontation of reasons pro and con emerged more clearly at the core of deliberation.
This is a classic understanding of deliberation. It holds that democratic deliberation is necessarily interactive and collective; that deliberation in public has social features that tend to promote the common good; and deliberation allows creative solutions and the transformation of preferences.
The Liberal Democrats are currently centre stage in the UK due to a hung parliament resulting from the recent UK election. If the Lib Dems stand for the Liberal tradition, and are its defenders, then how do they understand what Liberalism means in the 21st century? It is social liberalism, which receives few defenders in Australia these days, even though social liberalism is the philosophical underpinnings of social democracy.
An example is Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism in the 21st Century from the Beveridge Group produced by the centre-left ginger group within the Liberal Democrat party.The Introduction to Reinventing the State is a defence of social liberalism:
The limitations of the market, however, are becoming increasingly obvious. Conservative and Labour governments obsessed with market-based solutions have built a more unequal and unfair society than Britain has experienced at any time since before the Second World War. The ever-more serious threat of uncontrolled climate change cannot be met by market mechanisms alone. And the introduction of markets into the public services has had – at best – mixed results.
This is nothing new to British Liberals, who have argued for well over a century that the market suffers from a number of limitations, and that there is, therefore, an important role for the state. This was the social liberal approach of the New Liberalism of the early twentieth century that laid the foundations of the British welfare state. At the same time, however, Liberals have always recognised the danger of government- based solutions that rely on, or lead to the establishment of, remote and insensitive bureaucracies.
Their analysis is spot on:
Britain is seen as a divided and unfair society, where individu-als and communities are powerless in the face of bureaucracies and com-panies which treat them only as passive consumers. People feel that they cannot control their own destinies – or even their own local services, from schools and hospitals to post offices and community facilities. The Labour and Conservative approach to the breakdown of traditional social structures is to descend to mere consumerism, promising the voters more of everything – or at least more services and possessions, but never values, or community spirit, or social solidarity.
social liberals believed in the core value of freedom. They held that the state should as far as possible leave people alone to make their own decisions on how to live their lives, but they believed in addition that freedom was not attainable without a fair distribution of wealth and power. This in turn led to support for redistributive taxation as a way of fairly distributing wealth, and for democracy as a way of fairly distributing power.
The goal of social liberalism is to enable the individual to make the most of his or her life. This will not happen if the state stands idly by. Nor will it happen if the state steps in to control. But it will happen if the state enables, if the state hands power back and if the state tames the power of the market.
Boon and bust is the normal dynamic of capitalism. The view that markets are self-equilibrating and stable is fantasy since Capitalism is inherently crisis-ridden. Its crises mutate rapidly. Eighteen months ago we had a debt crisis of the financial sector, the a global economic crisis and now we have a public sector debt crisis spreading across Europe. That has prompted a political crisis across the eurozone, and particularly in Germany and Greece; voters in the former are incandescent about lending their money, while in the latter it is rapidly becoming a crisis of the state itself.
Once the bubbles are burst, expectations about asset values are dashed, optimism gives way to despair, and wealth is ruthlessly redistributed. Capitalism survives by purging itself of debt and loading the costs of adjustment on the weak and the poor. Capitalism survives by socialising losses and distributing gains to private hands. With this crisis the global epicenter of capitalism accelerates its shift primarily towards East Asia.
That is what happened with the global financial crisis and Wall Street. Creative destruction. Today it is back to business as usual for finance capital, which translates into support for the capitalist class. David Harvey says:
Can capitalism survive the present trauma? Yes. But at what cost? This question masks another. Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in the face of the raft of economic, social, political and geopolitical and environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding “yes.” But the mass of the people will have to surrender the fruits of their labour to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights), and to suffer environmental degradations galore to say nothing of serial reductions in their living standards which means starvation for many of those already struggling to survive at rock bottom. Class inequalities will increase (as we already see happening). All of that may require more than a little political repression, police violence and militarized state control to stifle unrest.
Harvey says:
This contrasts with the $0.15 trillion new investment needed in 1950 and the $0.42 trillion needed in 1973 (the dollar figures are inflation adjusted). Real problems of finding adequate outlets for surplus capital began to emerge after 1980, even with the opening up of China and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The difficulties were in part resolved by creation of fictitious markets where speculation in asset values could take off unhindered. Where will all this investment go now?
Leaving aside the undisputable constraints in the relation to nature (with global warming of paramount importance), the other potential barriers of effective demand in the market place, of technologies and of geographical/ geopolitical distributions are likely to be profound, even supposing, which is unlikely, that no serious active oppositions to continuous capital accumulation and further consolidation of class power materialize. What spaces are left in the global economy for new spatial fixes for capital surplus absorption? China and the ex-Soviet bloc have already been integrated. South and South East Asia is filling up fast. Africa is not yet fully integrated but there is nowhere else with the capacity to absorb all this surplus capital. What new lines of production can be opened up to absorb growth?