Liberal Vision

Five Books interview with Brink Lindsey

Check out this fascinating interview with the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey:

I think the typical view of politics from inside a partisan mindset is to see politics as a battle of the good guys versus the bad guys. Maybe the good guys are on the left, maybe the good guys are on the right, but it’s this Manichean struggle and the way to get progress is for the good side to win and impose their will. Mill sees through that and sees that, in fact, politics is a dialectical process. At any given time truth is partly on one side and partly on the other. It’s more a battle of half-truths and incomplete truths than of good versus bad. The excesses of each side ultimately create opportunities for the other to come in and correct those excesses. Liberalism, in Mill’s view and in mine, provides the basic motive force of political change and progress. It will go astray, it will have excesses, it will make terrible mistakes – and a conservatism that is focused on preserving good things that exist now will be a necessary counterweight to that liberalism.

Brink also talks about the great books that influence modern classical liberalism in a very thoughtful and considered manner. Excellent stuff.

Samuel Fleischacker: a Third Concept of Liberty, Judgement and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith (1999)

Fleischacker is a Professor at University of Illinois-Chicago. Though all his degrees and academic appointments are from the USA, he is English in origin. He is a leading Adam Smith scholar, author of On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (2004) and co-editor of Essays on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (2010). Amongst currently active thinkers inspired by classical liberalism, he could be taken as representing the other pole to Chandran Kukathas, who was discussed in my last post. Fleischacker is definitely a ‘liberal’ in what is now the normal sense in America, that is someone of egalitarian left leaning inclinations. However, he is also much less of a statist social democrat than the average American ‘liberal’, and he tries to establish an alternative to the kind of top down statism often employed to advance social egalitarianism. He is critical of libertarians for what he sees as indifference to the need for government action to aid liberty, but much of what he says fits with those libertarian thinkers who believe government has a role in promoting public goods.

Fleischacker looks back to Adam Smith and to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who will be addressed soon in this series of posts. Kant was greatly influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, and has similar ideas to Smith about the benefits of free trade, property rights, and individual liberty under law. Kant also puts those Scottish Enlightenment ideas in the context of a philosophy much more concerned with ‘transcendental’ questions, that is questions of the limits of knowledge, and the way our knowledge of the world depends on the nature of our consciousness.

One part of Kant’s study of our consciousness is concerned with the power of judgment itself, which he thinks is at work in our taste for beauty and our philosophy of nature. Fleischacker is particularly concerned with beauty in Kant, which Kant connects with the most inner and subjective aspects of judgment. Kant’s view of our power for subjective judgements of beauty, is that it joins with everyone else’s judgement of beauty in ways which are the basis of communication, which join subjective pleasure with universal standards. For Kant, the capacity for judgments of beauty is deeply connected with our freedom as human beings and with our capacity to make moral judgements regarding other free individuals.

This aspect of Kant builds, in part, on ideas in Hume and Smith about the improvement of human morality, liberty, and taste over history. It is this capacity which provides a third concept of liberty beyond, the ‘negative’ liberty of freedom from interference, and the ‘positive’ liberty of collective action to provide conditions of liberty.
Fleischacker looks at liberty and self-determination in Kant in the first part of the book, and follows it up in the second part with an examination of the moral and political aspects of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Fleischacker thinks of Smith’s political economy as referring to the kind of values of moral reflection and freedom from external domination, that can be found in Kant. He looks at how for Smith, the increase in the prosperity and independence of labourers is a prime concern.

Fleischacker refers to the various points in Smith, which identify the manipulation of markets by the rich and powerful who try to exclude competitions. Merchants collude in trying to rig markets against new competitors, guild masters try to limit and control the people entering that guild.

Fleischacker looks at Smith’s famous line about the benefits we receive from the self-interest of butchers, bakers and brewers, rather than from their benevolence. The main point for Fleischacker is the value of personal independence. It is better for me to depend on myself for my food and drink, rather than depend on anyone’s charity. Fleischacker also notes Smith’s enthusiasm for indirect taxes on luxury goods rather than taxes which bear on the poor, and his disdain for those who look down on, and preach at, the poor for their supposed irresponsibility. Fleischacker’s extrapolation that Smith would be a supporter of redistributive tax and welfare policies are no doubt open to debate, but his views are certainly based on deep knowledge of Smith’s writings.

The last part of A Third Concept of Liberty is concerned with John Rawls, the dominant figure in recent egalitarian liberal political theory. Though Fleishacker agrees with Rawls’ overall view, he thinks Rawls leans too much towards rigid views of social organisation and distribution of income. Fleschacker argues for a more contextual approach, in which policy solutions emerge in reaction to particular conditions. He argues for public action to be directed against monopolistic economic power, rather than towards distribution of income. Rawls himself is often take as master thinker of left-liberalism and social democracy, but he also been taken up approvingly by some classical liberal and libertarian thinkers including Friedrich Hayek (Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2 The Mirage of Social Justice, 1979). So if Fleishacker takes Rawls, and tries to move away from the more designed from above elements of Rawls thinking, he certainly has something positive for classical liberals and libertarians. Rawls himself will be dealt with in a future post.

GUEST POST: Jon Gower Davies on “hate crimes”

After and over the best part of 400 years we in Britain managed to construct a relatively free civil and civilised society in which religious and secular life could flourish in public and mutual agreement and disagreement, vigorously and occasionally scatologically critical the one of the other.

Now, however, this public debate has been circumscribed by classifying such argument and such difference as expressing little more than ‘hatred’, a new criminal offence: And, alerted to a looming illiberality by a series of ‘hate’ laws relating to race, religion, gender, age, and physical disability and by the ludicrous ambitions of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, all freedom-loving people would be well-advised to check on the legality of their public utterances before they make them – hypocrisy being the best policy.

In our new publication, we show how, in pursuit of ‘hatred’, the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service destroyed the free speech and independent existence of two ordinary citizens of Liverpool, a story pregnant with implications for all of us. When messrs Cameron and Clegg get round to their promised ‘Bonfire of the Banalities’, then the laws relating to religious hatred in particular should be the first into the flames.

As these two bold politicians told the House of Commons in June 2005, these laws ‘disproportionately curtail freedom of expression, worsen community relations as different religious and belief groups call for the prosecution of their opponents, create uncertainty as to what words or behaviour are lawful and lead to the selective application of the law in a manner likely to bring it into disrepute’. Our book looks to demonstrate how true this is.

• For more information on the study, click here.
• A NEW INQUISITION: religious persecution in Britain today, can be purchased here.

Jon Gower Davies is a former lecturer at the University of Newcastle and former Labour Councillor on Newcastle City Council.

LUDWIG VON MISES (1881-1973) LIBERALISM (1927

Mises was an Austrian in the sense that he was born into a high bourgeois  German speaking family in the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Mises was from a high bourgeois Jewish family which had roots in Vienna.  However, he was born in Lemberg, now the Ukrainian town of Lviv, which has been also been part of Lithuania and Poland.  The range of languages and ethnicities in the town reflected that history and in Liberalism he refers with great emphasis to the conflicts and suffering of that situation, arguing that the situation can only be experienced in that way in a non-liberal society.

His father was a liberal politician, and Liberalism also refers with great emphasis to the decline of the old liberalism, the liberalism of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries.  The family moved back to its roots in Vienna, and Mises attended the university there, first becoming qualified in law, and the coming under the influence of the ‘Austrian School’ economists Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.

Mises became an economist in that school, and for many Austrian School economists and libertarians now, he is the most important figure in that school.  Hayek was his student, when Mises became an academic economist.  Mises also worked as an adviser to governments and the Vienna Chamber of Commerce until 1934 when he moved to Switzerland.

He moved to New York in 1940 to escape Nazi-dominated Europe and had some difficulty finding an appropriate niche, but was able in the end to become a recurrent visiting Professor at New York University, though this was privately funded by sympathetic business people.  In his time in Europe, his students included many future economists, government advisers and politicians.

At least some of the more liberal aspects of post-war European economics were under Mises influence.  His students, and others under his influence, in the United States ensured the continuation of the Austrian School, most famously the economist and Anarcho-Capitalist thinker Murray Rothbard.

Mises’ most influential books are probably: Socialism (1922), a lengthy critique of socialism in many aspects and varieties; and Human Action (1949), developed from Nation, State, and Economy (1919), a long treatise which grounds economics in the broadest categories of human life.

He also took part in a famous 1920  debate with the Marxist Oscar Lange about the possibility of economic calculation under socialism.  Mises denied the possibility of economic calculation without a price mechanism guiding the decisions of economic agents.  As he argues in Liberalism, the pursuit of a completely planned economy can only collapse into chaos as decisions will be made with no regard to the best allocation of resources. Liberalism, though probably not one of his most influential books, is a convenient place to introduce his ideas.

We shall return to the other books, and to Rothbard.  Mises was not an Anarchist, and is at great pains in Liberalism to establish that liberalism is not opposed to the state.  His vision of the state is very minimal though, and he strongly condemns deviation from such a view.  This leads to him to reject John Stuart Mill as an authentic liberal, because of Mill’s increasing tendency over time to think that society could evolve towards socialism, or even communism, and preserve liberty.  Mises’ reaction seems harsh in relation to On Liberty and some other Mill texts.  It’s true that at the time of On Liberty, Mill toys with the idea of socialism in Principles of Political Economy, but very briefly and it is only later that Mill makes sustained gestures towards socialism.  In any case, this illustrate Mises’ view that in every way real liberalism has been declining since the mid Nineteenth century, and has become a form of moderate socialism.  Mises does not quite adopt the minarchist view that the state only exists to protect life, liberty and property, but he certainly regards these as the essential aspects of liberalism and rejects most forms of state action going beyond them.

He argues against unemployment benefits, on the grounds that they increase unemployment, and hold back changes in the labour market, of a kind necessary for economic development.  He does think that labour exchanges to help workers find new employment are allowable.  Mises does not completely exclude education from the state sphere, but certainly thinks that in the circumstances in which he grew up that compulsory schooling is dangerous, because it inevitably creates problems about which languages are preferred and more or less disguised pressures to adopt the majority language.  In this context, he also argues that a large state machine worsens relations between different groups, because of the competition to control the state in order to gain economic benefits that results.

Only liberalism respects both individual rights and objective sociological and economic realities.  Wealth is only created if there is private property and associated laws and institutions of the market, which allow the incentives to invest and produce.  Anyone who rejects this rejects reality and is a neurotic.  Mises supports the idea of the League of Nations (the forerunner of the United Nations), arguing it needed stronger powers to prevent war and to prepare colonies for self-government.  Though he supports a world structure to prevent aggression, he opposes European federation on the grounds that this would just promote a European level version of statist nationalism.

Book Review: “Bloody Foreigners”

Hello my lovely, liberal darlings. It seems a large part of the Liberal Vision cabal have found themselves flung to the far reaches of the planet this week. Julian Harris is in Holland, Angela is in Las Vegas and I’m in the sunny, little haven that is the United Arab Emirates.

So in honour of this group effort to be on holiday (well, Harris is on a business trip but whatever) I thought I’d do a post to venerate my beach side reading.  “Bloody Foreigners” by Robert Winder is actually a book I am obliged to read for my “Politics of Migration and Ethnicity” course at Uni. Despite being completely factual it is written as a story and is a thoroughly enjoyable read as well as an academic work.

If you think you know Britain or the British in any sense, think again. Somethings we take for granted as genuinely primordial (like Fish and Chips and Marks and Spencers) have rather more exotic origins than you may previously have thought.

Winder makes the point: “immigrants are often, and by definition, entrepreneurial risk-takers and rule-flouters, with a keen sense of individual liberty. The big idea of globalisation … is that the world should uproot the barriers to the free flow of trade. Yet few of the world’s richest countries are happy to extend this freedom to the free flow of labour.” –> Quite!

Anyone interested in migration, politics, sociology and/or anthropology should read this book. It is genuinely eye-opening - did you know, for example, that Enoch Powell was a willing volunteer to recruit workers for Britain’s labour force and eagerly traveled to the West Indies to do so? I didn’t.

Furthermore it shows how healthy immigration can be at it’s best and we see the best a lot more than we see the worst. If you’re not convinced then read this book. Be in no doubt that we should feel bloody proud that people who choose to immigrate choose our country above others. Winder says it best, “immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.”