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The Cause of Freedom
MA Dissertation: Cultural Studies 2012-3
Adviser: Tom Bunyard
3326254801
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Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank my friends and family for all their moral support,
and my advisor for the incredible amount of patience and care he gave to me.
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1. The Two Formulas of Freedom
Millions huddled around glowing screens to listen to
President Barack Obama's inauguration speech, the
culmination of a process that is in itself an instantiation
of the peoples' freedom, their freedom of choice. After
some brief exchanges of smiles and applause, Obama and the
crowd before him settled into a spirit of solemnity. With a
gaze cast far off into the distance, as if he was genuinely
envisioning the distant past and tracing its trajectory
forward upon each glance returned to the audience, he began
his speech with a stentorious voice:
"Each time we gather to inaugurate a President we bear
witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We
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affirm the promise of our democracy. What makes us
exceptional—what makes us American—is our allegiance to an
idea articulated in a declaration made more than two
centuries ago: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among
these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'
Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the
meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For
history tells us that while these truths may be self-
evident, they've never been self-executing; that while
freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people
here on Earth"
From here it's all agenda details. It is this last
bromidic sentence given here that concerns us. It blazons a
far-reaching departure from the ontological premise of
liberalism predicated on the subject's "self-evident", viz.
pre-given, freedom. Strictly speaking, it displays a
Foucauldian discernment of liberalism which applies
governmental practices to produce a free subject by
actualising "conditions of freedom" (Foucault 1979: 63):
freedom is ontologically contingent and hence "must be
secured" by the people and their government (Odysseos 750).
Nikolas Rose's book Powers of Freedom, written in 2004,
thoroughly analyses Foucault's notion of freedom as not only
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produced by a liberal form of government, but also as a
necessary resource for its operation. Thus while freedom
does serve as an ideal, as a "weapon in 'saying no to power'
", it is also a mode of organisation and regulation — "a
certain way of administering a population that depends upon
the capacities of free individuals" (Rose 1999: 64).
Typically, freedom in liberal politics "is structured by the
opposition between freedom and government"; in other words
the liberal ideology views the maximisation of individual
liberty and the power of the state as constituting an
inverse relationship (Rose 1999: 62). Francis Fukuyama
describes the dynamic of this relationship as being
determined by the individual's capacity to self-govern: if
they fail to discipline themselves in a manner conducive to
the harmonious co-existence with others and their
environment, then they will require a stronger and more
coercive state to maintain order (Fukuyama 1996: 357-8).
Thus, as Rose later explicates, freedom as an ideal and
freedom as a mode of organisation and regulation can also be
thought of as freedom as a formulae of resistance and
freedom as a formulae of power, respectively. As Fukuyama's
description of the relationship between governors and
governed shows, freedom as the formulae of power does not
function solely as hierarchical domination; it is not a
relationship of absolute control. Additionally, power is
not a "thing" that one can posses, lack, or can be directly
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pointed to. It is internal, not external, to relationships
— agency is always involved to a certain degree (Foucault
1978). Put differently, liberalism utilizes freedom as an
ethos of government: one governs others via the government
of the self 1 and, in effect, brings them together in a
bilateral continuity 2. Foucault explains the government of
the self as an ethical self-understanding that distinctively
operates via "technologies of the self". For example,
neoliberal forms of government coercively deploy practices
of self-government, under the guise of economic necessity,
to make individuals more responsible. By taking the least
amount of responsibility for all citizens and non-citizens
as possible, many serious problems with a social bearing —
illness, unemployment, poverty, etc —are unilaterally
shifted from the government to individuals so that they
become issues of "self-care" (Lemke 2001:12). Philip
Mirowski, a historian of economic thought, brilliantly
encapsulated how such policies are duplicitously posed as
liberating:
1 the government of the self contains practices that, as Wendy Brown states, "exceed express state action and orchestrate the subject's conduct toward himself or herself" (Brown 2005)2 Foucault deduces from one of the earliest texts on governmentality — La Mothe Le Vaver — that there is a continuity of power that flows in both upward and downward directions: if a person is to govern well, he must "first learn how to govern himself". When he governs himself well,his subjects will behave as they should (Foucault 1994: 206-7).
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"Hayek hit upon the brilliant notion of developing the 'double truth' doctrine of neoliberalism — namely, an elite would be tutored to understand the deliciously transgressiveSchmittian necessity of repressing democracy 3, while the masses would be regaled with ripping tales of 'rolling back the nanny state' and being set 'free to choose'..." (Mirowski 2009: 444)
This extra layer of truth, that gives governmental and self-
governmental practices rhetorically persuasive meaning, is
ideology.
1.2 The Vehicle of the Formulae: Ideology
3 Schmitt's disdain for democracy specifically targeted liberal democracy, as he believed the principles of liberalism — mainly the concept of individual freedom, which imports pluralism — to be heterogeneous, and therefore incompatible, with the modern democratic logic of group identity and equivalence (Mouffe 1993: 133). His view ofthe liberal relation to truth was one where the arrival of a truth, uponwhich a decision can be founded, is always deferred as a result of the lack of collective identity encouraged by the liberal notion of individual freedom. The underlying assumption in liberalism is that endless competition of ideas/opinion will effortlessly produce harmony (Schmitt 34). Conversely, for Schmitt the logic of democracy infers an identity between the "government and governed", which is "perfectly compatible with "Bolshevism and Fascism are, like all dictatorships, certainly antiliberal but not necessarily antidemocratic" (Schmitt 16). A strong fear of totalitarianism runs throughout Hayek's texts; and he, like Schmitt, has pointed out the danger facing the generally accepted types of democracies of becoming totalitarian during the mid 20th century. Somewhat ironically, Hayek was in support of liberal dictatorships and told an interviewer for El Mercurio: "Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism (El Mercurio 1981)." Since Hayek pioneered much of neoliberal thought, it is not surprising that there is a shared antidemocratic stance.
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What Foucault, and consequently Rose, are too quick to
dismiss is the question of how technologies of the self
intelligibly emerge and reproduce themselves. That is, by
performing a certain set of actions, one also assigns a
specific meaning or belief to them: the logic of which
Althusser sets forth, borrowing from Pascal; "pray, kneel
down, and you shall believe, faith will arrive by itself"
(Althusser 2012: 8). Contrary to Foucault's disregard of
ideology as being nothing more than a relative effect of a
material infrastructure 4, I argue that they have reciprocal
material import. Ideologies are internally embedded in
institutions and co-produce relations of power; they provide
people with "rules of practical conduct and moral
behaviour", and is the equivalent to a 'religion understood
in the secular sense of a unity of faith between a
conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct'
" 5. In this way, they too are a mode of organising and
regulating individuals in society and enable both individual
and collective action in advancing goals or making decisions6. Of course, this is not to say that ideologies positively
4 see (Barret 1992: 123). Not to mention Zizek's disparagment of Foucault for failing to bridge how his mechanisms of "micro power" in Discipline and Punish connect to the "spectre of Power"; and, as a result, isforced to resort to drawing a confused schematisation of overtly complexarrangements of power and its mechanisms (Zizek 9). 5 the single quotation marks contained within the quotation are from Antonio Gramsci's prison notebooks, see (Simon 1991: 65). 6 A recent study showed U.S. Supreme Court Justices' votes correlated 0.80 to their ideological values when using a system of measures that precluded their actual voting record, see Cover and Segal. On the
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cause a certain behaviour or the reverse of this proposition7; but, as Gordon Wood notes, while ideas may not cause
behaviour in a way that economic or psychological factors
allegedly do, they are always present — "we do not behave
without them" (Wood 629). Our world and actions are made
intelligible through the meanings we assign to them, making
them easier to produce and reproduce. These meanings
concatenate to produce other significations: they
"constitute our ideas, our beliefs, our ideology, our
culture" (Wood 631). Likewise, our language and cultural
conventions circumscribe the meanings we create, to which
Wood adds:
"It is in this sense that culture or ideology creates behaviour. It does so by forcing us to describe our behaviour in its terms" (Wood 631).
When signifiers are subsumed into an ideology they are
given different connotations and values. Within liberalism
freedom is the superlative value. Moreover, the dual
operation of freedom is characteristic of liberalism 8; but,
organising and regulating functions of ideologies, see also Freeden pg 14.7 not to mention that proving an ideology caused a specific behaviour would be practically impossible. 8 It is clear that Rose's two conceptions of freedom — as an ideal and as power — is formulated after the analysis of liberalism that Foucault made in his lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics: "Liberalism is also a tool for the criticism of reality, from a previous governmentality from whichone is trying to get free. Thus liberalism can be used as a regulative schema of governmental practice and as a means to radically oppose them
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as has been suggested beforehand, both function through an
ideology. For better or for worse, an ideology postulates a
particular world view, which in turn presupposes a certain
ordering of the world, including the propriety of certain
social structures. Althusser theorises this is how regimes
manage subjects to preserve their power: an ideology
presents a non-epistemological explanation of how the world
has to be and is, and along its lines a subject finds his
position in that order as necessary and natural. Freedom
inscribed in an ideology, then, is used as an ideal to
justify almost any governmental action or inaction; it
becomes an unconditional and objective good that must, at
any cost, be "secured". In defiance of liberalism's
conditional freedom, Sartre posits that it is intrinsically
part our being as our transcendence that surpasses all that
is and necessary: to treat it as an external effect coming
from the realisation of certain conditions is to be in a
state of bad faith. Serious problems arise when ideology's
defining quality of belief is converted into a finalising
rationalisation of certain natural or social orders and
ceases to be perceived as an ideology. Being able to
identify what meanings in our immediate experience are
ideological make critiques thinkable and new possibilities
imaginable. When freedom as a "weapon to say no to power"
and freedom as a "formulae of power" converge into common
(Foucault 1979: 320).
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sense, it becomes nearly impossible to perceive power
relations.
2. A Genealogy of the Liberal Value of Freedom
Freedom has a particularly predominant place in the
psyche of Americans, such that it is unquestionably felt to
be common sense a la Gramsci, as noted by David Harvey.
America's liberal democratic institutional foundations
indicate that a heightened, reverential feeling towards
liberty is far from being an inconsequential outcome of this
heritage. However, while the popular devotion to this ideal
has been more or less consistent, its meaning and the
material manifestations in its name have been otherwise.
Liberal intellectuals have adroitly taken up the cause of
freedom; and, their interpretations have been engineered and
employed to buttressed state apparatuses, extracting consent
to be ruled through the alluring medium of ideology. While
Althusser's theory of ideology contributes an effective
description of how ideology rationalises a modality of
governing and a corresponding subjectivity, he generally
deemphasizes the determinative role of the intellectual in
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not only developing ideologies 9, but in making them into
"compelling interpretations of actual lived experience"
(Morgan 2013). When an ideology achieves popular consent,
it becomes a hegemonic ideology. The means of hegemony are
not ones of unalloyed structural force, but of gaining a
position of intellectual and moral leadership:
"A social group can, indeed must, already exercise 'leadership' before winning governmental power (this is indeed one of the political conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to 'lead' as well" (Gramsci 1971 p 57-8).
One way to untie the Gordian knot of common sense
binding the two formulae of freedom together is to examine
the intellectual ideations of freedom against their
relatively coeval political practices, and other historical
socio-economic contingencies. This is approximately what
Foucault's genealogical method focuses on, and will lead us
to an account of freedom within the context of neoliberalism
— what I argue is still the ideological lens through which 9 An amusing anecdote, while it is one that digresses from our American context, recorded by John Ranelagh in his book Thatcher's People: An Insider's Account of the Politics, Power, and Personalities exhibits this point. During a Conservative Party policy meeting, a member was arguing for a "middle way" as the most practical one for the party when Thatcher, obviously frustrated by his position, ripped out a copy of Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty out of her briefcase, interrupted his speech by holding it up and declaring, "This is what we believe", then concluded her point by slamming it down on the table (Ranelagh 1991).
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America understands freedom presently. Furthermore, the
neoliberal ideology is one that "borrows ideas from the past
and then reinterprets them on a new ideological terrain"
(Turner 7). However, the appropriation, recombination, and
reinterpretation instantiated in neoliberal ideology is not
unique to it alone, as most ideologies can be said to have
sprung from an amalgam of past archetypes. Henceforth, I
will survey the quintessential thinkers of liberalism who
have markedly influenced its American version — elucidating
a basic schematic of their thought in relation to the core
concept of freedom — to illuminate freedom in its current
neoliberal form. Close attention will be paid to how the
interrelation between the two formulae of freedom gave rise
to its present form; as the thinkers explored have arrived
at their formulations in reaction to certain regimes power,
which are eventually embraced by new institutions of power.
During the course of our genealogy, thematic preconditions
for freedom in a liberal society will emerge — property
rights, the rule of law, democracy, homo oeconomicus, and
homo juridicus — that unify the liberal model in general.
However, the emphasis given to each varies within the four
ideologies addressed, which are: Lockean liberalism,
classical liberalism, liberal progressivism, and
neoliberalism. After these investigations I will be in a
position to advance toward a three-pronged critique of
liberal ideology with special attention given to its
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neoliberal configuration. My critique will not proceed from
weighing its theory against its practice — as many critics
of neoliberalism have done, most outstandingly David
Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism — but as a contestation of
its instrumentalisation of freedom by contrasting it with
Sartre's ontology of freedom.
2.2 Locke's "Beasts of Prey" and the Sword of Law
The Law of Nature and Lockean Liberalism
“That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
— Thomas Jefferson
Unfortunately, beginning with hackneyed historical
espousals are unavoidable, if one is to give a luminous
narrative of the development of the liberal value of freedom
up to its present form. I have already indicated that the
notion of freedom is particularly embedded in America. It
is possible to speculate endlessly as to why this is so, but
a choice reason would be that feudalism never took hold 10.
America was a tabula rasa (from the colonists' point of view) 10 The feudal structuring of society — with its rigid aristocratic and clerical hierarchies — is extremely antithetical to liberal notions of individual freedom.
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where one could escape feudal power structures (McGown 2007:
99). In place of the Church and the monarchical hierarchy,
liberalism itself was the supreme authoritative doctrine in
America 11; "it was the political equivalent of a civic
religion" (Turner 2008: 31). Liberalism, in the widest
sense of the term, can be defined as "the self-limitation of
governmental reason"; the central aims of which is the
promotion of individual freedom (Foucault 1978: 20) (McGown
2007: 24). To be sure, the ambiguity ingrained in its
idealism left one with room to expand its practical
potential beyond one's current situation, unmasking
illusions imposing the needfulness of oppressive measures.
Before the conflict between the British Empire and its
colonies piqued, the denizens of the latter petitioned their
grievances within the confines of the British constitution,
invoking "their rights as British subjects" (Foner 13). As
imperialist oppression progressed, colonists began to
perceive the whole system as corrupt and saw the need to
build for themselves a new foundation for the protection of
their freedom. Ironically, their ideas were built upon
prominent British philosophers, mostly from the work of John
Locke (McGowan 2007: 23). John Locke wrote the Two Treatises of11 Needless to say, the Puritan settlers also brought with them spiritual and moral imperatives that conceptualised freedom in a Stoic manner, viz. as being actualised by self-restraint. Though it did not last long — Eric Foner places the date at 1750 — and was soon after followed by a Anglo-American Protestant reading poised against "tyranny and popery", which was conveniently aligned with the liberal notion of freedom (Foner 5).
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Government before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 12, and its
content gives a reasoned, philosophical basis for
revolutionary action; therefore, it was a salient
inspiration for the American Revolution (Turner 2008: 33).
The First Treatise of Government is a polemical critique of
the Divine Right of Kings against Sir Robert Filmer's
argument for divine and absolute monarchy premised on
Filmer's belief that man is not "naturally free" — using a
hermeneutical reading of the Bible to metaphorically to
fortify this claim. Whilst this subsidizes the assertion
that Locke was authentically writing for revolutionary
change, it did not furnish a detailed account of his concept
of freedom nor its enabling framework (MacPherson 1980:
viii).
It is within his Second Treatise of Government where he
resolutely advances a conception of freedom deduced from his
theories on the state of war, state of nature, and civil society. These
various states are ordered to relatively correspond to the
events surrounding the American Revolution; and concurrently
freedom moves from a negative form of freedom to a loosely
positive one (when founding a new government), returning to
the former upon the foundation of new polity. As the British
12 The first of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government was believed to be written several years before the Glorious Revolution of 1688, with suspicions that the second wasn't written wholly after the revolution. It may be surmised, then, that the historical context did not so much imply that the Two Treatises were justifications of the revolution but a call for one (Locke 1988: 47).
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Empire escalated legislative coercion to force submission,
the atmosphere grew tempestuous and Locke's condemnations of
tyranny briskly and passionately circulated among the
patriots:
"Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power"
Upon this breach the people enter into a state of war, the
people have the right to use force to fight such tyranny, as
is made dramatically vivid in the following passage:
"..one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not underthe ties of the commonlaw of reason, have no other rule, butthat of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey" (Locke 1980: II § 16).
While Locke believed the human psyche was innately
prone to the warlike vicissitudes of pain and pleasure 13,
man could, by his intellect, discover the Law of Nature, which
13 Locke's explanation of human motivation, or human nature, is scrupulously rendered in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Synoptically put, he denies the existence of innate moral laws and instead, in a Hobbesian fashion, states that man's innate inclinations are in his appetites — "a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery"(Locke 1690: 1.2).
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is the Law of Reason (Locke 1988: 95). It is reason which
gives man the positive freedom to form societies and create
polities. Locke stipulates, however, that man's freedom,
bestowed upon him by the light of reason, cannot be
exercised until one has reached a level of maturity — of
which children lacked and "savages" were permanently
incapable of reaching (Klausen 760) (Locke 1980: II § 61).
Thus the settlers had no obligations to their ancestral
polity, i.e. imperial Britain, nor to the Native Americans
who inhabited the land in which they wished to establish a
new polity. For Locke the state of nature was more than a
mentally simulated metaphysical space but America herself —
where there was "room enough" to create a new polity, and,
therefore, shrewdly justified the white man's territorial
expansion 14.
As mentioned briefly in the preceding paragraph, the
Law of Reason also serves to ideologically regulate and
organise people under laws that are in adherence to the
liberal inflection of the raison d'Etat — "the self-
limitation of government". Locke was unambiguous about the
fact that freedom could only really be enjoyed with the
protection of law with which disputes could be 'peacefully'
14 In Locke's view the Native Americans did not have legitimate polities: "in many parts of America there was no government at all"; thus, from the settler's point of view, America was a blank slate whereupon they could establish a new sovereign (Locke 1980: § 102). Seealso (Klausen 760)
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settled by a third party 15. Locke has already implied that
freedom is not licentious abandonment to one's innate
desires. A dependable and veritable freedom is being able
to "dispose and order as he lists, his persons, actions, and
possessions", this could not exist "where there is no law"
(Locke 1980: II § 57). Only the limiting framework of the
law is an effectual prophylactic against the formation
tyrannical governments or individual paroxysms; therefore,
it is best to give up the executive freedom one has in the
state of nature and live in accordance with the rule of law.
Within a society, which for Locke is defined by consenting
to and living by the mediating authority of the law, one is
ensured a negative freedom from the arbitrary will of others.
Prioritising the common good — such that individual
interests are transcended (limited) in its name — was keenly
in line with the republicanism of Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison (McGowan 14). The concentration of power was
preventively battled on all fronts, and the Bill of Rights
reflected the republican imperative to control the tyranny
of the majority by enumerating unalienable rights. John
McGowan, an American distinguished professor of the
15 While this seems to be parallel to Hobbe's argument for the creation of the state, there is a subtle difference in Locke. Locke, unlike Hobbes, did not identify the State of Nature with a State of War. He believed that overall, men in the state of nature recognised the Law of Nature, and, therefore, morally conducted themselves accordingly, i.e. took it upon themselves not to harm others' "life, liberty, or possessions" (Locke 1980: II § 8). Nonetheless, he did estimate that the State of Nature could degenerate into State of War.
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Humanities, enthusiastically defends the wisdom of the
Constitutions' most well-known drafters in creating a
public/private sphere with private property rights. He
argue that since citizens are able to derive their
livelihood by means other than the state, they could better
stand up to the state (McGowan 27). The rule of law's main
objective is to protect property rights, including
individuals — "every man has property in his own person"
(Locke 1980: II § 27).
Lockean liberalism and the republicanism of the
founding fathers ideologically functioned to not only incite
revolution and erect a new government charged with producing
freedom, it also supplied the rationale for unbound
capitalist accumulation as well as an inchoate subjectivity
hinging on self-interest. Political scientist C.B.
MacPherson delineated three limitations on the accumulation
of property in Locke's Second Treatise:
"First, a man may appropriate as much as leaves 'enough, andas good' for others...[insomuch as] each man has a right to his preservation and hence to appropriating the necessities of his life. Secondly, as much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils...Thirdly, the rightful appropriation appears to be limited to the amount aman can procure with his own labour" (MacPherson 201)
Since the first premise entitles each man the right to
secure his life, there is no need to garner the consent of
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others; the bounty of the earth was given to mankind in
common and by the necessity of life man must be able to
appropriate them. Thereby the European yeomen could justify
intruding upon Native American lands. Historically we know
that this is not a wholly satisfactory validation, because
it was often the case that the Europeans took more than was
necessary to protect their lives and could acquire single-
handedly by their own labour, breaking the third limitation.
Money, Locke admitted in sections 36 and 50 of the Second
Treatise, could store value, and, as MacPherson aptly notes,
it transcends the spoilage limitation 16. He also concedes
that the limitation of "enough, and as good" may be
circumvented, insofar as Locke reckoned an enclosed piece of
land can yield "ten times more than those which are yielded
by an acre of land of equal richness lying waste in common"
(Locke 1980: II § 37). From this observation, Locke
concluded that even if "enough and as good" is not left to
others in an equivalent form, e.g. land, "enough and as
good" is left in the form of commodities (Locke 1980: II §
16 Locke's original limitations do not invalidate money, because consentto the use of money is "tacit":
"...it is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having by tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to anyone" (Locke 1980: II § 50).
see also (MacPherson 208)
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37). He even goes so far as to say that by taking land and
making it more productive, one is making a greater
contribution to society due to the surplus created. What's
more is that once the great American tabla rasa has been
covered in proprietary demarcations, it wasn't problematic
to permit the alienation of the landless wage worker's or
slave's labour: "the turfs my servant has cut...become my
property", since the turfs were removed from the common
state they were in by "my" labour originally (Locke 1980:
xvii).
Why did Locke allow for so many contradictions in his
theory of property? While one should always point out
personal reasons with caution, his logical contortions do
bend easily and favorably with his mercantilist background;
he desired the rapid accumulation of gold not only for its
own sake but to "drive trade" (MacPherson 205). MacPherson
also avers that it gives a moral foundation for bourgeois
appropriation by positing that man completely owns his
'labour' — owing none of its fruits to anyone besides whom
he so chooses — and, in so doing, also gives an affirmative
moral basis for a capitalist market society (MacPherson
221).
From Locke's Two Treatises the aim of freedom is secured
through three elements: one is property, and the other two
are the subjectivities of homo oeconomicus and homo
juridicus. Both of these subjectivities are not explicitly
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articulated within his work, but their schematic content
recognisably surfaces. Homo juridicus is the "man of right"17 who in exchange for the security of his property, gives
up his "equality, liberty, and executive power" that he had
in the state of nature (Locke 1980: II § 131). Homo
oeconomicus is much more embryonic in Locke, but his
individualism morally condones the self-interested
accumulation of wealth 18.
That said, Locke's idea of man being the owner of
himself was expanded to include his expressions, giving a
deeper political dimension to the concept of freedom.
During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Madison
proclaimed, "a man has property in his opinions and the free
communication of them" (Foner 17). Madison would continue
to adopt the language of property rights to encompass the
immaterial, insisting that a citizen also had "property" in
his rights; and this idea, Eric Foner argues, leads to the
logical conclusion that all should be able to participate in
government (Foner 17). At the time, this was only the case
for propertied, white free men 19. On the other hand, the
17 see (Foucault 1978: 283)18 Locke rather vaguely acknowledged the justness in providing basic food to prevent one's fellow from "extreme want" — i.e. from starvation — but nothing more. There is also the further restriction to this limited charity that the person in need must absolutely have no other means to his subsistence (Locke 1764: I § 42). 19 One's political freedom depended on one's self-sufficiency; the reason being was that man only has the virtue to overcome his "private passions" if he needn't worry about the trivialities of life (Foner 8-9).
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ideas of "liberty" and "equality" contained in these
statements and reflected in the Declaration of Independence
— the United States Constitution omits the latter and
sustains the former — counterposed their idealism with
extant social realities. The clarity of the contrast
created between them likely made future challenges to
disparities conceivable 20.
2.3 Vice Makes Paradise
The Scottish Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism
"Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity,Which join'd with Time and Industry...Vice is beneficial found,When it's by Justice lopt and bound"
— Bernard Mandeville The Fable of the Bees
Ever weary of the possibility of tyranny — which,
according to the influential intellectuals at the time, came
in a variety of forms, even democratic ones — the radical
20 The constitution encapsulated the intellectual revolution within the American Revolution. Thomas Paine, an English-American who helped foment the revolution through the distribution of the popular pamphlet "Common Sense", stated that power structures both at home and abroad were to be challenged, because "We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and we think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used" (Paine )
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ideas of Charles de Montesquieu and David Hume had major
impact in the constitutional debates. Generally speaking,
their work forms a choral decree calling for commerce to be
respected as a separate sphere autonomous from government
control, expanding upon Locke's possessive individualism.
In addition to the rule of law, a civil society freed from
political and social obligations was advised as a way to
bring about the 'common good' without 'despotic' dirigisme
that disrespected individual freedom. Montesquieu noted how
once the nobility was able to participate in commerce, a
monarchy's strikingly unequal ranking system was
destabilised to the point where its classification as
monarchical became merely nominal (Joseph Smith 9).
In a gesture that philosophically broadened the meaning
of society, Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson considered it
to be a historical-natural constant, as man's survival
necessitates that he live in society (Foucault 1978: 299).
In order to maintain the natural, spontaneous synthetisation
of individuals and free association that occurred in civil
society, the state's institutional frameworks had to prevent
the formation of coercive factions; Madison argued for this
in Federalist No. 10 and it appeared in the U.S.
constitution by dividing the legislative branch into the
Senate and House 21. Such a system ensured that the 21 Federalist No. 10 laid out a solution to the problem of factions (Madison 1787). Montesquieu agreed that the fragmentation of powers through checks and balances warded off tyranny, but believed that
26
opinions of the majority (which was composed, in the
founders' view, of mostly poor people) would be 'refined'
through representatives removed from their most proximal
constituencies; 'refined' euphemistically referred to the
larger goal of thwarting class conflict, or at least ensure
that it wouldn't work its way into policy (Diggins 51).
Madison warned that if such institutional measures were not
taken, the body politic would be inflicted with the "rage
for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal
division of property, or for any other improper or wicked
project" (Madison 1787).
Montesquieu's advocacy for free commerce rested upon
his assumption that it fostered one's "love of equality" and
a spirit "frugality" — as opposed to one "enervated by
pleasure" — but thought this relationship could only be
produced within a confederation of small republics. David
Hume's rationale, then, is more in line with the American
political system finalised in the Constitution (Joseph Smith
9). One's virtuous conduct in the market was not the cause
of its efficacy and democratising potential, Hume opined.
Pure pursuit of self-interested pleasures begets "self-
improvement", a "productive citizenry", and a more powerful
state 22. The people's aspirations to luxury and wealth
freedom was sustained better at a more local, republic level. He therefore opposed the centralisation of power in a legislative hierarchy(Joseph Smith 6).22 see (Tuner 2008: 34). Like most philosophical arguments, Hume made this argument from broad generalisations. In his case, they were from
27
incentivises "husbandmen to work harder" 23, thus creating
more commodities and wealth, and set into motion an endless
cycle that infinitely amplifies the drive for consumption
and production.
Without an aristocracy to extol the superiority of the
virtues over the degrading act of "working for profit" 24 or
an organised working class to "uphold the ideals of
socialism" 25, the accouchement of classical liberalism was
particularly robust and omnipotent in post-revolutionary
America. Classical liberalism's pivotal notions of laissez-
faire and homo oeconomicus operated in unison within civil
society. To the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment,
economic necessity was a more tenacious social cement than
Locke's imperative of moral duty. The former bond was also
empirically irreversible: man could transition from a
natural state of subsistence hunting to civil society, but
not back due to the former state because it required "ten
times the quantity of land" (Christian 369). Overall, then,
the economic bond is stronger, and therefore better, than
the historico-economic aspects of feudalism. To offer a slight criticism, it seems that he has forgotten the existence of independent peasant proprietors in feudal societies when drew up this proposition. He made the sweeping judgement that within simpler societies the dependency of serfdom and lack of trade perpetuated servility among other miseries, precluding the contradiction of the exception of the free peasantry. see (Joseph Smith 10)23 see (Joseph Smith 11)24 see (Wood 640) 25 see (Turner 34)
28
the governmental one 26. He vindicated that: "sovereigns
must take mankind as they find them, and cannot pretend to
introduce any violent change in their principles and ways of
thinking...[the] best policy [is] to comply with the common
bent of mankind" (Hume 1985: 260). What was the proclivity
of mankind in Hume's opinion? Well, in more complex
societies it is self-interest, which he concluded from two
essential findings in his analysis of human nature: man's
nature is common due to similarities in physical
constitution and moral evaluations are made by "taste" over
moral. Hume pointedly chose to use the word "taste" for its
connection to human "sentiments of pleasure and pain" which
he thought were the prime movers of man's actions (Church
173). In contrast to Locke, Hume did not think one could or
should orient their estimations beyond the "painful or non-
painful nature of the thing" — the avoidance of pain is the
irreducible, non-transferable factors of every decision 27.
Thusly, while a sovereign may have good, albeit
paternalistic, intentions in limiting the exports of wheat —
26 Hume believed the government should only intervene when necessary andonly in "as calculable a manner as possible", as was made obvious by ones of Hume's essay titles "That Politics May be Reduced to a Science" — an uncanny foreshadowing of the totalising, calculating governmental rationality in neoliberalism (Werner 444). 27 see (Foucault 1978: 272). Besides, even if one were to behave in an altruistic way, this would not entail a sacrifice of one's interest for the other per se, because, Hume would argue, such a decision is reducible to the fact this other's suffering is more painful than whatever sacrifices one would have to make in order to aid their situation (Hume 1998: 293).
29
say, out of the concern of possible shortages — it would be
more beneficial to both the nation experiencing dearth and
the one with a surplus to transact with each other (Foucault
1978: 294). John Maynard Keynes calls this the
harmonisation of "individualism and socialism", writing that
the "political philosopher could retire in favour of the
business man" (Keynes 1926).
Keynes undoubtedly had Adam Smith's "invisible hand" in
mind when making this animadversion, as it exemplarily
symbolised this miraculous, mutually beneficial alignment of
interests. Invisible is a key word with a double
connotation: firstly, it confers the fact that no agent can
know, and therefore cannot possibly pursue, the common good;
the second relates to the first since if no one can know,
neither can the state, being a mere instrument of men. For
this reason, any sort of economic planning is futile.
Friederich von Hayek, one of the main figures to develop the
neoliberal corpus, praised his British and Scottish
Empiricism influences:
"no human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guidesa society and [there is] a consequent need for an impersonalmechanism, not dependent on individual human judgements, which will co-ordinate the individual efforts" (Hayek 1960: 4).
30
Hayek found there to be "traditions of freedom" in the
work of these two 18th century philosophers: they attribute
a lack of coercion and spontaneity as fundamental qualities
comprising the true essence of freedom, both of which
greatly factored into Hayek's own definition of freedom 28.
In effect, this is a laconic description of the principle of
laissez-faire — embodied in the metaphor of the invisible
hand — acting in conjunction with the rule of law. Contra
to the vulgar version of laissez-faire, it was never meant
to be understood or practiced as an absolute. The Scottish
economic theorists did give some credence to institutions:
"They knew better than most of their later critics that it was not some sort of magic but the evolution of 'well-constructed institutions', where the 'rules and principles of contending interests and compromised advantages' would bereconciled, that had successfully channelled individual efforts to socially beneficial aims. In fact, their argument was never anti-state as such, or anarchistic, whichis the logical outcome of the rationalistic laissez-faire doctrine; it was an argument that accounted for the proper functions of the state and for the limits of state action" (Hayek 1960: 60).
28 Hayek came to this conclusion by comparing the colonial approaches of the French and the English where the success of the latter was due to"slow, half-conscious growth". According to his analysis, the French tradition located freedom in deliberateness and enforced planning, and their fortunes suffered as a result (Hayek 1960: 56). Political economyevidently had a huge effect on the meaning of freedom, in that the valueof its interpretation depended on how well it worked ideologically to produce wealth.
31
Ergo, the relevance of the Rule of Law does not
diminish under the principle of laissez-faire. But the
relationship between governor and governed does noticeably
change; an altered type of freedom surfaces and with it a
new subjectivity. Gordon S. Wood cites American historians
Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude's book The Countryside in the Age of
Capitalist Transformation and highlights their point that farmers
everywhere were industriously working the land, putting
their children and wives to work (even having them younger
and in greater number to increase their workforce), and
trading their surpluses for an ever-expanding variety of
consumer goods. Their "desire to consume above all became
the motor for their growing industriousness...[which]
contributed further to the rapid commercialization of
American life", she notes (Wood 638).
From these accounts it seems that the subject of right
(homo juridicus) underscored in Lockean liberalism takes a
back seat to the subject of interest (homo oeconomicus).
Perhaps the best way to assess the plausibility of this
transition is to ask, who was best served by this specific
articulation of freedom? Well, Tuner makes the following
summary that gives us a good enough idea — while also
abridging other transformations that we will unfortunately
have to neglect due to space limitations and so that we may
give attention to more pertinent developments:
32
"In the early days of classical liberalism...laissez-faire became a reform ideology associated with the rising class oftradesmen and entrepreneurs...In the Jacksonian era, it was used 'to open the area of freedom by restricting the area ofprivilege'. In the late nineteenth century, 'it became the conservative weapon against the new generation of social reformers' " (Turner 35)
Economic freedom is thoroughly made the crucial freedom
during the late 18th and the 19th century, but it was
accompanied by increased equality under the law. The
demolishing of property restrictions on voting rights began
to erode in 1792 and only two requirements remained by the
late 1950s 29. In 1868 the Equal Protection Clause (the
14th amendment) further abraded asymmetrical legal
privileges by ensuring equal protection and impartial
judgment by the law (Cornell).
2.4 Freedom in Law Vs. Freedom in Fact
Freedom from Want and Liberal Progressivism
“An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact.”
— John Galsworthy The Forsyte Saga
29 restrictions still applied to "foreign-born residents of Rhode Island", African Americans, and women (Keyssar 29)
33
At the beginning of the 20th century, the effects of a
permissive and rapacious individual self-interest myopically
focused on exercising a bludgeoning economic liberty were
palpable everywhere. The top ten percent of earners took
home almost half of the nation's wealth 30 — 43.6 percent to
be precise and in the 2000s 44.3 percent — and any proposals
to redistribute the wealth so as to relieve the misery of
the working poor, including children, were denounced at
first. William G. Sumner, the famous Social Darwinist who
founded the Sociology Department at Yale, voiced the
sentiments of robber barons and others of great affluence
when he cavilled that "every effort to realise equality
necessitates a sacrifice of liberty" in his popular little
book What the Social Classes Owe Each Other published in 1883 (Sumner
16).
Underneath the thin layer of lustrous, licentious
freedom practised by the few there was a compounding misery
that intermittently burst through in undeniable tragedies,
leading to a questioning of the rugged individual freedom at
the heart of classical liberalism and its effects upon
society 31. A growing social consciousness began to fight 30 see (Krugman 31) 31 Workers faced countless bursts of violence from the unchecked economic "freedom" of the capitalist class. There was the Monongah Mining Disaster that killed more than 350 men and children in 1907 ?; the egregious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 that claimed the lives of 146 garment workers, mostly immigrant women, whose deaths couldhave been entirely prevented had the managers not made a practice out of
34
the regime of classical liberalism on all fronts, both its
ideology and the practices that wore it. In 1888 The Ethics of
Democracy by John Dewey, an American philosopher, was
published and called for a "greater freedom in fact". It
was one of his earliest works, but it already contained most
of his progressive reinterpretations of classical
liberalism's fundamental concepts — principally its
atomistic view of the individual that resulted in a negative
version of freedom — by developing his idea of the "social
organism" (Dewey 231). This metaphor works on three levels.
First, it meant that the well being of the individual was
dependent upon the well-being of the whole. Second,
democracy was not simply an aggregate of individual
interests expressed in each vote but "a manifestation of
some tendency of the social organism through a member of
that organism"; that is, citing some of the findings of
Governor Tilden, the reason the majority often only wins
within a small margin is that each individual, and thus the
whole social organism, is deliberative and in regular
communication with others (Dewey 234-5). Or, put in a
different way, the majority position is only achieved
through the process of tentative deliberation, and
compromises must be made in order to reach a decision.
Thirdly, freedom is — in opposition to Lockean liberalism
locking their workers in to prevent theft and unauthorised breaks ?; thelynching of a disabled union organiser, Frank Little, in 1917 ?; and I am only naming a few of the more publicised cases here.
35
and classical liberalism — positive. Freedom is not brought
about just by the removal of external obstacles and
constraints, as is the case with negative liberty; it is
also the ability to participate in the construction of an
ethical social order per the recognition that men are
"organically related to one another" (Dewey 232). Dewey's
"social organism" makes a sophisticated case for equality —
the elemental concept of democratic freedom.
Even though an ideological paradigm shift with real
thwart was already well underway, most scholars agree that
the Great Depression was the definitive signifier that the
antecedent liberal era was coming to a close (Tuner 41).
Economic catastrophe hit nearly every family, giving Dewey's
notion of the "social organism" — primarily the aspect that
well-being of the individual and of the whole mutually
affect one another — a resounding truth. Important reforms
have already been made prior to Roosevelt's New Deal 32, but
the most ambitious expansion of government action and
positive freedom can be comprehensively attributed to his
administration. He added two new freedoms — freedom from
want and freedom from fear — that he considered to have as
much importance as the other two freedoms he listed in his
famous Four Freedoms Speech: "freedom of speech" and "freedom
32 To give just one example, after immense union pressure, the Adamson Act of 1916 mandated the eight-hour work day for railroad workers and was upheld in Wilson Vs. New (see Wilson V. New 242 U.S. 332 1917 Justia: the US Supreme Court Center)
36
of religion". Freedom from want translated into a right to
an adequate standard of living, and "freedom from fear"
translated into a world-wide call for the reduction of
armaments (Roosevelt). Both necessitated government
intervention — exceedingly so in light of their historical
context — and to properly do so it needed to recruit
economic theories outside of classical economic liberalism's
model.
For the key economists who helped shape governmental
policy during the New Deal era, the problem with laissez-
faire was not so much an ethical or moral one but a
pragmatic one: classical economic liberalism, frankly, just
didn't work anymore (Turner 50). Rescuing capitalism from
its dire state mandated collective action, calling for the
dissolution of the state/society dichotomy and the invention
of demand-side economics. Keynesian economics, eponymously
named after its founder, suggested that severe downturns in
the business cycle could be adjusted for with fiscal policy
and intensive public investment to create jobs. His advice
was wholly taken by Roosevelt's administration (Jones 139).
The creation of the Bretton Woods International Monetary
System 33 was partially led by Keynes, and a profusion of
work programs were enacted in accordance with his theories.
33 Bretton Woods worked to manage world economies during times of peace by fixing the exchange rate via tying it to the U.S. dollar. It was abandoned in 1971 by Richard Nixon — henceforth the nation's currency became free-floating (Harvey 2007: 12)
37
Still, Keynes did step outside of purely pragmatic
concerns to advance criticisms against the philosophical
claims upon which the notions of natural liberty and
laissez-faire had been founded:
"Let us clear from the ground the metaphysical or general principles upon which, from time to time, laissez-faire has beenfounded. It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive 'natural liberty' in their economic activities.There is no 'compact' conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately" (Keynes 1926).
Karl Polanyi, who was an eminent economic historian, added
to this perspective, writing that the government
interventions taking place during the New Deal meant that
the economy was simply being put back in its traditional
place; in his assessment the economy was always politically
and socially administered. Upon the nearly ubiquitous
rejection of classical liberalism, progressive liberalism
came to be associated with the welfare state and is the
38
common definition of liberalism in the American political
lexicon today.
With such a lucid apperception of the complete
artificiality — viz. the constructivism of all economic,
social, and political apparatuses — there were no barriers
to designing and administering programs to build an ideal
citizenry that would be maximally conducive for the
realisation of liberal progressivism's aims. Statistical
devices originally utilized for the investigation of
macroeconomic phenomena — such as researching the
relationship between national wealth and population size,
taxation issues, etc., — were used to thoroughly penetrate
the microeconomic in order to efficiently deliver welfare
services (Rose 113). As the sociologist Nikolas Rose aptly
put it, the "social organism" was to be "gridded by
regulatory codes demanding, for example, the registration
and recording of births, marriages, illnesses, numbers and
causes of death, types of crime, and their geographical
location", etc. (Rose 113). Numbers empowered experts to
distinguish and classify a desirable level of normativity
and vet over what degrees of deviation were socially
detrimental. Those who fell into the latter category were
to become the target for intervention by philanthropists,
social workers, teachers, police, doctors, etc. Dewey's
"social organism", whose health depends on the health of
each part, corresponds to the rationale behind new
39
government objectives. Liberal progressivism reconciled
freedom and control by underscoring a democratic type of
freedom — the prerequisite of which is a foundation of
equality. Daniel Stedman Jones, a historian and barrister,
indicates that there is an odd logical congruence between
the New Deal idea that "political freedom was inadequate
without some economic security" and the "hollow" point made
many neoliberals that there cannot be any sort of political
freedom without economic freedom — a logic that can be
traced back to ancient Greece but is also in found in our
discussion of Lockean liberalism and classical liberalism34. And once again, albeit differently, individualism is
conciliated with collectivism; because practices of social
control through standards of hygiene, schooling, child-
rearing, etc are internalized by the individual and
exercised as forms of "self-control" 35.
2.5 Hayek's Freedom Fighters
The Phylogenesis of the Mont Pelerin Society to American Neoliberalism
34 Jones calls the neoliberal vindication of economic freedom "hollow" because "it was beyond so many people's reach" (Jones 333).35 Rose gives examples of how governmetalising social responsibilities was reflected in individual conduct, especially within the working family: proper hygienic practices were disseminated through public schools, the "female condition" was psychiatrised, and officials such ashealth visitors morally reprimanded those who did not internalise properprocedures (Rose 121-8).
40
"It may seem odd now, but I hesitated a while before deciding to call my book Human Capital...In the early days, many people were criticizing this term and the underlying analysis because they believed it treated people like slaves or machines. My, how the world has changed!"
— Gary S. Becker Human Capital
"Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality – an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order."
— F. A. Hayek The Road to Serfdom
Growing alongside liberal progressivism was the
incipience of a reactionary ideology, which came to be known
as neoliberalism. Ludwig von Mises directly attacked what
he imagined to be a dangerous and vast augmentation of state
bureaucracy. Both his essay Bureaucracy and Hayek's extremely
popular The Road to Serfdom — published contemporaneously in
1944 — expressed deep-seated fears of totalitarianism that
they believed was congenital to government planning; the
most harrowing case they cited was National Socialism 36.
Mises was more optimistic about America's ability to fend
off its more nefarious aspects because America was born free
from the constraints of "industrial codes or guilds";
rather, her spirit is substantiated in the venturous pioneer
(Mises 2007: 76). Even so, he saw the indelible emblem of
36 The similarity between the texts is far from coincidental. Hayek came to admire Mises upon their very first meeting and placed himself under his tutelage (Magrit von Mises 1976: 189)
41
Obrigkeirt (authority) written on all bureaucratic structures;
they all equally sought to usurp everyone's freedom through
the paternalistic management of more and more individual
affairs (Jones 271). Its even worse, not only do
bureaucrats — even with the best of intentions — corrode
one's freedom with compulsory programs and taxes, he adds
that they are also too absolutely enslaved by "rules and
regulations" to be able to find the best possible solution.
Yet, in a stroke of blatant inconsistency, Mises opines, in
their zealous efforts to serve the public, they use morally
and legally questionable techniques such as "pork barrel
spending" 37 and exploit loopholes in the law to make sure
no "scoundrel" escapes their grasp (Mises 2007: 62). For
Mises, competitiveness in the public sector by parties and
organisations lead to corrupt practices, bringing him to the
conclusion that democracy could only work in the private
sector, i.e. the market.
It isn't, however, the exclusive fault of the
individual bureaucrats; their 'ruthless' drive to enlarge
the jurisdiction of their authority was a symptom of an even
greater political thrust for expansion and a disregard for
the rule of law (Mises 2007: 7). The Rule of Law — heeds
Hayek, in unity with Mises — cannot survive in a planned 37 see (Jones 272). "Pork barrel spending" describes the somewhat furtive act of a congressional representative inserting funding for a project exclusively beneficial to their specific constituency — and thereby bolstering their own career — into a bill as a condition for their backing of a bill (Jones 1539).
42
society 38; but, Hayek adds, this does not mean the exercise
of government power will not be legal:
"It means the use of government's coercive powers will no longer be limited to pre-determined rules. The law can, andto make a central direction of economic activity possible must, legalize what to all intents and purposes remains arbitrary action. If the law says that such a board or authority may do what it pleases, anything that board or authority does is legal — but its actions are certainly not subject to the Rule of Law" (Hayek 2007: 119).
Hayek's and Mises' critiques were a public plea to
rescue "the free society" from the New Deal's threatening
transgression of classical liberal principles such as
individual freedom the rule of law, and the free market.
Hayek was quick to point out that Hilter's Kronjurist, Carl
Schmitt, vehemently impugned the rule of law in defense of
the emergency powers granted under Article 48 of the Weimar
Constitution that were used to substantiate the power of the
Nazi Reich in 1933 39. Subsequently, they were convinced
that all ideologies supporting government intervention for
the sake of the collective good inevitably led to erection
38 For both of them a planned society includes any society that attemptsto control the economy, especially through the practice of redistributive justice.39 Article 48 gave absolute emergency powers in the event of any emergency that gravely threatened public security. In fact, Schmitt wasalso critical of Article 48 because it enumerated the rights that could be suspended by emergency powers rather than giving limitless executive powers, which he deemed necessary for the strengthening of Nazi power against the Communist party (Schmitt 1985: xx)
43
of totalitarianism. Something had to be done, and there
were plenty of intellectuals sympathetic to businessmen
frustrated by the New Deal and communist paranoia engendered
in McCarthyism to give a new voice to liberalism (Jones 53).
Hayek was one of the leaders of a communal project to
reinvigorate classical liberal ideology 40. Their task was
to reformulate the core principles in order to adapt them to
new social and historical realities. A few years before the
publication of Mises' and Hayek's critical texts, similarly
concerned intellectuals gathered at the Colloque Walter
Lipmann in 1938, where ordoliberal 41 Alexander Rüstow
suggested the term 'neoliberal' as the name "for a movement
to revive market liberalism" 42. Shortly after the
publication of Milton Friedman's "Neoliberalism and its 40 The collaborative aspect was part of new strategy to not only rigorously work out a new ideology but also to build a larger network todisseminate their message (Mirowski 2008: 113).41 Ordoliberalism is a German variant of neoliberalism developed during the 1930s and 40s as a "third way" to the Keynesian welfare state, proposing instead the social market economy. Opposite to the simple, self-establishing market system of classical liberalism that functioned best with a weak state, ordoliberalism valued a strong state capable of securing competition and fortifying the market society. Etymologically,the prefix ordo arose from its proponents in the Frieburg School frequently publishing in the Journal Ordo (Brown 38). While "the independent ordoliberal line of neoliberal thought" has nearly vanished,some of their "discoveries" — such as the importance of institutions, economics and law — have continued to noticeably influence the Anglo-Saxon world (Mirowski 2009: 27-8).42 It was during this transitional phase from what Jones labels the first phase of neoliberalism (which was during the interwar period and marked by ordoliberalism and Lippman's book The Good Society) to its philosophical crystallisation in the second phase (which is set between the 1950s-80s during the zenith of Keynesian policies) that the term wascommonly used by those involved in the project (Jones 167).
44
Prospects" in 1951, the term dropped out of popular usage,
leaving it vulnerable to misuse (Mirowski 2008: 113). Even
though the word has ceased to be a self-consciously applied
label, it still has a "conceptual identity" that crucially
delineates the difference between it and older forms of
liberalism, making it an important tool for analysis and
diagnosing the present (Hall 2012: 9)
Writing on the prehistory of the Mont Pelerin Society43, Mirowski adumbrates their project as a dynamic
investigation and tense negotiation between "socialist
planning philosophies and classical laissez-faire
liberalism" and not a search "for timeless (essentialist)
content" (Mirowski 14-5). There were over a thousand
members in just the MPS; and while there is a general
agreement amongst their contributions, there are also
significant divergences 44. That being said,
neoliberalism's defining solution is an odd merging of the
notion of constructivism prevalent in "social planning
43 the most comprehensive neoliberal organisation established by Hayek, Mises and others in 195744 It would be incorrect and deficient to offer what I argue is their preeminent resolution, and thereby foundational principle to their specific ideology, without first qualifying it with the acknowledgement that there isn't a simple universal definition of the neoliberal ideology or the interpretation of its central principles. For example, Mises was more a "free market libertarian" because he did not believe — in contrast to many other neoliberal theorists and politicians — that market mechanisms could ever be the modus operandi of decidedly public tasks. Instead of applying market principles to operation of government, Mises asseverated that government simply had to be smaller (Jones 259-60).
45
philosophies" and a principal faith in market solutions and
values (private property, individual freedom and spontaneous
order) representative of the laissez-faire attitude in
classical liberalism. Combined, however, these acquired
concepts change. Reverence for the market is no longer
based on its alleged superiority in achieving the optimal
balance of exchange (recall the hypothetical example cited
earlier concerning the wheat surplus versus dearth); rather,
its superiority is due to its being the most efficient
discovery mechanism whereby competition finds the best
solutions. Competition, unlike the market in laissez-faire,
is not a "natural given"; it is, as the ordoliberals say, a
fragile framework that must be constructed by the state in
order to guarantee its success. With neoliberalism,
constructivism operates in the opposite direction; instead
of the government correcting for the perpetual market
downturns in the capitalist cycle through demand-drive
initiatives designed to equalise access to consumer goods
and disciplining the market through regulations, the
government must not correct for the negative effects of the
market. Government interventions must act lightly on the
economy and heavily on society to maximally enable the
mechanisms of competition (Foucault 1979: 142-146). Using
the work of ordoliberal Walter Eucken, Foucault describes
light economic interventions as incremental adjustments to
the discount rate, foreign trade credit balance, and
46
taxation with the aim of stabilising prices — but only for
the purpose of controlling inflation. Economic interventions
typical of Keynesianism — job creation, price control,
support for struggling sectors of the economy, public
investment, etc — are to be, ideally, completely avoided.
Heavy interventions operate on what ordoliberals call the
"framework", which are all those social factors that have
appreciable, yet indirect, impact on the economy — e.g., the
population, training and education, technology, and the
legal system (Foucault 1979: 157-8).
Foucault decidedly locates Hayek and Mises at the
juncture between German ordoliberalism and the American
brand of neoliberalism that came to maturation in the
Chicago School, whose most formative intellectuals were also
members of the MPS. Both schools of thought — the Chicago
School and the MPS — resolutely affirmed that the vitality
of the state and the market economy are mutually dependent
upon one another, ridding themselves of the classical
liberalist notion of the natural economy with the state
acting as a pure superstructure to be limited as much as
possible. For all that, where the two schools diverge is
crucial for the sake of avoiding an empty, grand theory of
neoliberalism. Sociologist Thomas Lemke offers a percipient
description of their key difference:
47
"Whereas the Ordo-liberals in West Germany pursued the idea ofgoverning society in the name of the economy, the US neo-liberals attempt to re-define the social sphere as a form of the economic domain. The model of rational-economic action serves as a principle for justifying and limiting governmentalaction, in which context government itself becomes a sort of enterprise whose task it is to universalize competition and invent market-shaped systems of action for individuals, groups, and institutions" (Lemke 7).
In other words, what came to define American neoliberalism
is that it applied the economic grid to every domain of life
with a thoroughgoing intensity. And, in spite of the acme
of its intellectual and political articulations being
reached awhile ago within the Chicago School and the Reagan
administration in the 80s, it remains as an ideological
miasma obstructing visions of new horizons. This is
precisely what is lamented in Fisher's Capitalist Realism: it is
not even possible to imagine an alternative to capitalism, and
when that system is represented through a neoliberal
ideology 45 — "the capitalist realists par excellence"— it
reaches a nihilistic level of ambivalence. Thence, not even
a profound ideological rupture, which vigorously exposes its
underlying contradictions and hypocrisies, is affecting
enough to move people beyond symbolic resistance.
It should be made clear that neoliberalism is not just
an academic term for American conservatism; in fact, its
most astute theorist, Hayek, made certain to let everyone
45 see (Fisher 2)
48
know that he is "not a conservative" in the postscript of
his seminal text The Constitution of Liberty (Hayek 397).
Neoliberalism does not die out with the election of a
democratic president; it is "a rationality that exceeds
particular positions on particular issues" (Brown 37). Such
a rationality has also seeped into the Obama administration;
his most recent proposal for higher education mimics the
same 'competitive' market strategy found in Bush's No Child
Left Behind 46. Without accounting for the initial
resources of institutions, Obama proposed a standardised
metric system that transforms federal financial aid into a
punitive instrument by attaching good or bad results to the
granting of more or less federal dollars. Such a proposal
could negatively affect the choice of less well-off
students, who are the most reliant upon federal financial
46 Signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002, NCLB continues to indirectly accelerate the privatisation of education via high-stakes standardised tests, creating a downward spiral for failing schools through punitive measures — for example, loosing funding for tutors. But, this disadvantage is glossed over with the heavily connotated neoliberal rhetoric of "being free to choose", which is indentified withconsumer choice, by its intellectual figureheads. If a student's assigned school is deemed too be "failing" according the new standards, his or her family can choose to place their child in charter school — anattractive option, considering that charter schools are "free from some of the rules, regulations, and statues that apply to other public schools" (National Education Association). A very recent study funded by the Walton Family Foundation found that charter schools received significantly less funding than public schools, and, therefore, have to rely more heavily on private donations (Layton 2013); the idea is that schools will be disciplined by market forces via cut-throat competition between other schools for resources and between individual families in the community shopping for the "best" school (Hursh 2007).
49
aid, and the autonomy of institutions (Slack). Under his
administration H.R. 347 was made stronger and more
enforceable (the law permits the arrest of anyone who
knowingly enters an area that is under the jurisdiction of
Secret Service protection) 47, and the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) is currently being drafted behind closed
doors. A leaked chapter of the TPP draft revealed that the
agreement would allow foreign corporations operating in the
United States to "appeal key regulations to an international
tribunal"; for instance, if the labour laws or environmental
sanctions make it difficult for a U.S. company to profitably
operate in a foreign country, it can sue the country's
government not only to recover the initial investment but
for the profits the company expected to earn as well
(Democracy Now).
By now the justificatory narratives are familiar ones:
the nation needs to take such measures to increase security
or stay competitive in the global market. Constitutional
rights are threatened by H.R. 347, and the rights of
citizens in other countries will come under serious attacks
from TPP (Democracy Now). David Harvey, a professor of
anthropology and geography, still attaches the undying
thrust and resuscitation of neoliberalism in spite of its
obvious failures — its need for subsequent bailouts,
diminishing profits, and environmental catastrophes — to the
47 see (Verheyden-Hilliard)
50
restoration and preservation of class power. But how much
more restoration does it need? Can that really be the main
reason for its unrelenting grip on our thought when we have
already reached the same level of inequality as arguably the
most unequal period in our history — i.e. the gilded age —
with the top ten percent of earners taking home 43.6 percent
of the wealth back then and 44.3 percent in the 2000s?
Wendy Brown attributes neoliberalism's recalcitrance to its
seditious government rationality that rids itself of any
kind of moral cogitations within its paradigm of economic
calculation. Consequently, she proceeds, the "Janus-face or
at least Janus-potential of liberal democracy" — which
"codes, reflects, and legitimates capitalist social
relations" while simultaneously offering an internal
critique of power via its principles — is nullified 48:
Brown is undoubtedly correct here but she gives only
cursory attention to how the neoliberal ideology creates a
subjectivity that internalises this duality. Many scholars
have brilliantly described the transformations of
subjectivity under liberal democracy but with only one set
of eyes at a time. Cultural anthropologist Illana Gershon
brilliantly shows how subjectivity is flattened even when
faced with a plurality of cultures because the otherness of
another culture can be deployed "to engage with the market 48 her "Janus-face" of liberal democracy functions in a strikingly analogous way to dual powers of freedom that we extracted from Nikolas Rose.
51
to their advantage" through the commodification of their
difference (Gershon 451). In his 1978-9 lectures and the
College de France, Foucault presents the heterogeneous
relationship of homo oeconomicus and homo juridicus. But,
Gary Becker's theory of a totally calculating homo
oeconomicus contorts the latter into a homogeneous
relationship with the former — although he does not exactly
say this 49. Becker divulges the simplifications and
reduction of subjectivities to conform with purely economic
motivations through his speculations on the motivations of
the criminal:
"I was not sympathetic to the assumption that criminals had radically different motivations from everyone else...Rationality implied that some individuals become criminals because of the financial rewards" (Becker 1996).
Our genealogy has shown that the two formulae of
freedom do not faithfully function as two Janus faces
looking away from one another, with one looking to the past
and another to the future. Conspicuous contradictions
within any governmental rationality are, for a time,
successfully conflated with the face of idealism, so that
the two heads are turned toward one another, confusing the
past and the future with the present. Pejorative sentiments49 Gary Becker is a American Economist who has received multiple rewards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 granted by George W. Bush (Hoover Institution).
52
about subjectivities interwoven with the cold calculation of
human capital are attenuated with ideas of self-ownership
and possibilities to 'make yourself'; there is a sense of
empowerment, since this concept rids the sense of alienation
in the capitalist mode of production (Foucault 1979 224).
Stereotyping individuals and groups with demographic
statistics are likewise also seen as an innovation to
improve endemic social problems. Private property rights
allow for profiteering while creating a 'refuge' from state
control. Or, as neoliberals like Hayek see it, private
property is a defensive against coercion, because, in
theory, if there are many owners of the means of production
— i.e. suppliers of goods and services — existing without
being centrally organised then one is free to produce, free
to take his labour anywhere he chooses, and free to consume
(Hayek 1960: 135-40). The etiolating of democratic rights,
as with H.R. 347, are furbished with new modes of democratic
expression, such as those enthusiastically put forth by
Ludwig Mises:
"The anonymous forces operating on the market are continuously determining anew who should be entrepreneur andwho should be capitalist. The consumers vote, as it were, for those who are to occupy the exalted positions in the setting of the nation's economic structure" (Mises 2007: 95).
53
This perpetual recycling of ideals that produce new
forms of control is at its core a problem of posing new
realities in political ideologies: freedom is constantly
used as an empty vassal that needs to be given substance by
new interpretations, programs, policies, etc by an
intellectual or elite class.
However, Sartre would say that, our artful invention
and reinvention of meanings — of organising the universe
into ever-changing ideologies, cosmologies, or
Weltanschauungen — are only the manifestations of our
freedom. Freedom is not a thing in the world; it does not
authentically exist as a "bouquet of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen" 50 from which an elite can determine who
deserves a rose and who does not, as if someone's life is
more necessary than another's, when all exists by sheer
contingency. All these fictions and scenarios arise from
the freedom that defines the very ontological structure of
our consciousness: "man does not exist first in order to be
free subsequently; there is no difference between the being of
man and his being-free" (Sartre 2003: 49). Once we stop
alienating our freedom by placing it within given systems of
ideas and practices — all those ideological pronunciations
that essentialise our nature, our psychology, our being and
give agnate formulae of power — we leave the sticky comfort
of irresponsibility begotten by externalising our freedom in
50 see (Sartre 2007: 90)
54
conceptual trappings and can face our metaphysical
condition.
3. An Anticoagulant for the Thrombotic Heart
Towards a Sartrean Critique of Liberalism
"Thus all serious thought is thickened by the world; it coagulates; it is a dismissal of human reality in favour of the world...It is obvious that the serious man at bottom is hiding from himself the consciousness of his freedom; he is in bad faithand his bad faith aims at presenting himself to his own eyes as consequence..."
— Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness
“I confused things with their names: that is belief.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre The Words
We can make new worlds because we are not as the
unconscious pen or computer; whose phenomena are presented
as utilizable essences that are put to our own ends. With
man, there is no such self-identity; he is not a "sum
formulae of qualities" 51, rather:
51 see (Sartre 1946). There are countless practices in modern life thatencourage people to see and express themselves as a person-thing with special attributes and qualities.
55
"man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature...Man simply is" (Sartre 1946)
Sartre's conclusion that existence precedes essence with the
being of man is arrived at from his ontology, which is quite
elaborate. Nevertheless, going over the basic points will
be enough for our critique and leave us with the fundamental
principle of what he judges to be the metaphysical condition
of man. Ontology is discerned from metaphysics by Sartre by
the special technical meanings he assigns to each; the
former deals with fundamental classifications and
descriptions of being, whereas the latter deals with the why
question — i.e. causal explanations and accounts of the
ultimate origins of being (Catalano 1974: 17). In his
ontology, he first deals with the problem of Cartesian
sceptical idealism 52 and adds to Descartes' cogito the pre-
reflective cogito. Consciousness is aware of a self at all
times, not just upon reflection where the self becomes an
ego; the true self for Sartre is pre-personal and indirectly
present in action. If consciousness was entirely
ontologically structured on the "I" or the ego, then we
would be utterly incapable of even partially receiving the 52 Briefly states, Descartes' cogito turns inwards to itself to questionthe existence of things in the world and one's own ideas, inferring thatthe only thing one can be sure of is his existence.
56
world objectively and perceive reality; the opacity of the
ego would prevent any sort of objectivity by enmeshing man
in pure subjective idealism. From Husserl, Sartre takes the
principle that we are always conscious of something to
support his own predication that consciousness is a concrete
nothingness — not in the sense of an absence but due to its
"nihilating" activity:
"As nothingness it is separated from the object by not beingthe object, and preserves a distance from it. Nevertheless,consciousness is nothing but consciousness-of-the-object andtherefore present to it. It is this that Sartre has in mindwhen he terms nothingness being-for-itself; consciousness isan awareness of being. The relation between consciousness and its object might be compared with that between a mirror and the objects which are reflected in it; the mirror has nocontent of its own, containing merely reflections before it,yet it is always separate and never merges with the object" (Greene 17)
Nothingness, as a negation, requires being and the being
through which being is "made-to-be" is man (Sartre 2003:
46). Nihilation is a process by which one places oneself
"outside of being", which the human does by imaging,
questioning, doubting, and by thinking objects (Anderson
28). Because man can thus detach himself from the world
through the nothingness he brings to it, he is free.
At the same time, negation implies a relationship to
being outside of man's pre-reflective cogito — being that is
57
not consciousness. In Sartre's ontology, opposed to the for-
itself (more or less identified with man's consciousness) is
the in-itself which includes all the objects in the world
one is conscious of; the in-itself is full, in unity of
itself, self-identical, and positive. Figuratively
speaking, the in-itself is solid and the for-itself is
liquid. Now, human reality comprises both in relation to
each other, as hinted at earlier, being (now understood as
being-in-itself) is the precondition of negation. Being-in-
itself is our facticity, the givens of ourselves and our
environment: the pens, the desk, the language we communicate
with, our past actions, our race, class, physical
constitution, etc. Conversely, being-for-itself is our
transcendence: the mode of being that assigns meanings and
purposes to my facticity in light of my project.
Objectively, the pen has the quality of releasing a
controlled amount of ink onto a surface, its ink is black.
And while the pen's blackness and power to deposit ink on
paper are objective aspects on its being, they are the
outcomes of the subjective activities of the for-itself.
Since the for-itself is negation, it can comprehend cause
and effect. My past praxis with these materials informs me
of the possibility of it making a mark on a paper, and in
order make a mark I need to nihilate their present state of
inertia on the table (Sartre 2003: 122-5).
58
When we try to escape our freedom and the anguish it
brings — the anguish of having to create meaning for oneself
through one's project — we try to substitute our
transcendence with facticity and vice versa. Instead of
authentically coordinating them into a project by which one
aims to surmount them in a synthesis 53, we mistakenly
abdicate our project to only identify these two categories,
that is, we simply relate them with a prefabricated
experience. This is what Sartre calls being in bad faith.
To demonstrate this concept in a way relevant our
question of freedom in liberal ideologies, bad faith can be
explained in the following manner: one is in a state of bad
faith when one adopts the language of an ideology as the
objective truth of their situation, as describing their
proper place in its social ordering, as being wholly
determined by it, and so capitulates on their guiding their
actions — one's transcendence — in any other way than one
that would concur and be one with that ideology, to force it
be necessary — Amen 54. A good American citizen pays her
taxes, respects property rights, votes every two years
(maybe more if she is particularly active in local
politics), enjoys freedom and equality with her fellow 53 e.g. I see this blank paper and pen, project a drawing or some poetry, and take actions to bring it into being54 in reference to Althusser's characterisation of ideology; one of its facets being "the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognise what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen — 'So be it' " (Althusser 87).
59
citizens as they are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and
accepts these very circumstances as her rights and duties
and her limitations for political action. Contrarily,
Sartre professes that all these rights and duties "refer to
the transcendent" 55, and to fuse their factual content to
them makes great inferences that ignore different histories
and societies. We have seen how idealised petitions for
freedom in the form of natural rights, economic, and socio-
political rights — deduced from various philosophical tracts
on human nature or psychological theories — have been
decisive in challenging institutions that were
superincumbent on the idealistic ideologies of the
dissenters. Once these new formulations became
institutionalised, however, their abstract possibilities are
concretised within their ideology, affirming what is as the
natural order. The transcendent principles of freedom and
equality become facticity — rights, rules, and regulations —
and our good citizen, with prudence and a spirit of
seriousness, confounds the ideal with the present real. If
she finds it necessary to mould her transcendence in
accordance with them, despite the requirements of a new
situation, then she acts in an in apoplectic fit of bad
faith.
55 this is his critical response to the famous example he gives of bad faith involving the cafe waiter, but the abstract content of his conduct that characterises it as Bad Faith fits the schema of treating one's facticity as transcendence and vice versa (Sartre 2003: 82-3).
60
Yet, bad faith is metastable. It can slide into good
faith and vice versa; neither are permanent conditions. Man
can be in bad faith and leave it just the same because of
his ontological structure: "the origin of this risk is the
fact that the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to
be what it is not and not to be what it is" (Sartre 2003:
94). Bad faith, then, in no way resembles Engel's notion of
false consciousness 56. For Sartre man is consciousness — he
rejects Freud's notion of the unconscious — and a degree of
self-awareness is ceaselessly present in his life (Sartre
2003: 73). The structure of bad faith is analogous to that
of a lie (except it is one that we tell to ourselves) and is
composed of the following components arranged in the stated
order:
"First, one must believe something to be true. Second, one must express to another the opposite of what is believed. Third, for a lie to succeed, the other must believe in the statement expressed" (Catalano 1974: 79).
Joseph S. Catalano further expounded on bad faith in a
separate essay informatively entitled "Good and Bad Faith:
Weak and Strong Notions"; and, as the title suggests, this
lie we tell ourselves can be one lived in thought and action
(strong) or confined mostly to the latter (weak). In a weak
state of bad faith, one does not identify with pre-given
values and social roles but resigns herself to them 56 see "false consciousness" (Marxist Internet Archive)
61
(Catalano 1997: 125). Someone who is a in a strong sense of
bad faith believes in the correctness of a certain order
based on very little evidence.
The ideologies we have discussed have all been built
from philosophical or theoretical assumptions concerning
human motivation, psychological propensities, social
ontology, or rationality. To unquestioningly believe in any
one of them would be a mark of bad faith; because, as Greene
succinctly puts Sartre's reasoning, "human consciousness is
nothingness, it cannot contain its own motives, and since it
acts by negation, it cannot be determined by any exterior
influence"; and he continues, "thus arises the necessity for
man to choose freely his own motivations..." (Greene 170).
4. Left with a Choice
Conclusion
"...man finds himself in an organised situation in which he is himself involved: his choice involves mankind in its entirety, and he cannot avoid choosing."
— Jean-Paul Sartre Existentialism is a Humanism
America is still in the throes of neoliberalism and has
failed to assuage its overt rapaciousness that socialises
62
the private risks of the rich and leaves the rest of the
population with the bill. Mary Hawkesworth, a distinguished
professor of Political Science and Gender Studies, wrote in
2008 that the United States is far from entering any sort of
"post-neoliberal" stage, which is defined by the use of
"progressive policy alternatives" to compensate for social
contradictions and malaise produced by a state vigorously
pursuing the freedom of capital rather than the freedom of
it's people (Hawkesworth 182). With its ideology out in the
open, our individual submission to it is a matter of weak
bad faith. Occupy Wall Street was a mass recognition of the
hollowness of neoliberal freedom, and it is within this
paradigm more than any other that freedom has been made into
a thing. Homo oeconomicus is a subject whose relationship
to freedom is expressed and measured by his ability to
"adjust himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of
the social process and obeying the orders of a superior",
says Hayek, and "man in a complex society can have no
[other] choice" (Hayek 1972: 24). Homo juridicus' relation
to the law is not one of judgement and interpretation but of
scientific application; it questions not its own values and
methods so much as it is strictly concerned with correctly
applying the code. Louiza Odysseos — a lecturer in
International Relations — critiques the legal structure of
human rights as purely being a means to govern in the most
63
economically efficient way possible: "to put it cynically,
it says let them eat rights!" (Odysseos 764).
After sampling the various 'gifts' of freedom offered,
arrested, and deferred by the liberal ideologies, after
attending to each rose in the bouquet to behold the beauty
of its image and feel the pain of its thorns, there is
little room left for ideological mystification. As the
convulsions of violence continue to shake and rupture the
ground of neoliberal ideology, Sartre would argue that our
freedom to think will only grow stronger. He leaves us,
then, with a choice: one of which leads into living in bad
faith and the other in good faith; the former is our pre-
reflective choice, and is therefore foundation of the other.
The first comes naturally to us, it seeks to tuck away the
vertiginous burden of our absolute and spontaneous freedom
by delivering it to the stability of facticity, to ready-
made values and an ego cemented in contented conformity.
One needs to struggle to sustain a pure reflection that
recognises the self not as an ens causa sui — in this case a
self-caused ego — but as a contentless web of actions 57,
totally free and immersed in a world without any true
underlying meaning. Only then can we stop the futility of
57 In Sartre's terminology, an action is always intentional: "The careless smoker who has through negligence caused the explosion of a powder magazine has not acted." To act is to be aware of what one is doing; for instance, the engineer who accepts the project of designing anew missile as his task has acted, even if he may have done so begrudgingly (Sartre 2003: 455).
64
trying to make freedom be and mould mankind into a one-
dimensional subjectivity. Once we can let the security of a
pre-ordered universe go, we can start a new project that
recognises what men have in common is not their natures,
desires, or rational dispositions, but their metaphysical
condition: we are all condemned to the necessity of being
finite — to labour and die here 58. These are the only
objective realities we encounter and are not free to
moderate. We need a new philosophical ground for our civil
liberties if they are to have any meaningful relationship to
the simple truth of our freedom and the metaphysical ground
that is common to us all. This cannot be accomplished here,
but an aperçu can be given. Our metaphysical condition, or
human condition if one prefers, would be the ground of
humanity's project, something to be intended at the start of
our actions, while also respecting that each man is a
totality unto him/herself. It would navigate individual
difference and the common needs we have as humans all at
once without subsuming one into the other.
58 see (Sartre 1988: 260) and (Sartre 1946)
65
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