Postliberalism: A very quick response to Lucien Chardon
(Spoiler: he gets it in the same way that my Methodist, TeaTotal Gran 'got' the Newcastle Quayside on New Year's Eve, which is to say ....)
This essay by Lucien Chardon is profoundly misconceived — or at least it is rooted in an anthropology of cynical individualism and rational duplicity (as indicated by his Balzac nom de guerre). I may try and find time to address it more thoroughly. However the following immediately comes to mind.
Description not prescription
Postliberalism is a description before it is a prescription. There is a sort of category error going on. My own take on it owes as much to EF Schumacher as to Macintyre. The vision of endlessly mobile, billiard ball individuals, acting out a kind of Brownian motion has reached the end of the road not because of a political project but because of:
(a) ecological limits to growth: It just requires to much energy to sustain this level of complexity…with all the balancing and juggling outsourced to the State and the Market; and
(b) the social limits to growth — it has proved profoundly destructive of family, community, marriage and all of the social capital that (i) makes life meaningful and worth living and (ii) alleviates the economic costs of doing the business of social and community care. It costs nothing for a dutiful son or daughter to wipe granny’s arse; it costs the state about 10k per person per week.
It costs nothing for a dutiful son or daughter to wipe granny’s arse; it costs the state about 10k per person per week.
Postliberalism is a sociological proposition more than a political strategy — at least in the first instance. It’s way too early to gauge its long-term influence as a political movement or ideology. The “post liberals” have been astute and mostly correct about the terminal crisis of liberalism — the healthy, self-regulating market society of individuals sustained by a moderate but effective (nation) state. Whether we end up with something that looks like distributism (as per E.F. Schumacher/Illich — my preference) or the nightmare trans humanist machine (as per
or ), or just some big bloody war, or a chronic state of sectarian civil war (as per David Betz on ) — is a second order question. Liberalism — and certainly the slightly smug market individualism that seems to underpin this piece — is screwed as far as I can see. Post-liberalism is dead. Long live post-liberalism.Lucien Chardon doesn’t think society is in crisis. He doesn’t recognize the ecological crisis — which is a shame because it is real, even for conservatives. He doesn’t recognize the social crisis — which is weird because ANYONE with children recognizes that everything is not going well. He doesn’t recognize the economic crisis — because economic liberals just don’t see any exogenous constraint. But the crisis is real — and driven mainly by the end of low cost energy. If you want to scare yourself but don’t have the stomach for The Silence of the Lambs or the new Disney Snow White, then try Tim Morgan’s Surplus Energy Economics. The economic crisis is real. I suspect he also doesn’t lose as much sleep as he should over the demographic crisis. That is also an existential risk — just ask Paul Morland. And then there is the immigration crisis — and the threat of civil war (which everyone now is talking about thanks to
) Anyway, if you don’t see either the shit or the fan— let alone any spatial-temporal shit-fan convergence — then it’s clearly impossible to see liberalism as anything other than the best of all possible worlds and certainly the best on offer. Perhaps, it was —once. But now it’s not. And just yelling ‘warning: socialism!’ isn’t going to change that. This doesn’t mean than JS Mill and Hayek were both mistaken and that socialism is suddenly going to work. Clearly it is not. It is perhaps closer to the truth to say that socialism and liberalism emerged as siblings and may also exit stage left together.Calling Macintyre a Marxist is just a meaningless cheap shot. It would be like discrediting me as a Catholic because I used to hang out at Castle Donnington, loved AC/DC and didn’t grow up until I was 36. He admits it: “I also accept that Macintyre’s Marxist past does not in itself prove post-liberalism’s socialist intellectual heritage” — in which case we can wipe the first 10 pages, and all the blather about Althusser. It just has little bearing on the way Macintyre has been received and used, and almost none on the wider postliberal movement.
Although nodding to Balzac’s Illusions perdues, the author avoids actually dealing with the arguments in Dependent Rational Animals — the text in which Macintyre most effectively demolishes the anthropological priors — illusions — of the kind of Ayn Rand libertarianism that underlays his critique. Human beings are born into and depend upon relationships. The approximation of sovereignty and autonomy that animated the liberal imaginary from the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, through Kant to Mill and even Ayn Rand — all depended entirely on an unprecedented throughput of energy funding social complexity and a massive expansion of the social division of labour. This is the illusion that Macintyre dispels and to which Lucien Chardon clings.
The approximation of sovereignty and autonomy that animated the liberal imaginary from the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, through Kant to Mill and even Ayn Rand — all depended entirely on an unprecedented throughput of energy funding social complexity and a massive expansion of the social division of labour. This is the illusion that Macintyre dispels and to which Lucien Chardon clings.
On Polanyi versus Macfarlane — their theses are not nearly as incompatible as he (and Macfarlane) thinks. Certainly The Great Transformation was rhetorical in places. But actually, this is not an either /or. Yes medieval society was more individualist and eccentric and dynamic than the kind of Durkheimian vision of ‘mechanical solidarity’ or the heavy-handed undergraduate rendering of Tonnies ‘Gemeinschaft’ might suggest. Eoman Duffy’s detailed evocation of society just before the Reformation very much brings this to life. But there IS a massive difference between even the most dynamic early modern town and any truly modern, Internet-age city. There was a ‘Great Transformation’ and it does need explaining — and on this point, all the classical explanations — Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Tonnies, Karl Polanyi, Norbert Elias — concur. It’s also true that the broad parameters of a systemic shift (‘modernization’) also find simultaneous expression across a large swathe of 20th and 21st century commentaries that come from all sorts of traditions. These include: interiorization and declining psycho-affective participation (Owen Barfield); hyper-mobility (Zigmunt Bauman); the relative autonomy of the unconscious (Freud); therapeutic culture (Phillip Rieff); sexual revolution and the collapse of marriage (Morse; Perry); narcissism (Lasch); the collapse of community and social capital (Nisbet; Putnam) — and most recently commentators such as Seligman (from ritual to sincerity) and McGilhrist (from right to left-brain domination). The literature of modern commentary is pretty much screaming — “Something happened; What the f*** happened? What changed? Can we stay still: Can we go back? Can we go forward?”
The literature of modern commentary is pretty much screaming — “Something happened; What teh fuck happened? What changed? Can we stay still: Can we go back? Can we go forward?”
The idea that nothing really changed is just preposterous. It’s also true that just because the transformation was much longer and more drawn out (as per Macfarlane) doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. The kind of embedded culture and economy described by Malinowski, Firth, Evans-Pritchard, Levy-Bruhl — and captured in Polanyi’s later anthropological writing (e.g. the 1968 essays edited by Dalton) — is relatively universal in small scale face-to-face societies. This means all hunter-gatherers, but also horticulturalists, tribal agrarian societies and the rural life of many feudal states. The idea that:
“.. at least in some sense, the yeoman farmer would have recognized himself in the twentieth-century City stockbroker, and that the mediaeval wool merchant would have felt at home in Victorian Manchester”
is really pretty dubious. The caveat ‘at least in some sense’ is doing a great deal of work. ‘In some sense’ a Pleistocene mammoth hunter would have recognized himself in the truck-driving, camo-wearing, iPhone-app dependent, bow-hunter going after white tail deer in Wyoming; or in an old gaffer after rabbits with a ferret in a hedged-green lane in Devon. But I suspect the differences would be rather overwhelming. And nothing would have prepared the yeoman or the wool merchant for the atavistic, passive and pathological individualism of a contemporary Japanese ‘hikikomori’ (bedroom-bound, internet-crazy lost generation) or the angry incel movement. How could it?
This doesn’t it mean that Macfarlane’s criticisms of Marx, or even of the more heavy-handed renderings of Polanyi thesis are misplaced. It’s basically a matter of degree. But Chardon is an ideologue and doesn’t do nuance — or actually evidence. Referring to the kind of Hobbit-like, embedded forms of political economy posited by Polanyi, he says:
Whether or not such people existed elsewhere is question for another time (though even outside of Europe, there seems to be strong evidence that most peasants were in fact far closer to homo economicus than post-liberals would like to imagine).
This is simply not true. It is not as simple as that. I would be the first person to flag up the shortcomings of much social anthropology. The idea that human beings approximate, in their natural state, to some kind of Rousseauian Noble Savage — is a wild figment of the Randian liberal imagination. It is just nonsense. It took a vast amount of energy and complexity to produce a society in which an average human being could cultivate any real sense of themselves as a Robinson Crusoe-like individual with interests and a rational capacity to self-actualize. Apart from anything, it takes an extended division of labour simply to produce the distinct roles and occupations through which individuals could start to coalesce a sense of personal worth, capacity, sensibility and destiny that was truly different.
Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy provided mountains of empirical and experimental evidence (using data from experiments conducted by Alexandria Luria) on the way that literacy shapes cognition, and changes peoples brains. This concurs with Norbert Elias’s work on process of civilization in transforming personality. Average personalities and brains change between more and less complex societies. The 20th century literate mobile individual could not have been produced by a pre-modern farming society. Neither the Yeoman nor the Wool merchant could have asked or understood the questions ‘Who am I? What could/should/might I become"?’ with anything like the poignant openness that now afflicts pretty well every teenager on the planet.
Economic transactions in the sense hallowed by Chardon are certainly, in some degree, as old as humanity. There is evidence of red ochre moving hundreds of miles in Stone Age Africa, passed/traded hand to hand between contiguous family groups of nearly-sapiens hominids. But the existence of trade and exchange is perfectly compatible with a much more muted sense of the ‘I’ embedded in a deep and encompassing we-identity.
I don’t have time to elaborate here — but all the receipts and delineations of the literature are in many of the other essays on my Substack and I’m happy to take it further if pressed. But I would point out that Chardon presents no evidence at all for his assertions. There isn’t a single reference other than Macfarlane.
Prescription
In term of the historiography, Macintyre was NOT the first and even necessarily the most important intellectual way-marker. John Gray for one would be very miffed at that idea. But Gray is much less of an advocate. He is pointing to the internal contradictions of the liberal order and suggesting that it is collapsing under its own weight. As indicated above — the term postliberalism is diagnostic as much as prescriptive and draws not only on philosophy, but sociologies of modernity, cultural critiques of consumer society and psychological studies.
If it has one, the locus originalis of postliberalism is at the end of the 19th century, in the belated attempts by the Catholic Church to address polarizing politics and political economy of capitalism. Specifically, it emerges from the attempt by Pope Leo XIII to articulate a middle of third way that was orthogonal to the extremities of both left and right. Significantly, the latter we both construed as heretical and unbalanced approaches to the human condition stressing alternately freedom/egalitarianism, individual self-actualization/collective responsibility etc. Probably the first person to articulate a modern conception of social justice which captures this orthogonal response to capitalism and the attempt to imagine a different kind of modernity is Luigi Tapareli. It was Tapareli who laid the foundation for modern Catholic teaching on subsidiarity, and the insistence on the indissoluble autonomy of different scales and orders of association between the individual and the state, and the priority that should be accorded to lower levels of integration wherever possible.
The orthogonal nature of this critique and prescription means that it is generally not understood nor even recognized by those stuck in the two dimensional world of left —versus —right. Always evoking, albeit implicitly, an Ayn Rand world of bleak, heroic individuals struggling against the mindless machine-like collectivism of the state, right wing liberals such as Chardon fail to think beyond the dichotomy of Market and State. Their internal mantra is something like:
‘If it’s not Market, it must be State; and therefore Polanyi is a Socialist; and therefore Macintyre is a socialist; and therefore postliberalism is socialism.'
Polanyi was a (reluctant) socialist — or rather a social democrat. There is no doubt about that. But that is partly because he wrongly assumed that the embedded economic institutions he described in this later economic anthropology had no bearing on the modern world. Unwilling or unable to draw upon or take seriously the distributist political economy sketched by Chesterton, Belloc, Penty and others — which overlapped with aspects of Morrisonian/English socialism, Polanyi was indeed left with the dull bureaucratic ‘left hand of the state’ (to use Bourdieu’s phrase). The “countervailing movement for societal protection” against the destructive incursions of Market Society could only be conceived in terms of the State. However, the State and the Market are really two sides of the same coin. They both depend upon and are different ways of aggregating the agency of pulverized individuals ripped out of their natural communities. It is much better to think of that ‘great transformation’ that we call modernisation as the tandem emergence of the State-Market AGAINST Livelihood — the domain of embedded networked reciprocation, families, communities. As I have outlined in several essays —
Can our humanity survive the circular economy?: On edible insects, lab-grown meat and 'going green'
— the whole point of that orthogonal rejection of both corporate capitalism and state socialism that goes under the unwieldy moniker of ‘distributism’ is that there are more agents at play than simply the state, the individual and the firm. Macfarlane is right to say that the nuclear family has been much more embedded in English culture than has often been thought (Zimmerman [2008] got there first). In this he concurs with much modern scholarship that concludes that monogamy (more or less) has been the default and natural pattern for human beings for 2 million years (see Tucker 2014).
Ok…but this doesn’t vindicate the Adam Smith fantasy of individualism. For starters, these are families and not individuals. But more than that, families operate in networks and place-bound communities. And in the medieval period there were myriad organizations and associations that played an incredibly important role in mediating economic and social life. These included Friendly Societies, guilds — regulating the training and operation of skilled trades — religious associations involved in all kind of devotions, alms, public works, miracle plays and so on. A glimpse of this associational texture can be found still in the organization of allotment societies or the Lewes bonfire clubs in Brighton.
In his brief, implied two dimensional critique of socialism Chardon elides collectivism at the level of the state, with communitarianism at the level of families and communities. He conflates external regulation by ‘the powers’ with internal regulation as a response to childhood formation, socialization and catechism. And he inverts the central principle of all distributist/postliberal visions which centre on subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is pragmatic in the sene that it recognizes the need for bureaucratic state organizations at different levels, and even some supranational forms of coordination. Catholic Social Teaching starts from a cognizance of sin and the overwhelming likelihood that human institutions will be corrupted in big and small ways; and because of this, its practice centres on mechanisms for reducing, mitigating and dealing with these inevitable lapses. Catholic postliberalism, likewise, is not utopian. The possibility of an actual New Jerusalem created by human beings in this life is explicitly ruled out. Instead, with a pragmatic focus on trade-offs, postliberal political economy is about maximizing the opportunities for individuals and communities to thrive, whilst minimizing the damage wrought by corruption. Most of the time, where possible, this means devolving power and authority down to lower level institutions, not least the family.
Subsidiarity is not a recipe for perfection but it does address many problems. For instance, a welfare system that tips the balance back to active participation by all healthy adults and children will be less dependent on tax-transfers from a growing economy, less vulnerable to economic crisis — but also on the kind of economic growth that is in tension with ecological integrity. So postliberalism has a repertoire of overlapping answers to problems that Neo-liberals refuse to see, let alone address.
In short, with regard to this kind of (neo)liberalism, the historiography is wrong, the history is wrong, the anthropology is wrong, the economics is wrong, and the ecology is wrong — but most of all the argument is misplaced. This is an exercise in shadow boxing. If you don’t recognize any of the problems that animate the post liberals, clearly this orientation towards change or reform is not going to be appealing. If you think the ship of state is in good repair, then anyone seeking radically to rock the boat is not going to be on your dinner party list.
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