Laurence Fox & the little spheres

Aristotle's idea of the magnanimous, or great-souled, man is not an easy one to accept ("the great-souled man is justified in despising other people"). One aspect of his concept of magnanimity that is easier to relate to is that a great-souled man is willing to stand on the truth. Aristotle thought that such a man would "care more for the truth than for what people will think; and speak and act openly".

I very much admire the English actor Laurence Fox for being magnanimous in this sense - even though I disagree with his classical liberal politics. Fox recently posted his basic political principle on social media and it is simply the classical liberal understanding of individual freedom:

In such a view, every individual is free to act within their own little sphere, but not to encroach upon anyone else's sphere. The government exists to uphold and police the non-encroachment of our little spheres which is expressed in the language of individual rights.

I do not think this is an adequate way to conceive of freedom or politics. It is a framework that has signally failed to uphold the strength, vitality and integrity of the Western nations which have adopted it.

One reason for this is that if your focus is on each person doing whatever they see fit within their own little sphere, then you have already ceded much ground when it comes to upholding the rational, moral or rightly ordered ends of human life. You have already committed to "whatever they see fit" as the umbrella understanding, so it becomes difficult not to fall into neutrality when it comes to the choices people make. 

Fox himself illustrates this difficulty. He wishes in his social media post to make an argument against the trans movement and against the prescription of drugs for ADHD. But the best he can do is to argue against the use of ADHD drugs or trans surgery on children. He cannot take a principled stance when it comes to these issues in general:

Note that he feels compelled to underscore his general neutrality: "I've got nothing against adults dosing themselves with drugs. Or even removing their reproductive organs, should they so wish". He adopts this neutral position even though he believes that such outcomes are sad.

I do not think you can uphold a society over time on this basis. We should have at least something against people acting in ways that lead to sad outcomes.

If the focus is on each person doing whatever they see fit within their own little sphere, then much ground has been conceded when it comes to how we view the telos - the ends or purposes - of human life. If we were confident that there are distinctive, knowable and objectively existing ends of human life, then it would be irrational and uncaring to suggest that individuals should just do "whatever". Once we go with "whatever" we are leaning toward a telos that is self-defined and subjectively grounded.

For this reason, I don't think that Laurence Fox is on firm ground in taking a stand against the trans movement. If how we realise ourselves is determined subjectively and self-defined, then there does not seem to be a deeply principled way to argue against a man identifying as a woman. Such a man, after all, is "free" to do or to be "whatever" he chooses - that is, if we frame society along the lines that Laurence Fox himself sets out. 

The magnanimous Laurence Fox

On top of all this, there is another very radical consequence of seeing politics in terms of little individual spheres. In one stroke, an essential aspect of the human good is lost. There is no longer a larger circle, a body of people, that we belong to and have a duty to take care of. It is no longer factored in and disappears from view. There are only those little individual spheres.

I think it's helpful if we think about this in terms of bodies. We as individuals have a body. In this sense we are embodied souls. The two aspects of who we are should not be thought of as entirely discrete, not in this life anyway. Our physical body is not just an accidental feature of our self. It is not simply a machine for carrying around our mind. It is an integral part of who we are as a created being. Not only is our own good tied up with the health of our body, but our body is expressive of who we are and of our identity and purposes in this life. 

There is another body that we are a member of. This is the communal body of which we are a part, to which we belong, and through which we transmit across time the supra-individual aspects of our existence, such as our ancestry, our culture, our language, our religion, our manners and mores, and other key aspects of our own distinct tradition. 

And just as our own physical body carries meaning, so too does this communal body. It becomes a unique expression of the human soul in its own right, and as such is a transcendent good that inspires in its members a love of people and place. It is the body through which the individual participates in a much larger tradition that extends through time and place and that has continuity across the generations. And it is the body which contributes importantly to a sense of identity and belonging, that draws out our social commitments, and through which the individual expresses his or her social nature. 

Even in the early modern period, the existence of this body was acknowledged and defended. Descartes wrote:

though each of us is a person distinct from others...we ought still to think that none of us could subsist alone and that each one of us is really one of the many parts of the universe, and more particularly a part of the earth, the state, the society and the family to which we belong by our domicile, our oath of allegiance and our birth.

He is urging that we not just think in terms of our own little individual spheres, but that we recognise the larger spheres of which we are a part.

The idea is put even more forcibly by Francis Bacon in the early 1600s: 

he argues that there "is formed in every thing a double nature of good": "the one, as every thing is a total or substantive in itself": the other, "as it is a part or member of a greater body".

Put differently, there are two kinds of goods found in material nature: the one, goodness per se, or any given objects intrinsic value; the other, goodness insofar as it belongs, and thus contributes to, a collective reality greater than itself.

The appetite for self-preservation corresponds naturally to the safeguarding of a material body's essential goodness, whereas the appetite of union facilitates a basic level of material conjunction for the purposes both of self-preservation and the greater good.

For Francis Bacon there is a double nature of good. There is a good that pertains to the solitary individual. But there is also a goodness that relates to our membership of a greater body, including our contributions toward sustaining it. 

But how can we contribute to something that has been removed from the very design of human life? If there are only those small spheres that we are to stay within, and if goodness is represented by our choosing to do or to be "whatever" without regard to anything else, and by our committing not ever to extend beyond our own little sphere or even to think beyond it in terms of the good, then the larger body will remain undefended and, being subject to attack and to decay, will expire.

Prager's troubling thought

Dennis Prager is an American classical liberal. He decided recently that he would read Betty Friedan's influential feminist work, The Feminine Mystique (1963).

In this book Friedan claimed that American women were unhappy with their lives as mothers and housewives. As you might expect of a classical liberal, Prager is sympathetic to Friedan's message. Most liberals base their politics around the idea of autonomy, in which individuals are supposed to be "liberated" from predetermined qualities and roles, like those relating to our sex. And so Prager likes the way that most women now put their primary focus on a "self-determining" career role rather than "predetermined" roles relating to motherhood and family.

So far, so predictable. However, I have to give some credit to Prager for what happens next. Prager notes that things have moved exactly the way that Friedan wanted them to:

But a big and troubling thought hit me while reading the book. In the 56 years since "The Feminine Mystique" was published, every complaint Friedan made regarding the situation of the American woman has been addressed.

So women should be happy now, right? Prager is honest enough to admit that they are not happy. Far from it:

Yet, if you were to listen to many American women today, you would think nothing has improved. Every women's group and millions of individual women say women are "oppressed" despite the fact that virtually nothing remains of the "feminine mystique" described by Friedan.

Prager is aware of the anxiety and depression epidemic among women:

In fact, women today, including young women, who lead lives the very opposite of those described in "The Feminine Mystique," are about twice as likely to be depressed as men. And that statistic is true for women across all economic, racial and ethnic groups.

So if society is progressing along liberal lines, but there is no improvement in happiness, what is a liberal to do? Again, I have to give Prager some credit for his response. Prager does something unusual for a liberal. He abandons blank slatism and wonders if there is not something within female nature that might cause women to be malcontent regardless of their social situation. If this is true, then women need to overcome an aspect of their own nature in order to develop into successful adulthood.

Here is how Prager defends his idea that women might more easily than men, as a part of their nature, fall into being malcontent:

This is no more an attack on women than describing men's nature as aggressive is an attack on men. Each sex has built-in issues that an individual has to overcome in order to develop into a mature and good person. Men have to deal with aggression and the sexual predatory aspect of male nature in order to develop into mature and good men. Women have to overcome the power of their emotions and their chronic malcontentedness in order to mature into good women. But in our disordered society — a society that has rejected wisdom — in raising their children, two generations of Americans have told only their sons, not their daughters, that they had to fight their nature. The feminization of society has brought with it the destructive notion that only males have to suppress their nature. Feminists really believe females are superior, so why would women have to fight any aspect of their inherently beautiful nature?

I disagree with Prager on most things, but this is exceptionally well put. The only thing he leaves out is the reason why generations of women have been told that they don't need to regulate aspects of their nature. It's not just that female nature has been held to be superior to male nature. It's also a consequence of liberalism itself. If what matters is that I am autonomous, then I should be free to self-determine who I am and what I do, which means that I should not be limited by any ideas about an inborn nature, and which also means that I should be free to act on my own desires, no matter what they are, unless this interferes directly with others doing the same. That has been the logic of Western culture for some time.

It's great that Prager, as a liberal, has stepped back from this. In a sense, Prager is now setting objective standards, standards that represent an ordered personhood, standards that demonstrate both goodness and maturity. A community needs to do this, and to get as close as possible to the truth of this, if it wants to flourish.

The next step for Prager would be to consider not only the flaws within female nature to be overcome, but also the positive aspects of female nature that connect a woman to a higher, meaningful good that she can embody in her life and that she might therefore seek to cultivate.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

It goes back some way

Liberalism has dominated the English speaking countries for quite some time. I came across an interesting example of this from the Spectator magazine in 1935. This magazine has been mostly linked to the British Conservatives, but in the following excerpt the liberalism can be easily recognised.

The excerpt is from a reply to a speech by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling had argued in this speech "An Undefended Island" that something of the fighting spirit of the English had been lost due to the loss of a certain type of man in the Great War and that there was a risk that powers like Germany and Russia would rise in strength whilst the English remained complacent.

The Spectator writer argued in response that pacifism was in line with British values:

These questions may plausibly be put, but only if those who ask them are prepared to say what ideals, other than that of peace, but in accordance with traditional British virtues, are preferable...The more closely we examine the question the more we shall find that the qualities which we prize as being characteristically British cannot readily be manifested under the conditions of war...The prospect of war...leads to a demand in each country to be self-contained, and so to economic nationalism, trade restrictions, uneconomic production, and unemployment. It involves the exclusion of aliens and restriction on travel. These various consequences condemn each nation to a too self-dependent and therefore narrow existence, cut off from healthy intimacies with other people; and the general regimentation of life which follows when a strong central authority sets itself to prepare for war and organize economic supplies leads or tends to lead to dictatorship under which freedom and tolerance disappear.

The British people are in the main pacifist by temperament not only because they dread war itself, but because they value all the things which wars and threats of war destroy. The roots of modern pacifism lie far back in the history and character of the British people...In the past they have willingly granted asylum to aliens on British soil, partly because they believed that freedom of movement and trade were profitable, but partly also because their standards of conduct were based on a conception of the personal rights of every individual as an individual, and not merely as a Briton. Citizenship of the world is a notion which can be more easily entertained by the British than by other people. The conception of citizenship which can be widened out to include the native inhabitants of countries once subject and now becoming increasingly free makes us less insular than we once were, and certainly more ready to respect citizen rights in foreign countries.

This is the mindset of classical liberalism. Note how British values are defined in terms that could only in the long run undermine Britishness: citizenship of the world, citizenship widened out to those living in former colonies; granting citizenship to asylum seekers; freedom of movement; personal rights based on every individual as an individual and not merely as a Briton etc.

It clearly had an influence among Conservative Party types and you can understand from this why Britain changed so radically after WWII.

Memo to Jeremy Clarkson: Britain abolished international slavery

Popular Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson isn't afraid of speaking his mind. That's increasingly rare and I commend him for it.

But his most recent comments are disappointing. Clarkson's dog had to be put down and some of this twitter followers responded with cruel comments. Which then led Clarkson to write the following in Top Gear magazine:

Britain is a nation of 62million complete and utter bastards. We are the country that invented the concentration camp, and international slavery.

Maybe he's being deliberately provocative. Perhaps he wrote it whilst still in a fit of anger and upset. Even so, it's a hopelessly negative attitude to take toward your own national tradition.

The jibe about inventing international slavery isn't even remotely true. Slaves have been traded across national boundaries for thousands of years. If Britain had a distinct role it was more for using its power to abolish the international slave trade rather than inventing it.

Which leads me to a theory about why so many Westerners have a self-contempt. One of my readers recently defended liberalism as follows:

Shame on both the conservatives and modern liberals and any “ism” for using the government to force people to act in ways they think they should act. The only thing that should be worth dying for is freedom from men using the government to force people to act out their ideals. Governments should only exist to protect peoples life, liberty and personal selfishness as long as their selfishness does not lead to stealing, cheating, lying or causing harm to another’s private property or themselves.

There is an assumption underlying such an attitude which is that there are no positive goods that can be known to us; instead, we are to think in terms of there being personal, subjective ideals. But this runs very close to a pessimistic nihilism, as it locks in the suggestion that real, objective goods either don't exist or can't be known.

The only thing that lessens the nihilistic blow is this: if you think that there are only personal, subjective ideals then you might be able to conclude that a freedom to pursue your own subjective ideal unhindered becomes the one significant good that can be recognised to exist.

Which perhaps helps to explain the tremendous emphasis placed on such a freedom by liberal moderns. It is something that is clung to in order to avoid an immediate descent into a nihilistic scepticism.

But it's not much to cling to. And hence the vulnerability to self-contempt and a desire for self-abolition.

The solution is to have the courage to discuss a mix of positive goods (which can include freedom and autonomy) and to develop these within the political, cultural and social framework of society. Obviously,  a society which does a better job of this will have a stronger foundation than one which doesn't, but ruling out the notion of positive goods ensures that you will fail.

Going it alone

I don't want this comment from Lawrence Auster on my post Hitchens and Conservative Rights to pass unnoticed, so I'm posting it below:

A terrific restatement by Mr. Richardson of the traditionalist versus the classic liberal position. As Mr. Richardson shows, not only is the classic liberal position of negative rights and restrictions on state power inadequate in itself to a proper understanding of the human, but it leads inevitably over time to a system of positive rights and unlimited state power directed at making everyone equal.

The basic flaw of classical liberalism is that it has no sense of the "larger wholes" which form us, of which we are a part, and in which, to a significant and indispensable degree, we find ourselves. Rights being the only operative principle of classical liberalism, the rights inevitably keep growing and demanding more and more, and instead of just wanting to be left alone want to be made equal.

While there are various self-described classical liberals in the U.S. today (two examples being S.T. Karnick and Ilana Mercer) who argue that classical liberalism is not anti-national but affirms national identity and national sovereignty, the fact is that classical liberalism does not contain within itself the means to stop its own tendency to move leftward. ONLY traditionalism can do that. ONLY traditionalism can contain the inherent ills of liberalism and thus assure that what is good about liberalism does not turn into its own opposite.

I would add this. The American Founding is often described as the quintessence of classical, Lockean liberalism. But this is not correct. Americans in the Founding period believed in a uniquely American amalgam of Lockean liberalism and traditionalism: in Protestant Christianity, in traditional morality, in distinctive English-American ways of life, in English-American ways of governance, in a powerful and jealous sense of nationhood, and in a powerful sense of identity with their respective individual states of the Union, which they guarded against the power of the national government.

They spoke and believed in the Lockean principles of the universal and natural rights of man, but they understood them and applied them within the context of a specific political and cultural order that was not universal but particular and contained many inequalities. Their liberalism was a part of a cultural order that was not itself liberal—which happens to be my formula for non-destructive liberalism. But, because they failed to produce a sufficient articulation of the non-liberal aspects of their political society, the liberal parts kept expanding and over time drove out the traditional parts.

Liberalism has not always attempted to go it alone as a ruling principle of society. We live in exceptionally radical times because our society is now being ordered along the lines of a single political theory. In the past, there was room for an aristocratic ideal, for the influence of religion, for a serious commitment to family, community and nation and for an ideal of manhood and womanhood. It was the continuing presence of these other goods which allowed the "liberal West" to hold together. By itself, liberalism undercuts the existence of that group of people holding to it.

Hitchens & conservative rights

What makes us free? Peter Hitchens believes that the left has it wrong. The left has put its faith in abstract declarations of human rights. These declarations give judges the power to interpret what is right or wrong. Rather than everyone, including those holding state power, being held to a divinely sanctioned morality, it is now the officials of the state who wield this power. Hence a vast increase in state authority and a loss of liberty.

Hitchens prefers what he calls conservative rights. These are clearly defined legal rights which limit the power of what the state can do, as opposed to the "grandiose blether about rights" coming from the left, which leads the state to interfere in people's lives:

That is why left-wing rights increase the power of the state. Conservative rights, as expressed in the hard, cool, terse, language of the 1689 Bill of Rights ... concentrate on saying quite clearly what government cannot do. And in the space that is left, when the ruler is restrained by such things, free men can live, write, speak and think.

I don't think this goes far enough. If you really want to defend freedom, you have to take the contest to a deeper level.

What really counts are not the legal forms but the understanding of who man is and what his freedom is for.

For instance, the Lockean liberals, who Peter Hitchens seems to endorse, did not have a neutral view of the nature of man and what men might legitimately do in society. They had an excessively pessimistic view of men as being asocial, self-interested creatures who only pretended to act socially in order to impose their own partisan interests on others. Therefore, men were to be restricted to private pursuits, with the ideal activity being participation in the market.

The Lockeans left a lot out of man. They wanted us to be free as atomised, abstracted individuals, lacking natural ties to our community and oriented instead to a pursuit of private self-interest.

Think too of the modern liberals. They define man in terms of autonomy: we are human to the extent that we can self-determine our own lives and being.

This view of what man is has inevitable consequences. It is an autonomous self that is to be made free - one "liberated" from unchosen, inherited aspects of life such as manhood and womanhood, traditional forms of the family, ethnicity and objective forms of morality.

The realm of freedom then becomes those aspects of life that can be chosen at an individual level: career, entertainment, travel, shopping and so on. Society becomes good at developing these aspects of life; others are neglected or deemed illegitimate and repressed.

The rule is this: the concept of what man is will lead on to a view of what freedom is for. This is the deeper, driving force behind whether we have a true conservative liberty or not.

The conservative position should be this: we cannot be free as radically autonomous, self-created individuals. If we are to be free, it will be as men and women, as husbands and wives, as fathers and mothers and as members of distinct human communities and traditions.

One final, important point. If we do not do battle on these grounds, then it is likely that an older concept of rights, one focused on limiting state power, will give way to state interference and coercion.

Why? If it is accepted as true that we become human through the power to self-create our own autonomous lives, then it will be thought terribly unjust for there to be any inequalities in this power of autonomy. It would mean accepting that some people were more human than others - a serious breach in human equality.

For instance, if careers help our autonomy by making us financially independent, then how can we justify men spending more time in careers than women. If the liberal view of personhood is true, then this would mean that women were being relegated to a less human status than men.

This will seem so immoral and so unjust to liberals, that it's unlikely that the state would not interfere coercively to achieve "gender equity".

At the very least, we have to make sure that a new generation of conservatives is brought up to reject not only the particular forms of coercion enacted by the liberal state, but also the underlying principles justifying them.

The realm of freedom?

I have time now to get back to Liberalism & Community, a defence of classical liberalism by Steven Kautz.

Kautz supports the classical liberal view of human nature, namely that humans are by nature solitary, selfish and acquisitive. The natural condition of man is thought to be a war of all against all.

This dire understanding of human nature led to a radical world view: the human passions were held to be a dangerous source of division, peace was the only public good to be recognised, and men were to limit themselves to a private pursuit of happiness.

This is the "neutrality strand" of liberalism. To give you some idea of just how unreasonable and artificial it is, I'll comment on some passages from Kautz's book.

Our passions do not by themselves bring us together in political communities, other than by way of war for the sake of partisan or private advantage, and the liberation of the passions from the constraints of reason cannot bring peace to existing political communities ... (p.34)

What does this mean? Human motivation is divided here simplistically into "passions" and "reason". Because human nature is thought to be solitary, the passions can only bring about community in a coercive way: one group of individuals might get together to force their sectarian interests on others. Therefore, "reason" has to be used to promote a higher goal of peace for the benefit of all individuals.

This is a one-sided and limited understanding of reality. Humans are considerably social in their natures. Therefore, there are "non-rational" (non-intellectual) instincts, loyalties and identities through which communities are formed and held together. The "passions", therefore, do play a positive role in building stable forms of community.

It is wrong, therefore, to believe that humans are so much pushing toward sectarian self-interest, and so devoid of sociable instinct, that the only public good that can possibly be permitted to be expressed is that of peace.

Kautz goes on to discuss goods of the body versus goods of the soul. He criticises a communitarian writer, Michael Sandel, for asserting that a community might choose to pursue goods of the soul:

[Sandel's] book is more or less silent regarding the possibility of war, not only because Sandel denies that the body is the principle of individuation ... but also because of a remarkably optimistic view of the goods (or passions) of the soul. For Sandel, as for many recent advocates of community, it appears that the goods of the body are trivial and (besides) are easily satisfied, and that the goods of the soul are principally common goods, not private goods. (p.34)

So for the classical liberal Kautz, it is right that communities should focus on meeting bodily wants rather than goods of the soul. Kautz is surprised that Sandel doesn't treat the goods or passions of the soul in an entirely negative way as assertions of sectarian self-interest - Kautz believes that Sandel has a remarkably optimistic view of human nature, just as I believe that Kautz has a remarkably pessimistic view.

Note too that Kautz rejects the idea that the goods of the soul are common goods. Kautz believes that they are rightly private goods. This is a tremendously significant disagreement. If love of a nation is a good of the soul, can it really be limited to a private good? Isn't it a good which is formed, experienced and defended at a public, rather than a private, level? If you think, as Kautz does, that goods of the soul are private rather than common goods, then you change and limit what these goods can conceivably be.

Here is another snippet from Kautz:

Reason understands, says the classical liberal, what the (more warlike than sociable passions) do not feel, that there is a common good (p.35).

Again, here is the assumption that the passions are anti-social, so that community is formed through reason - through an intellectual rejection of warlike passion in favour of peace.

Creating this peace requires us to give up our naturally solitary condition - it requires common action and deliberation (i.e. setting up a police force, establishing forms of civility). Community, therefore, has shallow roots for classical liberals; it has little to do with significant forms of identity, of kinship, or of a shared history, culture or tradition. It only exists for a single pragmatic purpose: to secure the peace.

Furthermore, whatever virtue exists derives from this aim of maintaining the peace. So virtue too has shallow roots in the classical liberal world view:

Peace is a good, to repeat, because it is the necessary condition of all private pursuits of happiness; and peace is a common good, even requiring common deliberation and common action, because it cannot be made secure in the absence of various forms of civility and self-mastery. Here is the origin of the liberal virtues. (p.35)

Which leads on to this:

And then, where peace is secure because rights are respected and habits of moderation observed, human beings are liberated to engage in their various private pursuits of happiness, privately defined.

Or not. What if humans really are social creatures, who live well in relationship to each other, and who therefore must be concerned with the forms and quality of public life, rather than a purely private existence? What if our personal identity is derived from communal forms of existence rather than a solitary life? What if we express ourselves as men and women within social institutions rather than in isolation? What if we recognise communal traditions as significant goods in themselves which we naturally wish to commit ourselves to?

Finally, look at how reductive the classical liberal view is:

The liberal view of the political community implies a radical diminution of the dignity of political life: liberalism has turned "the political order into an administrative agency" that seeks to provide a plentiful and secure world ... As Walzer says, in the liberal welfare state, "the policeman and the welfare administrator will be the only public persons" ...

In part this situation obtains because the very questions of politics have been greatly transformed: we quarrel endlessly about how to provide, efficiently and justly, the instruments that are necessary ... for every private pursuit of happiness ...

Thus, the manifestly instrumental questions of economic policy now dominate our political life: politics today is concerned primarily with the largely technical problem of how to ensure prosperity ... Indeed it is possible that liberalism implicitly favours commercial ways of life, and associated conceptions of the good, over other private ways of life, as well as over public life.

... politics is best understood as an arena in which individuals, or groups of individuals, pursue their (primarily economic) interests: liberal politics is interest-group politics.

So it is perhaps not surprising that we have turned many of these questions over to bureaucrats and experts, for these technical and instrumental problems are just the sort of necessary burdens that a free human being will ... leave to his public "servants". (pp.35-37)

What are we left with under the terms of classical liberalism? The bias is toward a pursuit of economic self-interest, with public life being left mostly to technocrats and economic administrators. This is the realm of the "free human being" as conceived by classical liberals.

Would we really be surprised if classical liberalism were to hollow out human culture rather than deliver individual freedom?

Spinoza and classical liberalism

I've now finished reading The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart, a study of the intersecting lives of two important philosophers, Spinoza and Leibniz.

In my first piece on the book, I commented on the way Spinoza's philosophy seems closely allied with classical liberalism. Spinoza did not believe in a transcendent God, and so he looked for a way to base ideas of morality, purpose and freedom in nature.

He did so by identifying the "conatus" as a central principle: the striving of all things to preserve their own self. Self-preservation is therefore not, in Spinoza's philosophy, an important but mundane aspect of existence; instead, acting according to our self-interest to preserve our being is the key aspect of morality; and the absence of external constraints in pursuit of this self-interest is the definition of freedom.

Here is how it is put in Stewart's book:

Spinoza, like most modern theorists, grounds the legitimacy of political authority in the self-interest of individuals. He argues not only that everyone, and every thing, for that matter, is driven by self-interest but that they ought to be as well. "The more every man endeavours and is able to seek his own advantage, the more he is endowed with virtue," he says in the Ethics. "To act in absolute conformity with virtue is nothing else in us but to act, to live, to preserve one's own being (these three mean the same) under the guidance of reason on the basis of seeking one's advantage." (pp.101-102)

For Spinoza, man is defined by his desires:

"desire is the essence of man," as Spinoza puts it. To be clear: this desire is fundamentally self-centred. (p.175)

Leibniz was initially attracted to Spinoza's philosophy, but he recoiled at some of its implications, especially the denial of an immaterial soul. He prophesied that Spinoza's materialistic philosophy would undermine Western culture and civilisation.

Leibniz attempted to establish an alternative philosophy, one in which there was no single material substance in the world (a world soul) from which everything else emanated, but instead one built on a variety of substances called monads.

A difficulty in Leibniz's philosophy is that the monads are thought to be set in a pre-ordained harmony with each other - which then makes Leibniz something of a determinist (p.285). Another difficulty is that Leibniz thought that the purpose of life was for each monad to become autonomous, the better to realise its own self. Autonomy was achieved by the correct use of reason, by which monads were delivered from the influence of the passions (p.291).

Conclusions? Stewart sees Spinoza as carrying the day, but at a considerable cost:

Leibniz, perhaps alone with Spinoza, grasped the general direction of modern history. But, unlike his eerily self-sufficient rival, he had a far greater concern with the price that humanity would have to pay for its own progress.

He understood that even as science tells us more and more about what everything is, it seems to tell us less and less why; that even as technology reveals utility in all things, it seems to find purpose in nothing; that as humanity extends its powers without limit, it loses its faith in the value of the same beings who exercise that power; and that, in making self-interest the foundation of society, modern humankind finds itself pining for the transcendent goals that give life any interest at all. (pp. 254-255)

I'll finish with a rough conclusion of my own. Spinoza saw himself as a revolutionary who aimed to overthrow Christian theology and replace it with another, "naturalistic" theology.

His efforts to create this new theology led him to certain principles. This included certain ideas about life and liberty, namely that virtue means acting according to self-interest to preserve our being and that freedom is an absence of external constraints in the pursuit of this aim.

To the extent that these ideas were brought into classical liberalism through the influence of Spinoza, classical liberalism can be seen as the product of an attempt to replace Christian theology with a theology based on a concept of an immanent God.

But, I admit, I don't know to what extent the existence of such ideas within classical liberalism can be attributed to the influence of Spinoza.

So it's just self-interest?

Spinoza was one of the first of the classical liberals. I'm reading a book about him at the moment titled The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart.

By the 1670s, Spinoza was advocating the following:

Spinoza, like most modern theorists, grounds the legitimacy of political authority in the self-interest of individuals. He argues not only that everyone, and every thing, for that matter, is driven by self-interest but that they ought to be as well. "The more every man endeavours and is able to seek his own advantage, the more he is endowed with virtue," he says in the Ethics. "To act in absolute conformity with virtue is nothing else in us but to act, to live, to preserve one's own being (these three mean the same) under the guidance of reason on the basis of seeking one's advantage." (pp.101-102)

So I am to be self-interested and to seek my own advantage, and to set my sights at the level of self-preservation. These ideas, so familiar within classical liberalism, are already present in the world view of Spinoza.

Stewart goes on to tell us that:

Spinoza did not invent the idea of a secular state founded on self-interest; rather, he observed it clearly for the first time ... The very features of modernity that were then and are still regarded by many as its signature evils - the social fragmentation, the secularity, and the triumph of self-interest - he enshrined as the founding virtues of the new world order. His political philosophy was, in essence, an active response to the challenges of modernity. (pp.102-103)

Here's some more:

According to the author of the Ethics, self-interest is a virtue itself. The political order he intended to establish is one in which all social goals are secular, and so none may transcend the self-realization of the individual. In his magnum opus he baldly avowed that "no virtue can be conceived prior to this one, namely, the drive to preserve oneself." (p.107)

From wikipedia we learn that Spinoza was a naturalist in his philosophy:

Spinoza rejects the dualistic assumption that mind, intentionality, ethics, and freedom are to be treated as things separate from the natural world of physical objects and events.

So Spinoza's challenge was to explain such things as intentionality, ethics and freedom naturalistically.

He could no longer assert the existence of an inherently existing good or evil:

Spinoza held a relativist's position, that nothing is intrinsically good or bad ...

Because Spinoza believed that nothing exists outside natural causes, he was a determinist who believed that all things were determined by natural laws:

... Spinoza believes in his deterministic universe that, "All things in nature proceed from certain necessity and with the utmost perfection." Therefore, nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's world ...

So how then did he ground his concepts of ethics and freedom? He took the philosophical idea of a "conatus" - a striving to continue to exist and thereby to preserve one's essence - as his general principle.

In Spinoza's view, we act virtuously if we act rationally to strive to exist, in accordance with this idea of a "conatus". Similarly, we are free inasmuch as we are not constrained from acting to preserve our essential being:

His concept of "conatus" states that human beings' natural inclination is to strive toward preserving an essential being and an assertion that virtue/human power is defined by success in this preservation of being by the guidance of reason as one's central ethical doctrine.

And again:

His goal is to provide a unified explanation of all these things [intentionality, ethics, freedom] within a naturalistic framework, and his notion of conatus is central to this project.

For example, an action is "free", for Spinoza, only if it arises from the essence and conatus of an entity. There can be no absolute, unconditioned freedom of the will, since all events in the natural world, including human actions and choices, are determined in accord with the natural laws of the universe, which are inescapable.

However, an action can still be free in the sense that it is not constrained or otherwise subject to external forces.

A couple of observations. First, it's not easy to integrate the different claims made by Spinoza. If everything that happens is both perfect and necessary, then how can you have different degrees of freedom and constraint?

Second, Spinoza identified a naturalistic aim of preserving one's own being and he grounded both virtue and freedom on an absence of external constraints in pursuing this aim.

This aim, though real and important, is nonetheless a narrow one to occupy an individual life and a human culture and civilisation. It was chosen because it helped to resolve certain difficulties within Spinoza's naturalistic philosophy.

The intellectual foundations of classical liberalism are neither persuasive nor appealing. Do we really wish to understand virtue in terms of rational self-interest? Is freedom really to be understood merely as an absence of external constraints in the pursuit of individual self-preservation?

As for the other plank of classical liberalism - a belief in the pursuit of material prosperity - Spinoza advocated this as a means of occupying the energies of the common man. It was his version of the "bread and circuses" which was supposed to keep the common man at a safe distance from the more substantial issues of life (Stewart, p.103).

There seems to be little to gain in rejecting modern liberalism in favour of more classical forms. We need to think independently of both of these political philosophies and assert a worthier and more fitting politics of our own.

Liberalism & lost community

I've been gradually working my way through Liberalism & Community by American academic Steven Kautz. The book is an attempt to defend the classical liberalism of writers like John Locke.

In previous posts I've criticised classical liberalism for its overly pessimistic account of human nature. According to Kautz, Lockean liberalism begins with the idea that people are naturally selfish and solitary. The natural condition of man is thought to be a war of all against all. The human passions are negative aspects of existence, being warlike and irrational.

This faulty reading of human nature has some drastic consequences. It means that a "natural" community will be thought of negatively, as a merely civilised war of all against all, in which "partisan" causes will be invented to justify the carrying on of a civil war.

Having set up this framework, classical liberals then propose a solution: reason can be used to establish an unnatural peace, in which moderation is the chief virtue and in which all agree to banish "partisan" public causes and pursue strictly private pursuits instead.

The Lockean view unnecessarily diminishes what is possible within a community. It also fails to recognise, and therefore defend, the natural sources of unity and loyalty within a society.

Kautz draws out a few further consequences of the Lockean framework:

In a liberal world, high-minded moral and political aspirations have their proper place only outside the sphere of common deliberation and common action of citizens.

Liberals must therefore admit that ... politics properly attends above all to the manifestly instrumental questions of security and prosperity, because debates about these matters admit compromise and encourage moderation; and so, the ways of life of citizens and statesmen are soon deprived of their former dignity - statesmen are supplanted by bureaucrats, citizens by entrepreneurs.

Liberal politics, in short, is boring ... we refrain from more exciting or inspiriting political or moral partisanship, because we worry that such quarrels are often merely more or less quiet modes of civil war - cold civil war so to speak. When the political community steps beyond these bounds, it invites civil strife.

Our passions do not by themselves bring us together in political communities, other than by way of war for the sake of partisan or private advantage ... (p.34)

It's strange that classical liberals believe that we are naturally solitary and selfish, but that they think the impulse to high-minded public action so strong, that it is a danger to social peace.

Admittedly, liberals like Kautz argue that the high-minded public action is fraudulent and really masks an effort to pursue selfish, warlike qualities at a higher, social level.

If this is true, though, then why relegate the high-mindedness to a private level? If it's fraudulent, and exists merely as a cover to civil warfare, then it is as redundant at the private level (or more so) than at the public level.

Classical liberals can't have it both ways. Either high-mindedness has some merit, in which case the Lockean account of human nature is wrong, or it is fraudulent, in which case it's senseless to delegate it to a private, rather than a public, realm.

It seems all too convenient that people who believe that we are by nature selfish, anti-social and acquisitive should limit "community" to a technical pursuit of material prosperity, one in which "statesmen are supplanted by bureaucrats, citizens by entrepreneurs".

Anthony Esolen has drawn a distinction between men who are domesticated and men who are civilised. The domesticated man thinks only in terms of his own family; the civilised man has the capacity to think and act for the larger, common good:

Women do not in fact civilize men; they domesticate men, as I've said before. Men civilize men. There's a difference.

What is that difference? A soldier in a cavalry unit who spends most of his time in barracks or under the skies, may well be more civilized, more trained to think of and to act for the common good, to command other men or to obey, than many a high-priced lawyer or even college professor. He's not domesticated, though, and his new bride at first might find him pretty hard to live with.

On the other hand, men who live comfortable lives apart from other men, taking no initiative for the common good, considering only their wives and children and not the welfare of anybody else's children, never to be relied upon in time of public need, may be domesticated but not civilized. You might find plenty of men of the former sort at the inception of a great nation. You will find plenty of men of the latter sort at its decline.

In what way does classical liberalism allow for men to be civilised? It would appear to directly disallow civilised thinking in men: it assumes that the impulse to think or act for the common good is a dangerous, irrational passion, a form of cold civil war in which one party seeks to dominate another. Better just to leave things to the bureaucrats to sort out merely technical aspects of social organisation and financial policy.

We have had a few centuries now for classical liberal ideas to seep into Western culture and consciousness. I wonder if the influence of these ideas helps to explain the passivity of Western men when faced with civilisational decline.

Is human passion too dangerous?

I've written a few posts now reviewing Liberalism & Community by American academic Steven Kautz.

I hope readers will be patient with my efforts. Kautz sets out to defend the classical liberalism of Locke (seventeenth century), and he is very direct in spelling out the key features of this liberalism. Later, he admits that there are important weaknesses in the classical liberalism he supports.

I'll continue, though, with Kautz's description of the classical liberal worldview:

The natural condition of human beings ... is one of suspicion and hostility, an incipient war of all against all. (p.32)

This is too pessimistic a starting point. There is a natural fellow feeling existing between groups of people which is ignored here. Is there not at least some loyalty and cooperation between members of the same family? Or between members of the same ethny or nation?

Classical liberals are starting with a radically individualistic view of the human condition: that a natural state of affairs involves just me as an individual fighting against everyone else as an enemy.

But this is an unstable situation, one that almost inevitably leads to the establishment of tumultuous and illiberal political communities that do not make peace their overriding objective, where petty warfare is soon replaced by partisan warfare - often between rich and poor, sometimes among religious sects or other parties animated by one or another of the bizzare opinions contrived by the imaginations of men. (p.32)

This is what the faulty starting point leads to. If the state of nature is solitary individuals at war with each other, then what is required are artificial political communities which "make peace their overriding objective".

This won't be easy to achieve. After all, men will still by nature be inclined to a state of war against everyone else. There is a danger, in the Lockean liberal view, that the political community will be used not to secure peace between warring individuals, but as a weapon in the war of one faction of the community against another (partisan warfare).

Therefore, it is terribly wrong, in the Lockean liberal view, to be partisan about anything, including religion or politics. Not surprisingly, we are then told that it doesn't matter if we aren't partisan about such matters, as they have no basis in reality but only represent "bizzare opinions contrived by the imaginations of men".

This fear that any kind of group loyalties will unleash "the incipient war of all against all" has very damaging repurcussions:

Liberal theorists and politicians fear partisan (class, religious, ethnic, ideological) warfare above all, not simply the relatively petty quarrels of individuals. There is, indeed, a kind of communitarian logic about war: human beings at war seek allies because they have enemies. And alliances, sects, and parties will soon conceive the ideologies or dogmas that are necessary to justify oppressing the others, thus arming the warlike passions by civilizing them. (p.32)

Given the assumption that it is wrong to be partisan about anything, even ethnic loyalties are ruled out of bounds. We are to live, in the Lockean view, as solitary individuals restrained from war against all others by membership of a liberal political community.

Note too the Lockean liberal view of how partisan loyalties emerge. If we are by nature solitary individuals at war against everyone else, then partisan loyalties are driven simply by the need to seek alliances in war so that we may dominate and oppress others. Therefore, ethnic loyalties or religious beliefs don't represent anything real in themselves, but are simply a cover, a justification, for the getting of power over someone else.

... the most likely or natural path to political community is not a social contract, but a partisan struggle, because the passions (which suggest war) are more powerful than reason (which suggests peace), in the beginning. (pp.32-33)

A new element is added here. If an "incipient war of all against all" is natural, then the natural passions are bad - very bad. So these passions must be replaced by reason and by moderation.

Kautz sums up as follows:

It follows, say liberals, that there is no natural political community, but only this choice: we may endure life in one of those unhappy communities that transform the natural war of all against all into the more sanguinary and civilized wars of party against party or sect against sect; or we may construct a rational and peaceful political community on the basis of a social contract among free individuals who promise mutual self-restraint, or moderation.

... And so, in establishing liberal community, we must understand that the only truly common goods are peace and the means to peace (above all, private liberty and prosperity, as well as habits of public moderation), since peace is the necessary condition of security in the possession of all private goods.

All other speeches about so-called "common goods" are merely the (foolish or fraudulent) ideologies or dogmas of this or that party or sect. (p.33)

So the only common good that can be recognised is peace (although we may also seek material prosperity and a culture of public moderation).

So let's run through some of the problems associated with Lockean liberalism as outlined by Kautz:

a) there are no natural forms of human community, only an artifical political community

b) ethnic or religious loyalties are ruled out of bounds as being "partisan"; they are assumed to be made up for the purposes of conducting a more civilised form of the individual "war of all against all", so that one group in society may dominate and oppress another

c) the natural passions are considered bad and dangerous and are held to be opposed to reason

d) a community may have no common goods except the basic, initial aim of securing a rational, artificial peace between naturally warring individuals

Should conservatives accept such a world view? I don't think so. Moderns seem to swing between overly negative and optimistic views of human nature. The Lockean view is too negative and too individualistic. It is a view which radically limits the goods that humans may pursue: human passions are rejected as dangerous and irrational; religion and ethnicity are rejected as dangerously partisan and as imaginary constructs for the waging of war against others; and there can be no communal goods apart from the acquisitive pursuit of wealth and the maintenance of peace.

It is a cold and shallow account of human society. Nor is it likely to succeed in its one basic aim of keeping the peace, as it doesn't recognise, and so cannot preserve, the natural sources of loyalty, cooperation and unity in society.

Solitary, selfish, suspicious

I've written a couple of posts already on the book Liberalism & Community by American academic Steven Kautz.

The book was written as a defence of classical liberalism, particularly that early version of liberalism set out by John Locke (late 1600s). What are we to make of this defence? I'd list the following main points:

a) Classical liberalism is openly hostile to a traditionalist conservatism.

b) Classical liberalism begins with too negative an assessment of human nature and an artificial account of the basis of human society. It radically limits the sights that we may set ourselves as individuals and as communities.

c) Classical liberalism discourages people from acting publicly in the defence of a community.

I'll illustrate these points with some excerpts from the book, beginning with this:

Since human beings are by nature solitary and selfish, querulous and untrustworthy competitors for scarce and often fragile private goods, prudent individuals will learn to attend to the mostly private acquisition of the tools necessary to provide for their mostly private welfare - above all, liberty and property ...

... even a well-ordered civil society can ... not abolish, the harsh natural conditions and the querulous traits of our human natures that make it necessary to treat our fellows with abiding suspicion ...

So it is the principal business of political community to arrange "conditions" so that the acquisition and maintenance of liberty and property is protected, as against the "Fancy or Covetousness" of incipient aggressors.(p.30)

Is this really a balanced reading of human nature? Are humans by nature solitary and selfish? Must we limit our aims to our private welfare, in particular to the accumulation of private property?

the way of life of the businessman is only the most prominent among many other private ways of life, available in a liberal community, that enable human beings substantially to retain their natural freedom to "order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit" ...(p.31)

The most prominent way of life is that of the businessman? As we'll see, there is a great emphasis on acquisitiveness in classical liberalism.

According to classical liberals, the political community is surely not natural: man is not by nature a political animal. Still, there can be no doubt that membership in a peaceful and stable political community accords with the interests of almost all individual human beings.

Thus, the liberal political community, which seeks above all to secure this peace and stability, is an artificial rational construction, established by a "social contract" among free individuals; it is not a natural organism, a whole to which the individual is related as the hand is related to the body ... The liberal believes that "each of us" is somehow independent of, or prior to, the political community. Or again: we constitute our (political) communities; they do not "constitute" us. (p.32)

This is not a persuasive account of how human communities are, in practice, formed. We are supposed to believe that naturally solitary and selfish individuals decided to make a contract with each other, in order to safeguard their property and personal security. Therefore, human community is to be understood in terms of an unnatural, but rational, political arrangement.

It's more plausible to regard humans as social creatures, who are born into social communities, in which they live and work together with others they are related to, and with whom they share a common identity. Such communities arose naturally rather than being created through a process of contract; nor are the aims of these communities limited to the protection of life and property.

There are some particular problems with the classical liberal view as set out by Kautz. First, Kautz believes that the contracted form of community is rational because it accords with individual self-interest. So Kautz connects reason here with self-interest. It would seem that if you want individuals to act rationally, as liberals do, you will then expect them to act in a self-interested way. Egoism becomes a matter of principle.

Second, the larger, natural form of community is hidden within the liberal framework. In the classical liberal view, there are "free" individuals who contract to form a political community. Where in this is the natural social community? How can we have a proper regard for this natural social community if it is made obscure?

Third, the classical liberal theory sets up a framework in which the aims of a community are severely limited: community was established for the purpose of defending property rights and a right to personal security. The higher aim of a society is too one-sided and materialistic: it is to create the conditions in which property can be safely accumulated.

It's a recipe for a materially wealthy and technologically advanced society, but one which is likely to suffer a "hollowing" process, in which the culture and institutions which once sustained it and inspired loyalty in those who belonged to it are gradually lost.

There's more to add but I'll leave it to the next post.

So we are friendless by nature?

I've now read the second chapter of Professor Steven Kautz's Liberalism & Community. If you remember, the book is intended to be a defence of classical liberalism.

Once again, I found it an extraordinary read. Kautz sets out the foundations of classical liberalism so openly that the flaws in the theory are strikingly clear.

Kautz begins the chapter by reminding the reader that liberalism has become an orthodoxy:

Classical and contemporary liberal teachings ... dominate our political discourse. America is still now, or perhaps now more than ever, somehow a liberal regime ... (p.23)

Why is "community" such a problem for us, here and now? The short answer is liberalism. The political philosophy of liberalism, its critics and friends agree, is in some sense our political philosophy: we are somehow all liberals. (p.28)

Why has a liberal orthodoxy brought about a lost sense of community? Kautz argues first that liberalism overwhelmed other traditions which once upheld a positive sense of virtue:

Liberalism ... has prevailed in this century in America, overwhelming those elements of the American political tradition that once tamed our individualism and materialism. If liberal America once found needed moral sustenance in various religious and republican traditions of virtue that have long since been abandoned, as many argue, then it must now find a way to reconstitute those indispensable moral supplements to the material comforts that liberal politics provides. (p.28)

It's Kautz's second argument which is really striking. Kautz explains that the "moral pyschology" on which liberalism is based is inevitably hostile to community:

It should not be surprising, even to partisans of liberalism, that a world dominated by liberal individualism has given rise to longings for lost community. Classical liberalism is a doctrine of acquisitive individualism, and teaches that man is by nature solitary and selfish, not political or even social: the most powerful natural passions and needs of human beings are private. Human beings are not friends by nature.

This harsh moral psychology is, at any rate, the fundamental teaching of classical liberalism. As a result, the idea of community is always somewhat suspect for thoughtful liberals. Liberals are inclined to view partisans of community as either romantic utopians or dangerous authoritarians.

If there is no natural common good, beyond peace and security, then invocations of the spirit of community are either foolish or fraudulent, impossible dreams or wicked ideologies. (p.28)

Kautz goes on to write in a similar vein:

Classical liberals ... seem to believe that we could be content to live alone, because there are no natural bonds between human beings, and so there is no natural community. Indeed, the family is not simply natural, according to some of the founders of liberalism. And even if there were certain natural passions or sentiments that might, in favourable circumstances, bring human beings together in a natural community, these passions are overwhelmed, in most circumstances, by the strongest human passion, the desire to preserve oneself and to live in tolerable comfort in a world of human enemies ...

In short, the most urgent human good ... is the security of our bodies ... I repeat: our classical liberal teachers have taught us that human beings are in the decisive respect friendless by nature, and we have constructed a world on the basis of this understanding. It is not surprising that we feel lonely, now and then. (p.29)

Liberal politics is, as a result, a politics of fearful accommodation among natural foes who somehow reconstitute themselves as civil friends ... (p.29)

This "moral psychology" ought to have been challenged, and marginalised, long ago. It is way too pessimistic an account of human nature. We are asked to believe the following:

i) humans are by nature solitary and selfish
ii) other humans are to be regarded primarily as a threat to my life
iii) the primary good is to be left alone, in physical security, to pursue acquisitive wants, in other words, to accumulate material goods
iv) any invocation of community is either utopian or authoritarian

I think back to my childhood and early adulthood in Melbourne, a city of several million souls. I remember a whole set of naturally occurring communities: those of family, suburb, parish, city, state and nation. I remember people acting supportively toward each other, on the basis that you should "help your mates", or that men should act courteously toward women, or that you should help out a fellow Australian, or that you should help the less fortuntate and so on. I remember too a range of goods that were held to be more important than acquisitive wants: loyalty to friends, love for women, a culture of family life, masculine character and achievement, an appreciation of the arts, and a love of nature to name a few.

Melbourne was, at that time, a settled community and the primary experience of life was not fear of those you lived amongst. If anything, the opposite was true: people were generally honest and helpful in their dealings with each other.

So there is no compelling reason, in my own life experience, to retreat into a private world of acquisitive individualism - a world in which community is feared as a danger to my liberty of person or property.

We lose too much in this retreat, including a freedom to participate in the more significant aspects of life.

Liberalism vs community?

I've just begun reading Liberalism & Community by Steven Kautz. He is an Associate Professor of Politics at Michigan State University.

The book is a reply to those who have criticised liberalism for undermining community. Admittedly, I've only read the first chapter, but so far I've been more disconcerted than persuaded by the way Kautz puts his argument.

I'm going to quote some sections of the text and then briefly comment underneath, beginning with this admission by Kautz:

We have been taught by our classical liberal ancestors to think of ourselves as free individuals above all, rather than as children or parishioners or citizens, or as members of a racial or ethnic group - or, indeed, as members of any other communities. (p.19)

I'm still astonished that people can think this way and build a politics on such an understanding of life. Kautz is happy to support a liberalism in which we become "free" to the extent that we diminish the role in our lives of communities. Kautz thinks of "freedom" as the highest good, and he identifies communities as a threat or hazard to this freedom.

Such a perspective makes no sense if you think of people as social creatures, whose lives are naturally embedded in distinct communities. In this view, freedom is something that is achieved within a society and not against it.

Kautz is aware of such objections. He goes on to quote some communitarian critics of the liberal outlook:

But this idea of the free individual is based on a confusion, say its critics: one's deepest attachments to other human beings are not freely chosen, adopted, and then discarded like articles of clothing, but are given prior to such choices and "partly define the person I am" ...

Indeed, the human being who overcomes such "constitutive" attachments is not liberated, but is rather, says Sandel, "wholly without character, without moral depth"; an honorable human being must surely "feel the moral weight" of these primary loyalties.

The criticisms here are quite good. Liberalism holds that to be free we must be self-defining, self-determining individuals. But much of what is most significant in our lives is unchosen, including our communal identity and a great part of our family commitments. If we lose this unchosen aspect of life, then we will be poorer in our sense of ourselves and our place within a community.

Kautz seems to take this criticism seriously. He therefore sets out to prove that the asocial, "free" liberal individual can also stake a claim to "moral depth":

All of this is undoubtedly partly true: the liberal idea of the free individual too often, in liberal practice, produces eccentric, passive, lonely individuals. But it is perhaps not exhaustive.

Even for contemporary admirers of community, praise of the loyal and devoted citizen is commonly tempered by an awareness of the moral gravity of those who contributed to liberalism's past and present victories over intolerant and oppressive communities: moral freedom may require rebellion against moral community.

Those free individuals who secured for themselves, and for us, the blessings of liberty, even at the price of rebellion against a father or a priest or a prince, are perhaps not wholly "without moral depth," but deserve both our admiration and our gratitude: the truly free human being possesses a moral dignity that at least rivals the dignity of a human life that is animated by love or piety or patriotism.

Once again, Kautz, the defender of classical liberalism, writes of community as a kind of natural competitor against, or even enemy of, freedom. He even contrasts the "truly free human being" with the human being animated "by love or piety or patriotism".

I don't like Kautz's radically individualistic "truly free human being". I don't even think he is all that free - what, after all, is his freedom for, once he becomes asocial and discards membership of a distinct community and tradition, and once he steps aside from a life animated "by love or piety or patriotism"? Isn't it better to be free to participate in the greater aspects of life, rather than to discard them in order to be an autonomous loner?