Abstract
This chapter examines the roots of post-modernism in liberalism. It argues that the locating of normativity in the liberal subject opened the door for the kind of anti-metaphysical and anti-traditionalist outlooks which have come to characterize post-modernity. This is best expressed in the final transition of liberalism to an outlook stressing cultural pluralism and a political, not metaphysical, foundation.
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Notes
- 1.
Plato. The Republic, trans. G.M.A Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1992).
- 2.
See Plato. Parmenides, trans. Mary Louise Gill (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Classics, 1996).
- 3.
See Aristotle. “Metaphysics” in The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2001).
- 4.
Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2001).
- 5.
See Joel Warren Lidz. “Medicine as Metaphor in Plato” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Vol 20, 1995.
- 6.
Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2001) at pgs 1129–130.
- 7.
Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 8.
See Paul Tillich. The Socialist Decision (Eugene, OR: WIPF and Stock Publishers, 1977).
- 9.
Patrick Deneen. Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2018).
- 10.
Peter Augustine Lawler. Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thought (Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992).
- 11.
George Grant. Technology and Justice (Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press, 1991).
- 12.
See Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin. The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 13.
Leo Strauss. Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL. University of Chicago Press, 1953) at pg 6.
- 14.
Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes from the Underground and The Gambler, trans. Jane Kentish (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008) at pg 13.
- 15.
See Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue-A Study in Moral Theory: Third Edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre-Dame Press, 2007).
- 16.
See C.S Lewis. The Problem of Pain (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2015).
- 17.
None as brilliant at Tillich. See Paul Tillich. Christian Systematic Theology: Volume One (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
- 18.
Patrick Deneen. “Unsustainable Liberalism.” First Things, August 2012.
- 19.
Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- 20.
Charles Taylor. Multiculturalism and the ‘Politics of Recognition’: An Essay With Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
- 21.
Matthew McManus. “A Critical Legal Conception of Human Dignity.” Journal of Human Rights, Online, 2019.
- 22.
These are all very able discussed by Will Kymlicka. See Will Kymlicka. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 23.
Patrick Devlin. “The Enforcement of Morals.” The Maccabean Lecture in Jurisprudence, March 1959.
- 24.
Patrick Devlin. “The Enforcement of Morals.” The Maccabean Lecture in Jurisprudence, March 1959 at pg 132.
- 25.
Carl Schmitt. Political Theology (Chicago, IL. The University of Chicago Press, 2005) at pg 2.
- 26.
Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (Chicago, IL. The University of Chicago Press, 2007).
- 27.
Taylor makes this point against anti-humanists, as well as more conservative variants of Roman Catholicism, who always seem to insist that because they mysteriously know better that those who know less should do as they’re told. See Charles Taylor. A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) at pgs 637–638.
- 28.
One can also think of many of the passages in the New Testament concerning Jesus’ own struggle with good and evil. Matthew 4:1–11 comes to mind, where he is tempted by the Devil in the wilderness, as does the agony in Gethsemane prior to his arrest and execution.
- 29.
St. Augustine. The Confessions, trans. E.B Pusey. Online, 2002. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3296/3296-h/3296-h.htm.
- 30.
St. Augustine. The Confessions, trans. E.B Pusey. Online, 2002. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3296/3296-h/3296-h.htm.
- 31.
Slavoj Zizek. The Fragile Absolute: Or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London, UK: Verso Books, 2009).
- 32.
One of the ways modern critical theory has developed these theorizations is by inverting the emphasis and focusing on the victims of oppression. While Augustine devotes his attention primarily to those who wish to dominate, theorists from Fromm through Judith Butler have observed there is an uncanny willingness on the part of many to wish for just the domination they’re offering. I will come back to these themes shortly.
- 33.
My reading here is, of course, deeply inspired by Hegel’s dialectic of the master and slave. See Georg. W.F Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J.N Findlay (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977).
- 34.
See St. Augustine. “City of God.” In On Augustine: The Two Cities, ed. Alan Ryan (New York, NY: W.W Norton and Company, 2016) at pgs 127–128.
- 35.
Giovanni Mirandola. “Oration on the Dignity of Man” trans. Available online. http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/pico_oration.htm.
- 36.
Other factors included the liquidation of the aristocratic classes of Europe by Absolutist monarchs, which had the by effect of elevating and centralizing the power of the secular authorities enabling them to increasingly resist the pressures of influential religious groups.
- 37.
Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince, trans. George Bull (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2003).
- 38.
The term “historical empiricism” was developed, and problematically deployed, by the conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony. See Yoram Hazony. “Conservative Democracy: Liberal Principles Have Brought Us A Dead End.” First Things, January 2019.
- 39.
Interestingly Machiavelli and Burke join Madison, J.S Mill, Lenin, and only a handful of others who managed to be both active in practical politics and modern political theorists of the first rank. The fact that many of these figures are inclined towards a kind of pragmatic conservatism may be indicatory of the sense of limitations and narrow possibilities the real world tends to instill in theorists. Though it is just as possible, and perhaps undeniable, that their conservative inclinations may also reflect their status as powerful men who assessed the world in those terms while ignoring the Tolstoyan lessons about who truly makes history.
- 40.
This is, of course, Kant’s point in The Metaphysics of Morals. See Immanuel Kant. The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 41.
Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1982) at pg 559.
- 42.
Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1982) at pg 100.
- 43.
My reading of Hobbes is deeply inspired by Tuck and David Dyzenhaus’. See Richard Tuck. Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002) and David Dyzenhaus. “Hobbes and the Legitimacy of Law.” Law and Philosophy, Vol 20, 2001.
- 44.
See John Locke. “A Letter Concerning Toleration.” Online Library of Liberty, 2021.
- 45.
Indeed, by the nineteenth century, liberal international law had precisely mapped these contradictory tendencies into its very structure. It was driven both to criticize colonial and imperial projects by the egalitarian and emancipatory dimensions of liberalism while, at the same time, many lawyers defended these same projects under the auspices of civilizing the world. See Martti Koskeniemmi. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law (1870–1960) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- 46.
See Michel Foucault. “What is Enlightenment” in The Foucault Reader,ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, NY: Rabinow Books, 1984) at pg 50.
- 47.
My reading here is inspired by Arthur Ripstein and Tampio. See Arthur Ripstein. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) and Nicholas Tampio. Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in Contemporary Political Theory (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012).
- 48.
This objection was made, among others, by Nietzsche.
- 49.
See P.F Strawson. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (New York, NY: Routledge Press, 2006) at pg 219.
- 50.
See Slavoj Zizek. Sex and the Failed Absolute (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020) at pg 67.
- 51.
See Immanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2002).
- 52.
For a helpful guide on this issue see Arthur Ripstein. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
- 53.
In his classic book In Defense of Anarchism, Robert Wolff draws on Kantian theories of autonomy to chide democrats for not recognizing any form of compromise with majoritarianism will entail violating the freedom of individuals. Consequently, even a democratic or republican state is illegitimate, and we should embrace anarchy instead. While this is certainly a consistent view, most of us would find it too draconian for other reasons. See Robert Wolff. In Defense of Anarchism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).
- 54.
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ernest Mandel (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1990).
- 55.
One remarkable exception to this rule was Vico. See Giambattista Vico. The New Science (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2000).
- 56.
C.B MacPherson. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 1962) at pg 270.
- 57.
See Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald Bevan (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2003). For an especially astute analysis of De Tocqueville’s complex thoughts on this theme see Alan Ryan. “Alexis de Tocqueville.” In The Marking of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
- 58.
See Martti Koskeniemmi. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law (1870–1960) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- 59.
See Lynn Hunt. Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, NY: Norton and Company, 2008).
- 60.
The key transitional figure was of course Schiller.
- 61.
See J.S. Mill. On Liberty (Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, 2001) at pg 55.
- 62.
See Ian Shapiro. “The Neoclassical Synthesis of Rights and Utility.” Yale University Courses, April 5th, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcbj3XoXeEM&list=PL2FD48CE33DFBEA7E&index=7.
- 63.
See Alan Ryan. “Mill’s Essay On Liberty.” in The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012) at pgs 257–279.
- 64.
See John Stuart Mill. On The Subjection of Women, reprinted. In Richard Vandewetering and Lesley Jacobs. John Stuart Mill´s The Subjection of Women: His Contemporary and Modern Critics (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1999).
- 65.
David Harvey. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996) at pgs 32–45.
- 66.
See Cornel West. Race Matters: 25th Anniversary (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017) at pgs 65–66.
- 67.
See Constance Backhouse. Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
- 68.
See Desmond Morton. A Short History of Canada (Toronto, ON: Mclelland and Stewart, 2017) at pgs 148–149.
- 69.
Eurostat. “Migration and Migrant Population Statistics.” 2018. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Migration_and_migrant_population_statistics#:~:text=2.4%20million%20immigrants%20entered%20the,672%20thousand%20persons%20in%202018.
- 70.
Will Kymlicka. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 71.
Moreover, a nostalgia for empire, and the kind of economic and cultural boons it was perceived to bring for liberalism has never gone away. Not just the British, but the Austro-Hungarian empire of central Europe were often present in the imaginaries of various right-wing liberals. Indeed, forms of imperialism and modern colonialism enjoyed something or a resurgence between the 1980s and the early 2000s, when an unusual pairing of neoconservatives and neoliberals uneasily made (fractious) common cause to export the Washington consensus across the globe. Preferably through influence and soft power mechanisms, though as the Second Iraq War demonstrated, through force if necessary. I will discuss this in more detail later in this book. For now see Quinn Slobodian. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
- 72.
Uday Singh Mehta. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999) at pg 4.
- 73.
Related to this was an anxiety about the historicist and contextualist theoretical foundations upon which many militant particularists based their objections. As critics like Terry Eagleton observed, there was a frustrating propensity of “radical” critics to appeal to historicism and contextualism to criticize liberalism without realizing they were a few centuries behind the curve. Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Carl Schmitt, and their pals had long recognized that the kind of sweeping, transcendental universalism was very vulnerable to philosophical and political critique on such a basis. But their arguments were mounted to defend forms of traditionalism which many radical critics, to say the least, would not like. The same irony continues to this day, with figures like Yoram Hazony arguing for forms of “historical empiricism” which sound a lot like something that would flow from the pen of Michel Foucault. This influence goes both ways of course. Intriguingly, by the twentieth and especially twenty-first centuries reactionaries had bathed in liberal waters for long enough to learn how to invoke the same kind of language successfully, albeit with very different ambitions in mind.
- 74.
See John Rawls. Political Liberalism: With a New Introduction and the ‘Reply of Habermas.’ (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996) at pg 10.
- 75.
Many scholastic Aristotelians objected of course. While I understand that many readers may think pissing them off is itself a reason for going forward with the shift, and I would sympathize deeply, many of their critiques had some merit. See Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue-A Study in Moral Theory: Third Edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre-Dame Press, 2007).
- 76.
See Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- 77.
Pierre Schlag. “The Empty Circles of Liberal Justification.” Michigan Law Review 96 (1997).
- 78.
Ronald Dworkin. Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).
- 79.
David Dyzenhaus. “Liberalism After the Fall: Schmitt, Rawls, and the Problem of Justification.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol 22, 1996.
- 80.
Perhaps just a small aside. I do think it is impossible, as someone like Dyzenhaus circa Schmitt would argue, to fully strip any political doctrine of a metaphysical core. Our normative convictions also presuppose some ontological conception of the way things are and should be, which invariably brings in metaphysics. But I do think it is wrong to suppose that all metaphysical and political views are equal in their stringency and thickness; some impose strict cognitive demands on adherents which preclude the incorporation of other views as a matter of principle, while others are sufficiently thin and flexible to overcome this problem in part. There is no doubt that the most interesting question, then, is the Schmittian one of how far even the most deliberately inclusive metaphysics can stretch before it has to make an exception and say this far and no further. But for some doctrines the number of exceptions is far fewer; certainly, liberalism does a better job than the fascist claptrap Schmitt wound up endorsing.
- 81.
For his most sophisticated philosophical take see Richard Rorty. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). For how this view cashes itself out politically see Richard Rorty. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
- 82.
See Peter Augustine Lawler. Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thought (Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992).
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McManus, M. (2022). The Roots of Post-modernity in Liberalism. In: The Emergence of Post-modernity at the Intersection of Liberalism, Capitalism, and Secularism. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98970-5_3
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