On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 01:18, David B. Shemano <[email protected]> wrote: > Jim Devine writes: > >>> BTW, why is it that money libertarians like the word "liberty" while >>> most other people like the word "freedom"? Most people seem to use the >>> two words interchangeably. > > Here is a theory. "Money libertarians," as you call them, are the > contemporary descenants of 19th Century "Liberalism," which term is rooted in > "Libertas," and Libertas is at root a legal status of a free-man (i.e. not a > slave). The term "freedom," on the other hand, through the efforts of > Germans like Hegel, and then transmitted to the English speaking world > through interpreters like T.H. Green, became associated with what you call > "positive freedom" (i.e. a free-man who makes a bad choice, or is limited by > circumstance in making choices, is not really "free"). Therefore, to "money > libertarians." liberty is a status relationship between man and the state, > while for the modern day Hegelians, freedom is more of a psychological state > of a man. Money libertarians, aware (contra Mr. Andrews) of the efforts of > the modern day Hegelians to minimize the importance of legal status in order > to justify state power, therefore, prefer "liberty" rather than "freedom" as > the ideal. > > David Shemano
I didn't say some of them weren't aware, I said most of the fashionable libertarians today have no clue about the history of these arguments. They haven't even bothered to only read Rothbard's critique of Hegel (which seems to be where you sit) or to take on Berlin's understanding of the problems of Postive liberty (which he also attributes to Hegel): they simply assume both words are transparent and use them interchangeably. I think you're pretty right on when you make the distinction--as well as the argument for why--but I don't think everyone is aware of this argument or what those words mean in context. This is especially in US culture where they are used as what Hayek called weasle words where the speaker's use of them sucked all the substance out of the word. But to all of your above I'd add that there is always a political element to why these arguments are used--one which you are leaving out. Again, what you are saying implicitly is that there is some natural law which says people should be allowed to keep whatever they have and do with it as they please. It is a natural law that can't be bothered with the history of how one came to have what one has, except to argue that they worked hard one way or another to get it. It becomes a tautological argument: if you have it, you must have worked for it therefore you must be justified in owning it and the state must be justified in protecting you in your ownership. When you add to this the similarly tautological idea (inherited from people like von Mises) that any contract into which one enters is voluntary (i.e. uncoerced) and rational (therefore, if one entered into it, it must be voluntary and rational) then the idea that the state is just there to enforce contracts and protect ownership can be pitched as individual liberty and even freedom to everyone. The argument, however, has been not over whether the state should enforce positive liberty--whether it should make people free in your definition--but over the fact that the negative understanding of liberty is only legitimate as such based on this natural law notion of ownership. It is only with that notion that the state can be said to be protecting something that was already in existence, that it isn't said to be basically helping collude with owners against non-owners. For in actuality, the protection of property is a form of positive liberty from the perspective of the non-owner. It makes them freer to operate in society than those without property--and often secures ownership for a select individual over what were common pool resources and/or commonly produced values. This property--like the "freedom" you discuss above--only exists because the state takes positive action to enforce the owners' claims to it. And when the ownership of property by this select few makes it more difficult for the rest of the population to either 1) own property themselves or 2) simply exist this creates a conundrum. The protection of property in this circumstance--particularly when there is a clear memory of there being a common area for self-sustained production--is a form of coercion which forces those without property into contract relations with those with it. The coercion of the state, in other words, that libertarians fear is actually very helpful for the protection of property. And this liberty which is "a status relationship between man and the state" becomes more of a three way relationship: some men and the state and some other men and the state. And when the state is only there to protect property, it becomes obvious who it is there to serve--which also makes it difficult to sustain as a political apparatus (that is, unless you have a well developed set of ideological apparatuses. pace the cultural marxists and Glenn Beck). In other words, it is a circumstantial set of observations, not just an abstract theory of freedom or liberty, as Berlin would have it, solely base on psychological liberation. To quote Habermas, in his work on the public sphere, "As soon as the state itself came to the fore as the bearer of the societal order, it had to go beyond the negative determinations of basic rights and draw upon a positive directive notion as to how 'justice' was to be realized through the interventions that characterize the social-welfare state." This is not because of some poisonous set of ideas promoted by the Germans (as Hayek would have it): it is a structural reality. Polanyi (Karl not Michael) said that ignoring this would inevitably lead to some sort of fascism--which he defined (somewhat in line with the one you are suggesting) as only along the access of totalitarian control, where FDR is just a different kind of fascist than Hitler or Mussolini. It's worth noting in these cases, that part of the reason this seemed like a good plan at the time is that it was working better than people had expected in the Soviet Union. But now I've gone full bore from the more political side of the argument to the economic one. The point in either case is when the state supports a certain economic regime, it still relies on the political legitimacy of the state. If Libertarians accuse Communists of forgetting about the first part (or about the importance of markets for growth, which is the current economic orthodoxy upheld by the state) then I would say Libertarians often presume the latter--i.e. that just by having an elegant description of human liberty they will legitimate whatever oppression or hardship it bears in actual practice, pegging it instead on what you see as the only other variable, "a free-man who makes a bad choice." That you somewhat dismiss the idea that circumstances can make some apparently free choices rather unfree is, again, to presume this is a settled question. In short, there are many forms of social coercion: the state is not the only bearer of violence and its refusal to intervene when other forms of coercion are undertaken by members of its associated society through purportedly legal means is just a legitimation of what Hale called "policy making by unelected minorities." This opens up another dimension which is closer to the Realists, which is that laws don't mean what we say that they mean: they can't be interpreted to mean something until they have been active in society and we can see how they actually effect people. In this, the abstract libertarian understanding of liberty is obviously also concerned with consequences down the line (i.e. the whole slippery slope where national healthcare will end up in pograms), but they focus too much on the coercion of the state directly rather than the way direct coercion fits within the larger context of power whereby indirect coercion of the state made possible by people who the state will protect above others is actually a greater threat to individual liberty than that of the state itself. As C. B. MacPherson observed, the same was once true of the support of liberty against the state--when the state was an unelected monarchy. But the support of the market (and property) against democratic pressure to have a more egalitarian society is problematic: in other words, it is problematic (both ethically and politically) to support the market as the tide that raises all boats in the face of increasing pressure by people who can barely survive and evidence that inequality is increasing exponentially. As he also mentioned, the support of the market as a mechanism for dynamism and growth also seemed necessary, but this is, again, introduces a utilitarian element to the justification of the state--one which is possibly undermined when, say, it completely ruins the national economy for a generation. Then again, as Doug and others have just observed in relation to California privatizing its university system, the neo-liberal orthodoxy seems to be weathering the storm rather well. I fear we've gotten away from the subject at hand, but I'd say that Jim's three dimensional model is a pretty good one. And, in any case, I appreciate the conversation as it is certainly important to be clear about what we mean. I also assume that part of David's inquiry is motivated by the fact that Hitler, for the "classical liberal" is the primary example of the slippery slope of the "left." It is interesting to note, in either case, that it is difficult to pin down exactly what either side means--and how it relates to the way it was/is executed in practice. It's worth noting that, in the 1930s, Hitler was a fairly big celebrity in the US--appearing in home and garden magazines for his design expertise--and Stalin and the USSR were vilified and hated in the same culture. If there is a continuum, in other words, the US is closer to Nazi Germany than the USSR. This seems to make the whole definition turn on private property. That the US and Nazi Germany intervened in the market and set up clear connections with corporate, industrial entities is very different than the state taking over all industry and claiming itself as the distributor of wealth. In these two cases, the corporatist model of state capitalism was just an administered form of the economic orthodoxy at the time. In this sense, it is not at all different from the state in the US today making neo-liberal market imperatives predominant--look at the number of contractors working for government and the military--(whatever the underlying contradictions made evident by its residual welfare apparatises) but it is very different than the state actually nationalizing the entities in question. Even today, when they bail out car companies or financial institutions, they are leery of stepping in as the actual administrator, in many ways avoiding even the basic principles of neo-liberal management because it would possibly lead to the appearance of an overly leftist intrusion into the ownership of private property. But the argument that we should have let the car companies fail (and the finance industries) ignores the fact that these were only independent entities because of the argument that they would be more stable, productive, and socially beneficial as private entities. When they violated this rule, it seems, politically, that there had to be some intervention. It is hardly creeping fascism when the people in charge insist they are not going to take over the industries in question: in fact, IIRC, Bernake was influenced in his decision to bail out the banks by having read none other than Milton Friedman's account of what caused the depression. That this strategy is focused too much on the owners of capital and the monetary understanding of liberty is precisely the result of this framework of analysis. Strangely enough, it is driving the money libertarians crazy. go figure. s _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
