Adrian Wooldridge’s recent Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism does not just echo The Communist Manifesto in its language, it also mirrors its basic structure. Marx and Engels’s exhortation to workers around the world was not a free-standing bit of normative admonishment, but appealed to a theoretically informed historical argument about the role which class conflict has played in creating modern (i.e., mid-19th-century Western European) society, the form that class conflict now takes (capitalists versus proletariat) and the possibility of making society freer and more productive by fully socializing production. Much of Wooldridge’s book is likewise devoted to a historical account enlisted to support his thesis that liberalism created the modern world, but that it is now under threat. Rather than, as in the Communist Manifesto, calling on workers (‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’) to create something new, open-ended and unpredictable, Wooldridge issues a nostalgic summons to ‘centrists’ to rally around the liberalism which made the modern world such a wonderful place to live in.
Wooldridge, for many years a writer at the Economist, is well aware that ‘liberalism’ is a historically changing constellation of views, and has been, at various points, a very broad church indeed. But he nonetheless thinks it possible to discern a core of ‘eternal liberal values’; the historical variation, he thinks, is a question of shifting additions to this central stock of beliefs. He has two slightly different ways of specifying what this core is. Sometimes it is said to be the notion that ‘the individual must be cherished: his or her rights must be protected and autonomy preserved’. This general claim, of course, is almost completely vacuous until one specifies which particular rights need to be defended; there isn’t anything like a universal consensus on that. Does the individual have a right to meaningful employment (in what sense of ‘meaningful’ and under what conditions)? To healthcare? To live in an unpolluted environment?
It is somewhat unexpected that Wooldridge takes ‘autonomy’ to be an eternal value of liberalism because one strand of liberal thought, particularly influential in Britain, specifically denies this, asserting instead that liberals are interested in ‘negative freedom’, that is, the non-obstruction of action, and not in autonomy. The distinction is that a prisoner suffers from a restriction of her negative freedom because her ability to leave the prison is blocked, but her autonomy – her ability to decide how to act – might remain unimpaired. She can decide to do anything she wants, including walk to Land’s End; she just can’t execute this decision. More than a hundred years of discussion of these two concepts has resulted in something like a consensus that neither by itself is remotely adequate to serve as a guide to human action in a complex world.
If he wishes to remain within the confines of liberal thought and not become a Marxist, Wooldridge cannot avail himself of the obvious strategy, namely to claim that the basic value of liberalism is autonomy plus the power to carry out what one has decided – exactly the position Marx expounds and defends in Part III of the German Ideology and in later writings. When Wooldridge’s discussion becomes more concrete, he seems to specify the ‘eternal values’ of liberalism in a slightly different way, suggesting that the essence of liberalism is free markets and limited government – i.e., strong constraints on political intervention, but no limits on economic activity, especially on how much people may accumulate and how they should invest.
The book seems, prima facie, to be proposing an interesting thesis – that is, one which, even if not completely true, is at least contentful enough to be enlighteningly false. ‘Liberalism created the modern world’ does not, of course, mean that liberalism is responsible for such undeniable artefacts of the ‘modern’ (i.e., post-1800) world as the 19th– and 20th– century colonial empires, or the economic success of the most populous country in the world (China), or the political system of the geographically largest country (Russia), or the fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran turns out to be a resilient military adversary of the US and Israel, or the massive and increasing economic inequality which is such a striking feature of Western societies today.
It turns out that there is a difference between ‘the modern world’ and ‘modernity’, and not all features of one are characteristics of the other. China, then, presumably, is a massive feature of the modern world, but not an instance of ‘modernity’ (in the appropriate sense). It turns out, then, that ‘modernity’ designates those aspects of the modern world of which liberals approve. Thus ‘liberalism created the modern world’ turns out to mean ‘liberalism created those features of the modern world of which liberals approve’. One might think that this claim is in some sense true, but not very interesting. Even this, though, is not the case, because liberalism is said to have created (the properly) modern world by defeating fascism in Europe in the 1930 and 1940s (Part Two of Wooldridge’s book, entitled ‘How Liberalism Saved the World’). This makes it sound as if Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was a more important factor in defeating the Axis powers than the Red Army.
In Wooldridge’s view, the world of happy modernity is today threatened from several directions. He cites some of the usual suspects – the rise of ‘strongmen’, populist movements, religious fanaticism, leftist identity politics – but at a certain point he seems to lose control of his own argument and ends up listing resistance to foreign oppression as a threat to liberalism. Thus he seems to think it is illiberal for a Chinese politician to say: ‘Any foreign power that tries to bully, oppress and enslave us’ will be ‘battered and blooded from colliding with a great wall of steel forged by 1.4 billion Chinese people using flesh and blood’. To regard this as a threat to liberalism is extraordinary. Is the implication that a genuinely liberal regime would not resist a foreign power that tried to bully, oppress, and enslave its population? What kind of regime would not resist? Or is this just a prejudice against China? Does liberalism assert that the deficiencies of China’s political system give foreign powers the right to bully the Chinese, and that the Chinese people should not resist this? Unfortunately, this kind of lapse in argumentative discipline is a recurrent property of the book.
Wooldridge thinks that liberals have ‘a world to win’ (again adopting a phrase from the Communist Manifesto), but only if they can respond to the threats they face by ‘ridding liberalism of its recent taste for extremism’ (examples of which are ‘legalization of drugs regardless of the logic of addiction’ and ‘the rights of biological men who identified as women to enter women’s changing rooms and women’s prisons’). Centrists should rally round a regenerated liberalism, one adapted to the current world situation, and pursue moderation in politics and the via media advocated by Erasmus. The regenerated liberalism Wooldridge espouses seems to amount to no more than a demand that we recognize the importance and value of excellence, of authority (‘properly conceived’) and character, and that we try to `remoralize the ruling classes’, while otherwise apparently leaving our political, social, and economic institutions as they are.
It is hard to see how liberalism can provide a solution to the most pressing issues that confront us. We are going to do away with racism and neo-colonialism just by making markets ‘freer’ and limiting governmental intervention (albeit doing so with ‘moderation’)? Good luck with that. In the case of most of the problems humanity faces, ‘liberal’ policy proposals are not merely irrelevant but dangerous because they are virtually certain to make the problem in question much worse. Policies that depend on appeals to free markets and limited government can be reliably expected to increase the concentration of global wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, to increase mass poverty, and to worsen the overlapping ecological crises which threaten to make our planet uninhabitable.
That this particular attempt to present a coherent intellectual structure for understanding and acting in the modern world fails completely is not very important. But it is significant that such doomed ‘defences’ of liberalism keep being written and discussed seriously. Marx and Engels called communism a ‘ghost haunting Europe’. This has always seemed to me a poorly chosen metaphor because a ghost (Gespenst) is generally considered to be the returning soul of the dead, when communism is a hope for the future, not an exercise in nostalgia. Liberalism, meanwhile, is a vampire that sucks intellectual blood out of Western elites, making them perceptually and theoretically asthenic, but which has the uncanny power to come back to life again and again after having been declared dead.
What explains this power of liberalism to survive repeated refutation and rise from its own ashes? Marx thought that you could not get rid of religion simply by refuting its dogmatic content. It answered a human need, and you could not do away with it until you had satisfied that need. Similarly, in treating political ideologies like liberalism, it is crucial to consider this motivational aspect, not merely its ideological character. So what needs, desires, wants, perceived interests does liberalism satisfy? To answer this question perspicuously, one must consider the motivational landscape of two distinct groups. First, the tiny group of actors with great economic power have a clear and direct interest in resisting attempts to limit how they can invest their capital, how much they can accumulate and how they can use that power to influence politics. Obviously, liberalism with its strong emphasis on the need to protect individuals’ rights to own property and to use it as they see fit, is a virtually ideal vehicle for furthering the interests of members of this group.
The overwhelming majority of the human population, however, do not have huge economic assets. They lead lives that are in many ways, even in the best of cases, limited, sometimes painful and disappointing, or even deeply unsatisfactory. Arguably some of this might be existential, simply rooted in the human condition and not eliminable by any means available to humans. Death might be an instance of this. Much of it, though, has its origin in particular social, economic and political conditions. The trick of those with great economic power is to mobilize the existing dissatisfaction of those without economic power and use it to fuel an imaginary identification among the have-nots with some of the basic attitudes associated with liberalism. The manoeuvre works by funnelling dissatisfaction with one’s life into a particular channel and imposing on it a particular format: satisfaction and dissatisfaction basically have to do with the ownership of goods and assets and with consumer behaviour. Life would be more satisfactory if individuals had a choice between a greater array of goods. Freedom means consumer choice.
I am compensated for the loss of social goods – the destruction of communities, infrastructure, public services and the environment, the neutralization of political action, the lack of meaningful work and of collective control in the workplace – by being offered an ever more dazzling assortment of new opportunities to consume, these days mostly shiny electronic gadgets of one kind or another. In this imaginary construct, any threat to control the investment policy of an economically powerful individual or corporation is also construed as a direct threat to my freedom to control what has been made to feel the most important part of my life, my consumption, and thus also to my identity. Anyone who points out that some have much greater freedom (i.e., consumer choice) than others is fobbed off with a discussion of ‘opportunity’. We all had ‘opportunities’ to increase our powers to consume, with the implication that those who failed to take them have only themselves to blame. Wooldridge admits that what he calls the ‘ladder of opportunity’ may be broken, but he has a remedy – an even bigger dollop of liberalism.
Wooldridge begins his book with a discussion of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) in which a naive, malleable young man, Hans Castorp, travels to a sanatorium in Switzerland and ends up spending seven years there, even though there is really nothing wrong with him. Wooldridge correctly interprets the sanatorium as a kind of living encyclopaedia of the various forms of human decadence that could be found in European societies before the First World War. The main part of the plot concerns the tension between two figures who represent opposing worldviews and who struggle for control of Castorp’s soul: Lodovico Settembrini, an Italian humanist and committed liberal, and the Communist Jesuit Leo Naphta. At the end of the story Naphta commits suicide and Settembrini suffers what seems to be a nervous breakdown. Wooldridge identifies so completely and uncritically with the traditional liberalism that Settembrini represents that he seems not to recognize that for Mann, Settembrini and Naphta are strictly parallel freaks: their ideologies each in their own way ludicrous, pernicious and decadent.
Settembrini took ‘liberalism to be responsible for everything glorious in the comfortable world he inhabited’, which is a good summary of the book Wooldridge has written. The last we see of Settembrini he is telling Castorp that he is going to try to put his talents as a writer at the disposal of Italy and encourage it to join whichever side of the coming war is recommended by a calculation of its own sacred self-interest (heiliger Eigennutz). If this is what liberalism amounts to when the chips are down, and this book gives us no reason to think otherwise, then it seems a particularly cognitively impoverished and morally repellent approach to the world. Who would wish to ‘unite’ around such a doctrine?
Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Liberalism’s Echoes’, NLR 150.