I'm sure that the whole "progressive" label worked a lot better before the world wars. Back then, the idea of "historical progress" was plausible and attractive, so it was okay that the progressive reforms were a grab-bag with no single coherent goal.
I'm not sure that the piecemeal thing is going to work nowadays. And although it would certainly be better than the current direction we're heading, I'm not sure that a return to the happy days of Fordism is going to be possible. What we need is a coherent alternative to the national security state -- which is admittedly a very seductive vision of society for people, but not immutable.
Yeah, I get puzzled by the geneological connection between the 'Classical liberalism' that libertarians are always on about, and liberalism as the majority ideology of the modern Democratic party. I'm interested in the latter rather than the former, but I'm not satisfied by the explanations I've gotten of the latter.
where a progressive says "We should do X, because I've thought about it, and I have a convincing argument that X is a good idea", a liberal is historically less certain that those kinds of arguments are sufficient to justify fundamental changes, and ends up cautiously tweaking policies, rather than forthrightly doing what seems best.
It sounds to me as though there could be (edmund) Burkean arguments for this; liberals are suspicious of massive attempts to remake society because they can be so harmful, or something like that. Which Rauchway (via the rather brilliant Brinkley) seems to suggest comes partly from reactions to problems with earlier massive social engineering experiments. Excessive certainty about the solutions to the problems you see can lead to great harm.
That's why someone might want to be a liberal rather than a progressive. I'm not saying we should. (Cf. the Kotsko/Emerson complaint about 'reality-based'.)
Good point, Matt. A lot might also depend on the content of X, since there are classical-liberal reasons for limiting state authority rather than using it to accomplish certain ostensibly good ends. (I'm thinking of the eudaimonism in On Liberty here, which. allegedly, gives us utilitarian reasons for these limits.)
Adam, a book I've referred to before in response to you, Christopher Lasch's The True and Only Heaven starts from the question "Why do liberals particularly still believe in progress?" He identified a whole counter-tradition, of which Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society was a high point, of dissent from Liberalism.
I must say, Lasch convinced me, by bringing together so many strands of thought: Carlyle, Emerson, William James, Brownson, Niebuhr and many others, that I had explored on my own, and finding consistent themes. I would now not describe myself as either a liberal or a progressive because of it.
Exasperation with liberals, that becomes a kind of allergic reaction, is an observed phenomenon I often feel myself.
Atrios quotes from an excellent diary that Rep. Louise Slaughter has posted on DKos. It is a speech in opposition to the horrendous "Detainee Bill", a.k.a. "Omnibus Torture & Tyranny Act".
I read it. I went to Slaughter's site. I donated some money.
Now I'm off to phone my Senators to explain to tell them that I'll do the same for them when they take a stand.
(bonus question: does that make me a progressive or liberal?)
Hi, everyone. Let me try to continue answering as best I can.
FL: Does it strike anyone else as weird that the discussion of liberalism goes back only as far as the early 20th century?
I had actually considered putting in a comment to the effect that someone not an American, or else a tiresome American, or else a philosopher, would be sure to remind me that in almost every other context "liberal" doesn't mean what Americans think it means; that indeed it means almost the opposite. But I thought, I think rightly, it would have been rude to say that.
It's a legitimate question as to how you get from c18 liberalism to c20 liberalism; the short answer is, "politics". The British Liberal party threw in with Labour sometime in the early c20, abandoning its classical liberalism in favor of "new liberalism," i.e., a more interventionist, social-welfare kind of program. Generally, traditional European parties moved toward more interventionist policies specifically out of fear of socialism or communism. They modified their political philosophies accordingly, but I think it's at the least a draw as to which came first -- the philosophical innovation or the political motive to adopt it. This draws, again, on James Kloppenberg's book, which you can't knock off in an afternoon, but has (in my case) repaid re-reading.
That was the short answer, remember? The long answer is, there are ambiguities even in classical liberalism. Smith favored more government than modern acolytes tend to think. There is the other part of liberalism -- J. S. Mill liberalism.
Yes, I know, the long answer was shorter than the short answer. That's because I didn't do the long answer justice.
I think that the contemporary switch to "progressive" from "liberal" has a lot to do with escaping the stigma. But "progressive" sounds more activist and positive.
For a lot of people "liberal" has come to mean "permissive" with regard to childraising, education, law enforcement, sex, and drugs. (Including some people who call themselves liberals -- the social liberal / fiscal conservatives.) And a lot of liberalism really is non-intervention and individual freedom, so this interpretation isn't far off.
There's a category of words like "justice" whose definition is uncertain, but which are agreed upon to be very good things. "Liberal" used to be almost like that, so that a lot of arguments took the form, "What liberalism really is, is...." But not so much any more.
There's a book by DuBary on the Liberal Tradition in China which basically defines liberalism is such a way that it's just barely possible to cherrypick instantiations of aspects of liberalism from various places in Chinese history. But China really was never very liberal at all -- a specifically illiberal society, like many others.
6: After two recommendations, it officially goes on "the list." I need to read [the fucking huge] Nature and Destiny of Man first, though.
(Have you ever noticed that Reinhold Niebuhr has a real penchant for titles featuring the word "man"?)
I'm definitely developing a liberal allergy. I had the worst sneezing fit the other night -- right after checking Unfogged comments. If I try to read Daily Kos, I break out in hives.
Matt Weiner: Which Rauchway (via the rather brilliant Brinkley) seems to suggest comes partly from reactions to problems with earlier massive social engineering experiments.
This is almost what I think Brinkley would say, but not quite. The question is, how do you get from aggressive forms of progressivism, the kind of experimental agenda characteristic of earlier c20 American politics, to pretty cautious New Deal liberalism? The answer is, I think, as I said above, "politics," but a different kind of politics.
Drawing on Brinkley again, we should regard 1937 as a really critical year. This is, remember, the start of FDR's second term, he's been reelected in a landslide, you've had all kinds of long-time Progressive wishes fulfilled (old-age and unemployment insurance, federal regulation of securities, recognition of labor's right to organize; others). But a lot of the more Progressive elements of the early New Deal have been shot down by the Supreme Court -- the more interventionist programs that assume the free market is permanently broken, or proven inept.
FDR tries to pack the Supreme Court with justices more sympathetic to his cause. The plan backfires, he loses even elements of his own party in Congress. In fact, Southern Democrats were always pretty leery of more-ambitious schemes anyway. From this point, it's harder for FDR to push for similarly ambitious schemes; he's lost the whole-hearted support he earlier had and the unfriendliness of the Supreme Court to such schemes remains (though the Court does affirm the constitutionality of Social Security; would it have done otherwise? open question).
Also in this year, you have the so-called "Roosevelt recession" -- you had a recovery, FDR says great, let's back off all this wacky spending, and the economy plunged again into recession. The lesson often supposed to have been learned from the 1937 recession is, spend money in a downturn in keeping with Keynesian principles (the General Theory had just been published); that you don't need to meddle with the structure of the economy, just prime the pump.
Those two episodes by themselves see the checking of the more Progressive elements of the New Deal and the dawning of a new era in which you see New Deal liberals as people who understand that the free market is more or less jolly good, it just needs the occasional Keynesian stimulus. Guess what provides the real-live Keynesian stimulus? War. Which is where you get liberal complicity in the national security state, as Kotsko identifies it above.
So via Brinkley, that's a liberal: someone who accepts the market as the best provider and disposer of wealth, but who's prepared to have the state intervene periodically when the market breaks down or, (and this gets into the territory of the Altercation piece) who's increasingly willing to use the state to rectify long-standing structural market failures -- e.g., the failure of the vigorous free market to include the South at all and African Americans especially.
11: Yeah, sounds appealing when you put it like that. There's a G.K. Chesterton quote that I've always thought made the case for conservatism terribly well:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
Now, I think this leaves all sorts of scope for things that need changing; but the basic point, that if you have a system that functions at all, it is best to change only the parts you are fairly certain that you understand. (This argument becomes less powerful as the system functions less well -- a lot of New Deal programs weren't all that well theoretically justified, but the status quo was lousy enough at the time not to be presumptively preferable.)
Teddy! At the age of around 10, I dressed up as Teddy Roosevelt for Halloween. I had riding pants and a cowboy hat, short hair, wire-rimmed glasses, a round face and a whole lot of buck teeth. I was surprisingly convincing. (And, of course, a very weird little girl.)
11,16: I'm sympathetic to this point of view, but I don't like identifying it with Burke. Burke himself was a mystifier and the originator in English of persistantly reoccuring perverse reactionary arguments. His great contemporary, Hazlitt, both appreciated his quality and took his measure, but is no where near so well known today. A good contemporary source for what I just said is Albert O. Hirschmann's The Rhetoric of Reaction
I think the caution isn't philisophically unfounded at all. Liberalism has a relatively expansive conception of the rights of individuals. It may not be as expansive as, say, libertarians, but it is stall large enough to make liberals very nervous about having the state charge around setting five year plans and such.
I also think modern american liberalism specifically has really taken to heart the various lessons of burke/hayek about state action destroying the intricate social framework that makes society actually function. This consideration isn't decisive, but it does mitigate strongly against the state pursuing projects, even if those projects have good goals. There is a reason liberalism often tries to place Jane Jacob's under its banner.
Here's an example of contemporary liberals (as opposed to progressives) deriving a position from doubt. (A TNR commenter expressed what I hope was sincere but suspect was snide "surprise" that I hadn't cited this exchange; the reason was I hadn't got the current NYRoB in the mail yet. Some of us live in the sticks.)
A lot of conservatives/libertarians have made fairly vigerous attempts to claim her. They see e.g. The Birth and Death of Great American Cities as a polemic against the alleged central planning instincts of arrogant liberals. Obviously, there are all sorts of problems with this, but I also think that liberalism did become significantly more cautious about social engineering specifically in response to the arguments of Jacob's and others. Of course, this leads to various goofy situtations where conservatives attack liberals for overestimating the efficacy of the state and then march off to utterly reengineer Iraqi society.
I don't know -- Chicago seems to be doing alright with dictatorial central planning. I only hope that there is a Richard III in the works to assume his father's throne.
3:I sure can, although I may not be able to articulate it.
14:Not necessarily "war", but a large defense budget. Some here might remember me arguing that a draft and large standing army was/is an essential part of post-WWII liberalism and Nixon's "volunteer army" was a reactionary tactic with many bad consequences for the left.
21.---I wouldn't call him the originator of some of those recurring tropes. Also, have you read the American War and Hastings trial speeches? There's some excellement material in there. It's not that I identify with Burke, certainly not the Burke of the anti-Jacobin phase, but more that I take some strains of his argument very seriously (as did Hazlitt).
though the Court does affirm the constitutionality of Social Security; would it have done otherwise? open question
I'm not quite sure what this quoted phrase is doing in the comment, but just wanted to note that my understanding is that at the time the upholding of minimum wage legislation (West Coast Hotel) was of the greatest import for public perception of the court as reactionary or not.
Did anyone offer Prof. Rauchway a fruit basket when he first showed up in comments, or are we trying to be serious here?
(I'm actually kind of embarrassed by the fruit basket. I was worried that someone would link to it for TEC, and that she would reasonably think it was a studied insult. But what the hell, someone wants to link the fruit basket for the man, go crazy.)
But this thread should help explain a lot of things.
1) Economics roolzs. What did Aristotle say? All politics is about the distribution of resources, tp paraphrase.
2)HRC's pro-business pro-military positions. "Liberalism" is a "conservatism", a Schumpeter-based plan to preserve the existing economic/social order.
3) A real "progressive" seeks radical change. Stirling Newberry, last time I checked, had all but abandoned the Democratic Party and was not so far from abandoning the very idea of political parties and political heirarchies. To the extent I understand the word, "Syndicalism". (May he come along and eviscerate me if wrong.)
I'm not quite sure what this quoted phrase is doing in the comment, but just wanted to note that my understanding is that at the time the upholding of minimum wage legislation (West Coast Hotel) was of the greatest import for public perception of the court as reactionary or not.
I take Social Security to have been much more iffy (and arguably more important) than the minimum-wage legislation. Some legal historians (see G. Edward White) argue that West Coast Hotel doesn't represent the radical break you might think it does. But Helvering v. Davis reflects a much more, let's say, free jurisprudence, doesn't it? Cardozo's opinion reads something like, "it's a good idea, so it's constitutional." No, that's unfair:
The purge of nationwide calamity that began in 1929 has taught us many lessons. Not the least is the solidarity of interests that may once have seemed to be divided.... the ill is all one, or at least not greatly different, whether men are thrown out of work because there is no longer work to do or because the disabilities of age make them incapable of doing it. Rescue becomes necessary irrespective of the cause. The hope behind this statute is to save men and women from the rigors of the poor house, as well as from the haunting fear that such a lot awaits them when journey's end is near.
JM, Hazlitt used whether a person took Burke seriously as a test of quality. We are definitely on the same page. I know you are interested in rhetoric, and I recommend the Hirschmann highly. Hirschmann's turn toward "self-subversion" is particularly interesting.
Is there an edition of Hazlitt anyone recommends? I've seen him recommended in enough contexts that I've had him on my list to buy when I come across something, but I never have.
Thanks for the Hirschmann recommendation, IDP; I'll have to see if I can check it out of a library somewhere, as I currently have a moratorium on buying books.
Just back after about an hour and a half. Bromwich's Hazlitt, The Mind of a Critic is a very readable study, making big claims and backing them up. Very highly recommended.
13 - Nature and Destiny of Man is worth the irritation, despite it being as slow and boring as something made of ordinary physical wood pulp and ink could possibly be. Neibuhr's definition of "sin" as fundamentally related to a need for security against those things which cannot be secured against has stuck with me to this day.
He's more-or-less my age, and went to grad school at the same time. I think of him as having the career I might have had. There's a lot about Wordsworth, and Burke, already in the Hazlitt, which started as a dissertation, so these other books are a natural development.
I've also been wondering about a slightly different split: between what Michael Sandel calls liberals and communitarians. In his definition, liberals are people who are concerned with individual rights and liberties--sometimes so concerned that they forget the broader needs of the community and our responsibilities to eachother. Do communitarians fit with the progressives?
(Interestingly, in his recent collection of essays, he claimed that it was wrong for liberals to criticize the invocation of religion in political debate on first amendment/ establishment clause grounds. No liberal should tolerate the propogation of religion through government funds, but it's wrong, he argues, to shunt religious values and arguments out of the debate about policy entirely--since these clearly matter to a lot of people. If you want to shut out religious viewpoints and religiously inspired arguments, then you have to disavow MLK Jr. too.)
Does it strike anyone else as weird that the discussion of liberalism goes back only as far as the early 20th century?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:26 AM
I'm sure that the whole "progressive" label worked a lot better before the world wars. Back then, the idea of "historical progress" was plausible and attractive, so it was okay that the progressive reforms were a grab-bag with no single coherent goal.
I'm not sure that the piecemeal thing is going to work nowadays. And although it would certainly be better than the current direction we're heading, I'm not sure that a return to the happy days of Fordism is going to be possible. What we need is a coherent alternative to the national security state -- which is admittedly a very seductive vision of society for people, but not immutable.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:28 AM
Yeah, I get puzzled by the geneological connection between the 'Classical liberalism' that libertarians are always on about, and liberalism as the majority ideology of the modern Democratic party. I'm interested in the latter rather than the former, but I'm not satisfied by the explanations I've gotten of the latter.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:31 AM
where a progressive says "We should do X, because I've thought about it, and I have a convincing argument that X is a good idea", a liberal is historically less certain that those kinds of arguments are sufficient to justify fundamental changes, and ends up cautiously tweaking policies, rather than forthrightly doing what seems best.
It sounds to me as though there could be (edmund) Burkean arguments for this; liberals are suspicious of massive attempts to remake society because they can be so harmful, or something like that. Which Rauchway (via the rather brilliant Brinkley) seems to suggest comes partly from reactions to problems with earlier massive social engineering experiments. Excessive certainty about the solutions to the problems you see can lead to great harm.
That's why someone might want to be a liberal rather than a progressive. I'm not saying we should. (Cf. the Kotsko/Emerson complaint about 'reality-based'.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:34 AM
Good point, Matt. A lot might also depend on the content of X, since there are classical-liberal reasons for limiting state authority rather than using it to accomplish certain ostensibly good ends. (I'm thinking of the eudaimonism in On Liberty here, which. allegedly, gives us utilitarian reasons for these limits.)
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:38 AM
Adam, a book I've referred to before in response to you, Christopher Lasch's The True and Only Heaven starts from the question "Why do liberals particularly still believe in progress?" He identified a whole counter-tradition, of which Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society was a high point, of dissent from Liberalism.
I must say, Lasch convinced me, by bringing together so many strands of thought: Carlyle, Emerson, William James, Brownson, Niebuhr and many others, that I had explored on my own, and finding consistent themes. I would now not describe myself as either a liberal or a progressive because of it.
Exasperation with liberals, that becomes a kind of allergic reaction, is an observed phenomenon I often feel myself.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:41 AM
Wasn't this basically what I/we said?
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:42 AM
4: So a liberal would be a progressive with Burkean-conservative (rather than current 'conservative') tendencies?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:43 AM
Atrios quotes from an excellent diary that Rep. Louise Slaughter has posted on DKos. It is a speech in opposition to the horrendous "Detainee Bill", a.k.a. "Omnibus Torture & Tyranny Act".
I read it. I went to Slaughter's site. I donated some money.
Now I'm off to phone my Senators to explain to tell them that I'll do the same for them when they take a stand.
(bonus question: does that make me a progressive or liberal?)
Posted by kid bitzer | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:43 AM
Hi, everyone. Let me try to continue answering as best I can.
FL: Does it strike anyone else as weird that the discussion of liberalism goes back only as far as the early 20th century?
I had actually considered putting in a comment to the effect that someone not an American, or else a tiresome American, or else a philosopher, would be sure to remind me that in almost every other context "liberal" doesn't mean what Americans think it means; that indeed it means almost the opposite. But I thought, I think rightly, it would have been rude to say that.
It's a legitimate question as to how you get from c18 liberalism to c20 liberalism; the short answer is, "politics". The British Liberal party threw in with Labour sometime in the early c20, abandoning its classical liberalism in favor of "new liberalism," i.e., a more interventionist, social-welfare kind of program. Generally, traditional European parties moved toward more interventionist policies specifically out of fear of socialism or communism. They modified their political philosophies accordingly, but I think it's at the least a draw as to which came first -- the philosophical innovation or the political motive to adopt it. This draws, again, on James Kloppenberg's book, which you can't knock off in an afternoon, but has (in my case) repaid re-reading.
That was the short answer, remember? The long answer is, there are ambiguities even in classical liberalism. Smith favored more government than modern acolytes tend to think. There is the other part of liberalism -- J. S. Mill liberalism.
Yes, I know, the long answer was shorter than the short answer. That's because I didn't do the long answer justice.
Posted by Eric Rauchway | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 9:51 AM
So a liberal would be a progressive with Burkean-conservative (rather than current 'conservative') tendencies?
Holy crap, I've finally found a label for myself.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:01 AM
I think that the contemporary switch to "progressive" from "liberal" has a lot to do with escaping the stigma. But "progressive" sounds more activist and positive.
For a lot of people "liberal" has come to mean "permissive" with regard to childraising, education, law enforcement, sex, and drugs. (Including some people who call themselves liberals -- the social liberal / fiscal conservatives.) And a lot of liberalism really is non-intervention and individual freedom, so this interpretation isn't far off.
There's a category of words like "justice" whose definition is uncertain, but which are agreed upon to be very good things. "Liberal" used to be almost like that, so that a lot of arguments took the form, "What liberalism really is, is...." But not so much any more.
There's a book by DuBary on the Liberal Tradition in China which basically defines liberalism is such a way that it's just barely possible to cherrypick instantiations of aspects of liberalism from various places in Chinese history. But China really was never very liberal at all -- a specifically illiberal society, like many others.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:04 AM
6: After two recommendations, it officially goes on "the list." I need to read [the fucking huge] Nature and Destiny of Man first, though.
(Have you ever noticed that Reinhold Niebuhr has a real penchant for titles featuring the word "man"?)
I'm definitely developing a liberal allergy. I had the worst sneezing fit the other night -- right after checking Unfogged comments. If I try to read Daily Kos, I break out in hives.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:05 AM
Matt Weiner: Which Rauchway (via the rather brilliant Brinkley) seems to suggest comes partly from reactions to problems with earlier massive social engineering experiments.
This is almost what I think Brinkley would say, but not quite. The question is, how do you get from aggressive forms of progressivism, the kind of experimental agenda characteristic of earlier c20 American politics, to pretty cautious New Deal liberalism? The answer is, I think, as I said above, "politics," but a different kind of politics.
Drawing on Brinkley again, we should regard 1937 as a really critical year. This is, remember, the start of FDR's second term, he's been reelected in a landslide, you've had all kinds of long-time Progressive wishes fulfilled (old-age and unemployment insurance, federal regulation of securities, recognition of labor's right to organize; others). But a lot of the more Progressive elements of the early New Deal have been shot down by the Supreme Court -- the more interventionist programs that assume the free market is permanently broken, or proven inept.
FDR tries to pack the Supreme Court with justices more sympathetic to his cause. The plan backfires, he loses even elements of his own party in Congress. In fact, Southern Democrats were always pretty leery of more-ambitious schemes anyway. From this point, it's harder for FDR to push for similarly ambitious schemes; he's lost the whole-hearted support he earlier had and the unfriendliness of the Supreme Court to such schemes remains (though the Court does affirm the constitutionality of Social Security; would it have done otherwise? open question).
Also in this year, you have the so-called "Roosevelt recession" -- you had a recovery, FDR says great, let's back off all this wacky spending, and the economy plunged again into recession. The lesson often supposed to have been learned from the 1937 recession is, spend money in a downturn in keeping with Keynesian principles (the General Theory had just been published); that you don't need to meddle with the structure of the economy, just prime the pump.
Those two episodes by themselves see the checking of the more Progressive elements of the New Deal and the dawning of a new era in which you see New Deal liberals as people who understand that the free market is more or less jolly good, it just needs the occasional Keynesian stimulus. Guess what provides the real-live Keynesian stimulus? War. Which is where you get liberal complicity in the national security state, as Kotsko identifies it above.
So via Brinkley, that's a liberal: someone who accepts the market as the best provider and disposer of wealth, but who's prepared to have the state intervene periodically when the market breaks down or, (and this gets into the territory of the Altercation piece) who's increasingly willing to use the state to rectify long-standing structural market failures -- e.g., the failure of the vigorous free market to include the South at all and African Americans especially.
Posted by Eric Rauchway | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:09 AM
I'm so, so sorry for putting that logjam into your free-flowing comments stream....
Posted by Eric Rauchway | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:11 AM
11: Yeah, sounds appealing when you put it like that. There's a G.K. Chesterton quote that I've always thought made the case for conservatism terribly well:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
Now, I think this leaves all sorts of scope for things that need changing; but the basic point, that if you have a system that functions at all, it is best to change only the parts you are fairly certain that you understand. (This argument becomes less powerful as the system functions less well -- a lot of New Deal programs weren't all that well theoretically justified, but the status quo was lousy enough at the time not to be presumptively preferable.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:12 AM
a tiresome American...philosopher
ID'd! Put this on my about page, Ogged.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:12 AM
A lot of the early progressives were Republicans.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:15 AM
A lot of the early progressives were Republicans.
I actually mentioned that in the TNR piece. There are good reasons for it.
Posted by Eric Rauchway | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:16 AM
Teddy! At the age of around 10, I dressed up as Teddy Roosevelt for Halloween. I had riding pants and a cowboy hat, short hair, wire-rimmed glasses, a round face and a whole lot of buck teeth. I was surprisingly convincing. (And, of course, a very weird little girl.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:21 AM
11,16: I'm sympathetic to this point of view, but I don't like identifying it with Burke. Burke himself was a mystifier and the originator in English of persistantly reoccuring perverse reactionary arguments. His great contemporary, Hazlitt, both appreciated his quality and took his measure, but is no where near so well known today. A good contemporary source for what I just said is Albert O. Hirschmann's The Rhetoric of Reaction
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:24 AM
I think the caution isn't philisophically unfounded at all. Liberalism has a relatively expansive conception of the rights of individuals. It may not be as expansive as, say, libertarians, but it is stall large enough to make liberals very nervous about having the state charge around setting five year plans and such.
I also think modern american liberalism specifically has really taken to heart the various lessons of burke/hayek about state action destroying the intricate social framework that makes society actually function. This consideration isn't decisive, but it does mitigate strongly against the state pursuing projects, even if those projects have good goals. There is a reason liberalism often tries to place Jane Jacob's under its banner.
Posted by glenn | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:25 AM
Where else would Jane Jacobs belong?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:26 AM
Here's an example of contemporary liberals (as opposed to progressives) deriving a position from doubt. (A TNR commenter expressed what I hope was sincere but suspect was snide "surprise" that I hadn't cited this exchange; the reason was I hadn't got the current NYRoB in the mail yet. Some of us live in the sticks.)
Posted by Eric Rauchway | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:30 AM
A lot of conservatives/libertarians have made fairly vigerous attempts to claim her. They see e.g. The Birth and Death of Great American Cities as a polemic against the alleged central planning instincts of arrogant liberals. Obviously, there are all sorts of problems with this, but I also think that liberalism did become significantly more cautious about social engineering specifically in response to the arguments of Jacob's and others. Of course, this leads to various goofy situtations where conservatives attack liberals for overestimating the efficacy of the state and then march off to utterly reengineer Iraqi society.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:35 AM
Example: http://www.mises.org/story/1247
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:35 AM
21: Oakeshott? I don't actually read these people.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:40 AM
I don't know -- Chicago seems to be doing alright with dictatorial central planning. I only hope that there is a Richard III in the works to assume his father's throne.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:41 AM
3:I sure can, although I may not be able to articulate it.
14:Not necessarily "war", but a large defense budget. Some here might remember me arguing that a draft and large standing army was/is an essential part of post-WWII liberalism and Nixon's "volunteer army" was a reactionary tactic with many bad consequences for the left.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:50 AM
21.---I wouldn't call him the originator of some of those recurring tropes. Also, have you read the American War and Hastings trial speeches? There's some excellement material in there. It's not that I identify with Burke, certainly not the Burke of the anti-Jacobin phase, but more that I take some strains of his argument very seriously (as did Hazlitt).
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:54 AM
though the Court does affirm the constitutionality of Social Security; would it have done otherwise? open question
I'm not quite sure what this quoted phrase is doing in the comment, but just wanted to note that my understanding is that at the time the upholding of minimum wage legislation (West Coast Hotel) was of the greatest import for public perception of the court as reactionary or not.
Did anyone offer Prof. Rauchway a fruit basket when he first showed up in comments, or are we trying to be serious here?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:56 AM
Seriously? Kotsko's a fan of Richard Daley? Who knew?
Posted by mealworm | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:57 AM
(I'm actually kind of embarrassed by the fruit basket. I was worried that someone would link to it for TEC, and that she would reasonably think it was a studied insult. But what the hell, someone wants to link the fruit basket for the man, go crazy.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:58 AM
But this thread should help explain a lot of things.
1) Economics roolzs. What did Aristotle say? All politics is about the distribution of resources, tp paraphrase.
2)HRC's pro-business pro-military positions. "Liberalism" is a "conservatism", a Schumpeter-based plan to preserve the existing economic/social order.
3) A real "progressive" seeks radical change. Stirling Newberry, last time I checked, had all but abandoned the Democratic Party and was not so far from abandoning the very idea of political parties and political heirarchies. To the extent I understand the word, "Syndicalism". (May he come along and eviscerate me if wrong.)
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:58 AM
I'm not quite sure what this quoted phrase is doing in the comment, but just wanted to note that my understanding is that at the time the upholding of minimum wage legislation (West Coast Hotel) was of the greatest import for public perception of the court as reactionary or not.
I take Social Security to have been much more iffy (and arguably more important) than the minimum-wage legislation. Some legal historians (see G. Edward White) argue that West Coast Hotel doesn't represent the radical break you might think it does. But Helvering v. Davis reflects a much more, let's say, free jurisprudence, doesn't it? Cardozo's opinion reads something like, "it's a good idea, so it's constitutional." No, that's unfair:
Posted by Eric Rauchway | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 11:06 AM
JM, Hazlitt used whether a person took Burke seriously as a test of quality. We are definitely on the same page. I know you are interested in rhetoric, and I recommend the Hirschmann highly. Hirschmann's turn toward "self-subversion" is particularly interesting.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 11:12 AM
Is there an edition of Hazlitt anyone recommends? I've seen him recommended in enough contexts that I've had him on my list to buy when I come across something, but I never have.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 11:13 AM
No, but a lot of his essays are online.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 11:22 AM
Thanks for the Hirschmann recommendation, IDP; I'll have to see if I can check it out of a library somewhere, as I currently have a moratorium on buying books.
LB, Oxford has a "selected writings" that has most of the important things. One of the best modern critics of Hazlitt is Dav/id Brom/wich, whose big book on Burke has been forthcoming for about five years now.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 12:58 PM
Oh, poo.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 1:02 PM
Just back after about an hour and a half. Bromwich's Hazlitt, The Mind of a Critic is a very readable study, making big claims and backing them up. Very highly recommended.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 1:13 PM
I like his book on the early Wordsworth, too; fucker better finish up his Burke book soon.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 1:18 PM
13 - Nature and Destiny of Man is worth the irritation, despite it being as slow and boring as something made of ordinary physical wood pulp and ink could possibly be. Neibuhr's definition of "sin" as fundamentally related to a need for security against those things which cannot be secured against has stuck with me to this day.
Posted by Tom Scudder | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 1:21 PM
He's more-or-less my age, and went to grad school at the same time. I think of him as having the career I might have had. There's a lot about Wordsworth, and Burke, already in the Hazlitt, which started as a dissertation, so these other books are a natural development.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 2:04 PM
I've also been wondering about a slightly different split: between what Michael Sandel calls liberals and communitarians. In his definition, liberals are people who are concerned with individual rights and liberties--sometimes so concerned that they forget the broader needs of the community and our responsibilities to eachother. Do communitarians fit with the progressives?
(Interestingly, in his recent collection of essays, he claimed that it was wrong for liberals to criticize the invocation of religion in political debate on first amendment/ establishment clause grounds. No liberal should tolerate the propogation of religion through government funds, but it's wrong, he argues, to shunt religious values and arguments out of the debate about policy entirely--since these clearly matter to a lot of people. If you want to shut out religious viewpoints and religiously inspired arguments, then you have to disavow MLK Jr. too.)
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-27-06 10:31 PM