The two types of causation, one operating in enlightened absolutism and the other in democracy, can be told apart in an a priori sense by having either one, as it were, act in a "society of equals," where all subjects (except, where applicable, the praetorian guard) are equal at least in such respects as political influence, talent and money. The enlightened absolute monarch, liking equality, and seeing his subjects equal, would be broadly content with political arrangements as they are. The democratic state, however, would be competing with rivals for popular consent. A rival could attempt to divide society into a majority and a minority by finding some dimension like creed, colour, occupation or whatever, with respect to which they were unequal; he could then bid for the support of the majority by offering to sacrifice to them some interest of the minority, e.g. its money. Since everybody has equal political influence (one-man-one-vote, simple majority rule), if everybody followed his self-interest, the democratic incumbent would lose power to a democratic rival unless he, too, proposed inegalitarian policies and offered to transfer, for instance, more of the minority's money to the majority.*8 (The equilibrium conditions of this competitive bidding are sketched in chapter 4, pp. 219-25.) In a society of equals, then, democracy would act in the opposite sense to the levelling we associate with it; using some convenient criterion for separating some subjects from others, it would have to carve out a majority and sacrifice the minority to it, the end-effect being some new inequality. This inequality would then function as a democratic value approved by the majority. If democracy ever created a "society of equals," it is possibly along such lines that it might then develop further, calling for an ideological adjustment which does not look unduly difficult.
3.1.21 In the last such historical adjustment, which began roughly when the present century did, and which replaced government as nightwatchman by government as social engineer, the ideology of the advancing state has changed in almost everything but the name. Owing to the breathtaking transformation which the meaning of "liberal" has undergone in the last three generations, the original sense of the word is irretrievably lost. It is no use any more shouting "Stop, thief!" at those who stole it. Speaking of "classical" liberalism or trying to resuscitate the original meaning in some other form would be a bit like saying "hot" both when we mean hot and when we mean cold. My use of the term "capitalist" is, in fact, intended to avoid such misleading usage and to stand in for at least the hard core of the original sense of "liberal."
Hoping that this might help thin out some of the prevailing semantic fog, I will employ "liberal" as the modern shorthand symbol for political doctrines whose effect is to subordinate individual good to the common good (leaving no inviolable right) and to entrust its realization to the state ruling mainly by consent.*9 The common good consists for the most part of democratic values, which are whatever the exigencies of consent require. In addition, however, the common good also calls for the fulfilment of an evolving variety of further goals for which there is, at any given time, no majority support. Present-day examples of such goals include racial desegregation, abolition of the death penalty, banishment of nuclear energy, affirmative action, homosexual emancipation, aid to underdeveloped countries, etc. These goals are deemed progressive, i.e. expected to become democratic values in the future.*10 Liberal doctrine holds that civil society is capable of controlling the state and that the latter is therefore necessarily a benign institution, the observance of democratic procedure sufficing to confine it to the subordinate role of carrying out society's mandate which, in turn, is some kind of sum of society's preferences.
Given this nature of the state, there is a certain unease in liberal doctrine about freedom as immunity, a condition which can negate the priority of the common good. Where immunity is conspicuously a privilege not shared by all, as it patently was in most of Western Europe up to at least the middle of the eighteenth century, liberalism opposes it. Its remedy is as a rule not to extend privilege as much as possible if that is not sufficient to create equality, but to abolish it as far as possible. Tawney, a most influential developer of the liberal ideology, waxes eloquent on this point:
[Freedom] is not only compatible with conditions in which all men are fellow-servants, but finds in such conditions its most perfect expression.*11
What it excludes is a society where only some are servants while others are masters.*12
Like property with which in the past it has been closely connected, liberty becomes in such circumstances the privilege of a class, not the possession of a nation.*13
That freedom is most perfect when all are servants (more perfect even than if all were masters) reflects the presumption in favour of levelling down. It is not the condition of servitude which contradicts freedom, but the existence of masters. If there are no masters yet there are servants, they must be serving the state. When servitude is to the state, freedom is at its apogee; it is better that none should have property than that only some should have it. Equality and freedom are, albeit a shade obscurely, synonymous.
We could hardly have come farther from the idea of the two being competing ends.
Even if it were not yet one more dimension of people's existence, like money or luck or breeding, in which equality can be violated, freedom as immunity would still have to be opposed by the liberal. Even when we all have it, the immunity of some curtails the state's ability to help others and consequently its production of democratic values; even equal freedom-as-immunity is inimical to the common good.*14
This is strikingly manifest in the way liberal thought looks upon property. Private property, capital as the source of countervailing power, reinforcing the structure of civil society versus the state, used to be considered valuable both to those who owned some and to those who did not. Liberal thought no longer recognizes such value. It considers that democratic procedure is the source of unlimited sovereignty. It can rightfully modify or override title to property. Choices between private and public use of private incomes, as well as between private and public property in the narrower sense, can and in fact ought to be made and subjected to continuous review in pursuit of such aspects of the common good as democratic values or efficiency.
These criteria must primarily govern the scope and manner of state interference with private contracts in general. For instance, a "prices and incomes policy" is good, and ought to be adopted regardless of the violation of private agreements it entails, if it helps against inflation without impairing allocative efficiency. If it does impair it, it ought still to be adopted, in conjunction with a supplementary measure to rectify the impairment. Liberal thought
is rarely at a loss for additional measures to complete the first one, nor for policies to take care of any unintended effects the latter may produce, and so on in an apparently infinite regress, in hopeful pursuit of the original aim. (Arguably, a measure taken today is the nth echo of some earlier measure in that the need for it, in that particular shape and form, could not have arisen without the preceding measure(s); and as the echo shows no signs of dying down, n has a fair chance of growing into a very large number.) The fact that a measure brings a cascade of consequential measures in its train is a challenge to imaginative government, not an argument against it. The fact that imaginative government needs to override property rights and the freedom of contract is neither an argument against it nor for it, any more than the breaking of eggs is an argument for or against the omelette.
This exploration of some sensitive tenets of liberal doctrine may invite a parallel analysis of socialism. The reader, who incidentally would have no difficulty in doing this for himself, is likely to note a few vital points of incompatibility between the two, despite the large extent of surface resemblance which has long nourished the facile and ambiguous thesis of the "convergence of the two world systems." The crucial incompatibility, in my view, lies in their treatment of power and hence of property. The liberal is relatively relaxed about power. He trusts the majority to direct the state in society's best interest
, which is tantamount to trusting it to award social power more often than not to him, to his friends, to the party of liberal inspiration. Consequently, while he may interfere with private property for a number of reasons, he will not do so out of a perceived need to weaken civil society's ability to take state power away from an incumbent.
For the socialist, however, power is a cause for deep anxiety. He sees majority rule as a licence for the rule of false consciousness, involving an unacceptable risk of relapse into reaction, due to the defeat of progressive forces by the ballots of a mindless electorate. He must have public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy (and as much as possible of the slopes and the plains, too) for public ownership (both in itself and as the corollary of no significant private ownership) is the best guarantee of the security of tenure of power. Private ownership loosens the state's control over the livelihood both of the capitalist and of the worker (in the widest sense) whom he may choose to employ. It is thus an enabling cause of opposition by both. The socialist state, less trusting than the liberally inspired one and more knowledgeable about power, thus feels a far more vital concern about property, even though its view about the relative efficacies of planning, the price mechanism, allocation or incentives may be no different from that of most non-socialist states.
3.1.29 The surface compatibility of liberal and socialist doctrines, however, is such that discourse in terms of one can inadvertently get caught up in the strands of the other. The ensuing crossbreeding of ideas can produce startling progeny. One area where ideological miscegenation is apt to happen is the concept of liberty, its refractoriness to definition and its nature as an ultimate, self-evident good. Not for nothing does Acton warn us to be wary: "But what do people mean who proclaim that liberty is the palm, and the prize, and the crown, seeing that it is an idea of which there are two hundred definitions, and that this wealth of interpretation has caused more bloodshed than anything, except theology?"*15 Any political doctrine must, in order to look complete, incorporate liberty among its ultimate ends in some fashion. The rules of ordinary speech guarantee that it is a solid value: it sounds as absurd to say "I dislike liberty, I want to be unfree" as to assert that good is bad.*16 Moreover, one is safe to feel dispensed of any obligation to derive the goodness of liberty from some other value, to which liberty may lead as a means leads to an end, and which may turn out to be contestable. Happiness (freely translated as "utility") and justice are on the same footing. It is impossible to say "I am against justice," "there is a lot to be said for unfairness" and "utility is useless." Such ultimate, uncontested ends can be made to play a particular role in validating other ends that an ideology seeks to promote.
Equality is the prime practical example. The problem of inserting it in the value system is that it is not self-evidently good. The statement "there is a good deal to be said for inequality" may provoke vigorous disagreement; it may require backup argument; it is in any case not nonsensical. Ordinary speech tells us that it is possible to contest the value of equality. If we could see that it is derived, by a chain of propositions we accept, from the value of another end which we do not contest, we would not contest equality either. Utility and justice have alternatively been employed in elaborate attempts to establish equality as an uncontested end in this way. The next three sections of this chapter are intended to show that these attempts, like the squaring of the circle, are futile; equality can be made into a valuable end if we explicitly agree to put value on it, but it is not valuable by virtue of our liking for something else.
I know of no systematic argument trying to derive the goodness of equality from our liking for liberty in the way attempts have been made to derive it from utility or justice, perhaps because the very idea of liberty lends itself poorly to rigorous argument. On the other hand, it positively invites the muddling up of pieces from incompatible ideologies, whose result is some strange proposition
like "freedom is equal servitude" or "freedom is enough food." Such conceptual miscegenation, by coupling equality to freedom, gives it a piggyback ride. Carried on the back of liberty, it is smuggled in among our agreed political ends.
This is the drift of thinking of liberty (as Dewey would have us do) as "the power to do": as material sufficiency, food, money; as an empty box unless filled with "economic democracy"; as some fundamental condition not to be confused with the "bourgeois" or "classical" liberties of speech, assembly and election, all of which are totally beside the point to the "really" (economically) unfree. (It is surely possible to interpret history as "proving" the contrary. Why else did the English Chartists agitate for electoral reform rather than higher wages? By the same token, one can plausibly present the formation of workers' councils, the call for a multiparty system and free elections in Hungary in 1956, and of the wildfire spread of a nationwide autonomous trade union in Poland in 1980, as demands for the classical bourgeois freedoms by the "economically" unfree. In fact, the opposite interpretation looks grossly implausible. We cannot seriously be asked to believe that it was the happy accomplishment of "economic liberation" that has engendered the demand for bourgeois freedoms in these societies.)
It is to show up the deceptive ease with which equality rides piggyback on freedom past the most watchful eyes, that I choose a text by the usually so lucid Sir Karl Popper, who is as prominent a critic of totalitarianism as he is a distinguished logician:
Those who possess a surplus of food can force those who are starving into a "freely" accepted servitude.
A minority which is economically strong may in this way exploit the majority of those who are economically weak.
If we wish freedom to be safeguarded, then we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention of the state.*17
The use of the word "force" is, of course, poetic licence. What Popper is saying is that those with a surplus of food just sit back and do not volunteer to share it with those who are starving; to eat, the latter must come forward and offer to work for them. Since they cannot "really" choose to starve, their offer to work is an acceptance of servitude. It is "free" but not "really" free choice. Note also that it is the minority who do this to the majority, which makes their conduct somehow even more reprehensible than if it were the other way round. Our democratically conditioned consciences have thus one more reason to approve the "planned economic intervention of the state," though it is a little bewildering that in defence of the Open Society, we are proffered the Gosplan.
Poetic licence or not, the multiple confusion which finally gives us the Gosplan as a condition of freedom, needs sorting out. First, Popper asserts that there is an analogy between the strong bully enslaving the weaker man by the threat of force, and the rich exploiting the economic weakness of the poor.*18 But there is no such analogy. There is a plain distinction between taking away a man's freedom (by threatening to beat him up) and not sharing our "freedom" (= food) with a man who lacks it in the first place.
Second, there is confusion between the availability of choice (between servitude and starving) which is a matter of liberty,*19 and the equity, fairness, justice of a situation where some people have a lot of food and others none, which is a matter of equality. Third, confusion is spread by leaving unstated a number of assumptions which are needed to stop this situation from ending up as a normal neo-classical labour market equilibrium, where those owning a lot of food compete to hire those who own none and who compete to get hired, until hirers and hired are all earning their respective marginal (value) products.
The assumptions under which the outcome is starving or servitude are quite strong ones, though they may have some realism in particular kinds of societies. In such societies, the minority's offer of food in exchange for the majority's servitude is at least "Paretosuperior" to letting them starve while redistribution through "planned intervention of the state" would have generally unpredictable results, one likely possibility being that much of the food goes bad in government
warehouses.
Finally, although freedom is not food, and liberty is not equality, equality may yet help justice, or be otherwise desirable, but this does not go without saying. Before anyone can state that the coexistence of a minority with a surplus of food and of a starving majority ought to be redressed, he has to show, either that greater equality in this respect would contribute to other ends in such a way that self-interest will make rational people opt for the equality in question, or that people's sense of justice, symmetry, order or reason demands it to the exclusion of contrary considerations. The endeavour to show this constitutes much of the ideological Begleitmusik of the development of the modern state.
To sum up and to restate some of the preceding argument: The democratic state is unable to content itself with providing benefits to its subjects that may make some better off and none worse off. In democracy, tenure of state power requires consent, revocably awarded to one of several competitors by an agreed procedure. Competition involves offers of alternative policies, each of which promises to make designated people in society better off. These policies can be produced only at the cost of making other people worse off. In an unequal society, they tend to be egalitarian (and in a society of equals they should tend to be inegalitarian), to attract a majority. The majority's "preference" for one of the policies on offer "reveals" that its proximate effects represent the greatest accrual of democratic values. People may opt for it whether or not their interests are served thereby. The dominant ideology, liberalism, coincides with the interest of the democratic state and predisposes people under its influence to like democratic values. It calls upon the state to do for ethical reasons what it would have to do anyway to maintain its tenure. It tells people that the policy agreed to by the majority contributes to ultimate ends they all share. It also promotes additional policies, showing that they are conducive to the same ends and recommending that people opt for them when they are offered. In doing so, it both promotes and responds to the growth of the state.
The State by Anthony de Jasay Page 17