Thus one of the liberal state’s main roles becomes the active liberation of individuals from any limiting conditions. At the forefront of liberal theory is the liberation from natural limitations on the achievement of our desires—one of the central aims of life, according to Locke, being the “indolency of the body.” A main agent of that liberation becomes commerce, the expansion of opportunities and materials by which not only to realize existing desires but even to create new ones we did not know we had. The state becomes charged with extending the sphere of commerce, particularly with enlarging the range of trade, production, and mobility.4 The expansion of markets and the infrastructure necessary for that expansion do not result from “spontaneous order”; rather, they require an extensive and growing state structure, which at times must extract submission from the system’s recalcitrant or unwilling participants. Initially, this effort is exerted on local domestic economy, in which the state must enforce rationalization and imposition of depersonalized modern markets. Eventually, however, this project becomes a main driver of liberal imperialism, an imperative justified among others by John Stuart Mill in his treatise Considerations on Representative Government, where he calls for compulsion over “uncivilized” peoples in order that they might lead productive economic lives, even if they must be “for a while compelled to it,” including through the institution of “personal slavery.”5
One of the main goals of the expansion of commerce is the liberation of embedded individuals from their traditional ties and relationships. The liberal state serves not only the reactive function of umpire and protector of individual liberty; it also takes on an active role of “liberating” individuals who, in the view of the state, are prevented from making wholly free choices as liberal agents. At the heart of liberal theory is the supposition that the individual is the basic unit of human existence, the only natural human entity that exists. Liberal practice then seeks to expand the conditions for this individual’s realization. The individual is to be liberated from all the partial and limiting affiliations that preceded the liberal state, if not by force then by constantly lowering the barriers to exit. The state claims to govern all groupings within the society: it is the final arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate groupings, and from its point of view, streamlining the relationship between the individual and the liberal state.
In a reversal of the scientific method, what is advanced as a philosophical set of arguments is then instantiated in reality. The individual as a disembedded, self-interested economic actor didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order. The imposition of the liberal order is accompanied by the legitimizing myth that its form was freely chosen by unencumbered individuals; that it was the consequence of extensive state intervention is ignored by all but a few scholars. Few works have made this intervention clearer than the historian and sociologist Karl Polanyi’s classic study The Great Transformation.6 Polanyi describes how economic arrangements were separated from particular cultural and religious contexts in which those arrangements were understood to serve moral ends—and posits that these contexts limited not only actions but even prevented the understanding that economic actions could be properly undertaken to advance individual interests and priorities. Economic exchange so ordered, Polanyi argues, placed a priority on the main ends of social, political, and religious life—the sustenance of community order and flourishing of families within that order.7 The understanding of an economy based upon the accumulated calculations of self-maximizing individuals was not, properly speaking, a market. A marketplace was understood to be an actual physical space within the social order, not an autonomous, theoretical space for exchanges conducted by abstracted utility maximizers.
According to Polanyi, the replacement of this economy required a deliberate and often violent reshaping of local economies, most often by elite economic and state actors disrupting and displacing traditional communities and practices. The “individuation” of people required not only the separation of markets from social and religious contexts but people’s acceptance that their labor and its products were nothing more than commodities subject to price mechanisms, a transformative way of considering people and nature alike in newly utilitarian and individualistic terms. Yet market liberalism required treating both people and natural resources as these “fictitious commodities”—as material for use in industrial processes—in order to disassociate markets from morals and “re-train” people to think of themselves as individuals separate from nature and one another. As Polanyi pithily says of this transformation, “laissez-faire was planned.”8
This process was repeated countless times in the history of modern political economy: in efforts to eradicate the medieval guilds, in the enclosure controversy, in state suppression of “Luddites,” in state support for owners over organized labor, and in government efforts to empty the nation’s farmlands via mechanized, industrial farming. It was, in complex ways, an underlying motive during the American Civil War, which, for all its legitimacy in eliminating slavery, also decisively brought the state-backed expansion of a national economic system, opposition to which was forever stained by guilt by association with southern slavery.9 We see its legacy today in the ongoing expansion of global markets through free-trade agreements ardently supported by so-called conservatives, often with the aim of disrupting and ultimately displacing native cultures that might be of concern both to Burkean conservatives and to Marxist-leaning critics of relentless globalization.10 The state’s role in enforcing the existence of a national market has been reinforced in recent years by efforts to roll back various state-based environmental standards—ironically, an activity most ardently embraced by “conservative” Republicans who are otherwise strident defenders of “states’ rights.”11
From the dawn of modernity to contemporary headlines, the proponents and heirs of classical liberalism—those whom we today call “conservative”—have at best offered lip service to the defense of “traditional values” while its leadership class unanimously supports the main instrument of practical individualism in our modern world, the global “free market.” This market—like all markets—while justified in the name of “laissez-faire,” in fact depends on constant state energy, intervention, and support, and has consistently been supported by classical liberals for its solvent effect on traditional relationships, cultural norms, generational thinking, and the practices and habits that subordinate market considerations to concerns born of interpersonal bonds and charity. Claiming that the radical individual imagined by liberal theory was a “given,” liberal practice advanced this normative ideal through an ever-burgeoning state that ceaselessly expanded not in spite of individualism, but to bring about its realization.
PHILOSOPHICAL SOURCES AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS—PROGRESSIVE LIBERALISM
One of the consequences of the political, social, and economic dynamism unleashed by classical liberalism was the widespread sense that it had underestimated the capacity for human transformation as well. Dewey, for example, in his short book Individualism, Old and New, praises the “old” liberalism for its success in “liquefying static property” of the type that was prevalent in feudal times, and for eliminating the local bases of social life as the economic and political system became visibly more national and “interdependent.” He dismisses the “romantic” individualism that had animated the American belief in self-reliance (here echoing Frederick Jackson Turner’s observations that the age of the American frontier had come to a close), instead calling for recognition that it was empirically true that Americans were now part of a “social whole” from which no individual could be understood to exist in separation.12
The “old individualism” had successfully undermined any vestiges of aristocratic society or Jeffersonian agrarianism, but the nation had not yet made the leap into a new “organic” reconciliation of individual and society. The “liberalism
of the past” had created the conditions that now required its own supercession: a new liberalism was now in view, needing a push by philosophically and socially sensitive thinkers like Dewey to realize humanity’s self-transformative potential.
Herbert Croly similarly saw a transformation taking place, particularly in the national system of commerce, culture, and identity. But this national system was still animated by a belief in Jeffersonian independence even as in fact it reflected new forms of interdependence. He called for the creation of a “New Republic” (the name of the journal he cofounded) that would achieve “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.” Democracy could no longer mean individual self-reliance based upon the freedom of individuals to act in accordance with their own wishes. Instead, it must be infused with a social and even religious set of commitments that would lead people to recognize their participation in the “brotherhood of mankind.” This aspiration had been thwarted heretofore by antiquated belief in individual self-determination, neglectful of a profound and growing interdependence that was now generating the potential for “the gradual creation of a higher type of individual and higher life.”13 Walter Rauschenbusch was to echo this sentiment in his call to establish the “Kingdom of God” on earth, a new and more deeply social form of democracy that “would not accept human nature as it is, but move it in the direction of its improvement.” Rauschenbusch, by overcoming the individualistic self-interest that he saw informing even traditional Christian theology—whose object had traditionally been individual salvation—envisioned, like Dewey and Croly, the “consummation” of democracy as the “perfection of human nature.”14
While one may see collectivist economic arrangements in these thinkers’ practical recommendations—Dewey, for instance, calls for “public socialism,” and Croly writes in support of “flagrant socialism”—it would be mistaken to conclude that they do not endorse the inviolability and dignity of the individual. A consistent theme in both men’s work is that only by eliminating the cramped and limiting individualism of “old liberalism” can a truer and better form of “individuality” emerge. Only complete liberation from the shackles of unfreedom—including especially the manacles of economic degradation and inequality—can bring the emergence of a new and better individuality. The apotheosis of democracy, they argue, will lead to a reconciliation of the “Many” and the “One,” a reconciliation of our social nature and our individuality. John Dewey writes, for instance, that “a stable recovery of individuality waits upon an elimination of the older economic and political individualism, an elimination that will liberate imagination and endeavor for the task of making corporate society contribute to the free culture of its members.”
While we will have to wait for the complete elimination of old liberalism to know fully how that reconciliation of “individuality” and “corporate society” will be achieved, what is clear from these central and formative arguments of the progressive liberal tradition is that only by overcoming classical liberalism can true liberalism emerge. The argument still continues over whether this represents a fundamental break with, or fundamental fruition of, the liberal project.
The most apt recent symbol of the progressive state’s role in “creating” the individual was a fictional woman who famously formed part of President Obama’s campaign for reelection in 2012—a woman who, like Cher or Madonna, needed only a single name, Julia. Julia appeared briefly toward the beginning of Obama’s campaign as a series of internet slides in which it was demonstrated that she had achieved her dreams through a series of government programs that, throughout her life, had enabled various milestones. Part of the effort to show the existence of a Republican “war on women,” the ad campaign “Life of Julia” was designed to convince female voters that only progressive liberals would support the government programs that would help them achieve a better life.15
While the “Life of Julia” campaign seemed thus designed for liberals who generally supported government programs that helped foster economic opportunity and greater equality, Julia was nevertheless someone who could not be an object of admiration without the background appeal of conservative liberalism’s valorization of the autonomous individual as the normative ideal of human liberty. If the positive portrayal of Julia’s extensive reliance upon government aid tended to make the right blind to the ad’s fundamentally liberal ideal of autonomy, the left was barely cognizant that the aim of this assistance was to create the most perfectly autonomous individual since Hobbes and Locke dreamed up the State of Nature. In Julia’s world there are only Julia and the government, with the very brief exception of a young child who appears in one slide—with no evident father—and is quickly whisked away by a government-sponsored yellow bus, never to be seen again. Otherwise, Julia has achieved a life of perfect autonomy, courtesy of a massive, sometimes intrusive, always solicitous, ever-present government. The world portrayed by “Life of Julia” is an updated version of the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which there only exist individuals and the sovereign state—the former creating and giving legitimacy to the latter, the latter ensuring a safe and secure life for the individuals who brought it into being. The main difference is that while Hobbes’s story is meant as a thought experiment, “The Life of Julia” is meant to depict present-day reality. But the ad makes increasingly clear that its story is the very opposite of Hobbes’s: it is the liberal state that creates the individual. Through the increasingly massive and all-encompassing Leviathan, we are finally free of one another.
Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom. Behind the lines, however, both have consistently sought the expansion of the sphere of liberation in which the individual can best pursue his or her preferred lifestyle, leading to mutual support of the expansion of the state as the requisite setting in which the autonomous individual could come into being. While “conservative” liberals express undying hostility to state expansion, they consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and international markets as a way of overcoming any local forms of governance or traditional norms that might limit the market’s role in the life of a community.16 And while “progressive” liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector of individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it comes to enforcement of “manners and morals,” preferring the open marketplace of individual “buyers and sellers,” especially in matters of sexual practice and infinitely fluid sexual identity, the definition of family, and individual choices over ending one’s own life. The modern liberal state consistently expands to enlarge our self-definition as “consumers”—a word more often used today to describe denizens of the liberal nation-state than “citizens”—while entertaining us with a cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to rightly suspect aren’t that different after all.
CREATING THE INDIVIDUAL
At the heart of liberal theory and practice is the preeminent role of the state as agent of individualism. This very liberation in turn generates liberalism’s self-reinforcing circle, wherein the increasingly disembedded individual ends up strengthening the state that is its own author. From the perspective of liberalism, it is a virtuous circle, but from the standpoint of human flourishing, it is one of the deepest sources of liberal pathology.
An earlier generation of philosophers and sociologists noted the psychological condition that led increasingly dislocated and disassociated selves to derive their basic identity from the state. These analyses—in landmark works such as Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, and Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community—recognized, from various perspectives and disciplines, that a signal feature of modern totalitarianism was that it arose and came to power through the discontents of people’s isolation and loneliness. A population seeking to fill the void left by the weakening of more
local memberships and associations was susceptible to a fanatical willingness to identify completely with a distant and abstract state. While this analysis attracted adherents in years following the fall of Nazism and the rise of communism, it has since declined, suggesting that many contemporary thinkers do not think it applies to liberal ideology.17 Yet there is no reason to suppose the basic political psychology works any differently today.
Nisbet remains an instructive guide. In The Quest for Community, his 1953 analysis of the rise of modern ideologies, Nisbet argued that the active dissolution of traditional human communities and institutions had given rise to a condition in which a basic human need—“the quest for community”—was no longer being met. Statism arose as a violent reaction against this feeling of atomization. As naturally political and social creatures, people require a thick set of constitutive bonds in order to function as fully formed human beings. Shorn of the deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture, and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon their autonomy, deracinated humans seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining available to them: the state. Nisbet saw the rise of fascism and communism as the predictable consequence of the liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities. Those ideologies offered a new form of belonging by adopting the evocations and imagery of the associations they had displaced, above all by offering a new form of quasi-religious membership, a kind of church of the state. Our “community” was now to consist of countless fellow humans who shared an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation, and isolation. It would provide for our wants and needs; all it asked in return was complete devotion to the state and the elimination of any allegiance to any other intermediary entity. To provide for a mass public, more power to the central authority was asked and granted. Thus Nisbet concludes, “It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.”18
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