Robert Kuttner, who I adore, has just delivered a smack-down of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed (Yale, 2018) in the New York Review of Books. I can't wait for the rejoinder from Deneen, where I suspect he will look like the reactionary fool he is. For me, what was depressing about reading the essay-review is where Kuttner notes how many otherwise smart people, such as former President Obama, liberal-left historian Jackson Lears, and even Cornel West, failed comprehension 101 in "blurbing" Deneen's screed. Worse, any modern liberal or left persons who favorably reviewed or blurbed Daneen's book showed the limits of their own reading in not recognizing Deneen as largely another Anglo-American reactionary who only sounds "liberal" when attacking excessive pro-capitalist nostrums and societal structures.
It is always important for close readers of William Blake, Lord George Byron, Charles Dickens, and others in the early British capitalist accumulation period to recognize their attacks on capitalism (this even accounts for some of them opposing slavery and supporting extending the voting franchise) was nonetheless rooted in a nostalgic belief in the pre-capitalist or late feudal period. E.P. Thompson understood this better than most historians and political philosophers. It is not to say such early dissenters from the capitalist accumulation period did not speak in a language that implied or expressed socialist oriented ideas or socialist based outrages against the capitalist system. Instead, it is to say these late 18th Century and early 19th Century should never be simply ripped from their time, nor should we ignore how they ended up where they did on the issues of their day.
Kuttner exposes how Daneen's idealism for a pre-capitalist European and American past renders him unable to comprehend the actual bloody history of the Dark Ages, when faith, not reason, was most valued, and when the Church enforced an ostensible moral code--where an exposure of the hypocrisy and corruption in the enforcement was treated as a heinous heresy worthy of torture or state-sanctioned murder. What makes Kuttner especially compelling, however, is his deft, succinct, and wise appreciation of John Locke and Adam Smith, two avatars of capitalist-oriented philosophers who are far more useful to Marxists and New Dealers than one may ordinarily think. See David Brin and John Kenneth Galbraith, among others, on Smith's continued liberal radicalism; and Robert Dahl on the left-oriented radicalism in John Locke's thought. Kuttner, whose own work, such as The Economic Illusion and Everything for Sale, correctly questions the modern business libertarian philosophies which emanate from Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, and the Austrian version of the Bobbsey Twins, von Mises and Hayek--though at least Hayek recognized social welfare states are possibly okay.
In short, what Kuttner exposes is Daneen wishes to throw out the Enlightenment baby with the modern bathwater. Admittedly, it has not been an easy time since the Enlightenment, as we see the Enlightenment also encompasses the rise of nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, Fascism, and Communism. The modern era since 1600 has worked alongside slavery and capitalists have worked in tandem with religious zealots who deny the modernity capitalists continually pursue. But the best values of the Enlightenment remain a respect for individual autonomy, civil liberties, pluralist, secular and open government, laws which outlawed slavery, child labor, discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religious, and other statuses, and a demand that government has a duty to provide for the common good. The irony of the revolutionary era is how oppressed peoples around the globe were able to ingest and articulate back against Europe's and Great Britain's Enlightenment values the reason for their revolts. The Western canon gave important background and articulation to the most revolutionary values, in the sense of hopefulness, not simply violence and vengeance.
Kuttner shows, perhaps not as well as I would have liked, how Daneen is wrong to put von Mises and Karl Marx in the same box. However, as Noam Chomsky has recognized, there is, among modern Western elites, an overlap in beliefs between Gingrich and Clinton, Thatcher and Blair, and the conservative and liberal elitists who oppose minimum wage increases and support pro-corporate trade deals. There is also admittedly some overlap between Patrick Buchanan and Ralph Nader on corporate trade deals, but Buchanan's is rooted in feudal, reactionary, religious zealotry that easily turns to tribalism. Nader's is more about moving forward with the best the Enlightenment has had to offer. It is here where Kuttner is imploring us to not embrace Daneen because, while Daneen may be a strange bedfellow anti-capitalist, Daneen's position is essentially atavistic and tribalistic. Daneen's vision exults religion at the expense of reason, exults organized religion as a mechanism of and for social control, and seeks a vague return to a form of pre-capitalism that is at best nostalgic and ahistorical, and worst, monstrously reactionary.
For me, I would rather stand with David Brin and Steven Pinker as potentially strange bedfellows than with Daneen. Unlike Brin and Pinker, Daneen wants us to reject the premises of the Enlightenment project, something which would, in the current environment, only play into the hands of the Fascist International and accelerate a return to the Dark Ages, where organized religion rules. His is a prescription he would only countenance if it was Christian-dominated, and one which would easily play into the hands of imperialists of, ahem, a Western historical tradition. Attempting to run his morality through other religious traditions, starting with Islam, shows the vacuousness of his a priori style claims.
Caveat: Notwithstanding my adoration for Kuttner and his take-down of Daneen, I found troubling Kuttner's statements, near the end of his essay-review, where Kuttner stated:
Liberal democracy has endured a long history of premature burials by its detractors. Despite such pronouncements in the 1930s by anti-liberal philosophers and dictators, liberalism enjoyed a remarkable renaissance in the postwar era. World War II was the epic victory of the democracies over fascism. The cold war, for all its faults, represented the triumph of the democracies against communism. The democratic state won broad legitimacy for its success in taming the instability and inequity of the laissez-faire market. The economy not only grew, but it grew more equal. In the twentieth century, the domain of rights was expanded to bring in formerly excluded citizens, notably African-Americans and women.
I am hoping this was an editor's editing which led to the second and third sentences in the above paragraph. When I read Kuttner saying there was a "remarkable renaissance" of "liberalism" in the post-WWII period, my mind immediately flashed on the post-war anti-Communist hysteria and the start of the Cold War National Security State. These were not a renaissance of liberalism, but the start of a decades-long project of reaction. That the New Deal era echoed a few decades into the post-war period is more a recognition of the great success of the New Deal era which had to be dismantled step by step. Kuttner is also way too blithe in saying "the Cold War, for all its faults, represented a triumph of the democracies against communism." This sentence reveals a remarkable tone deafness to, if not ignorance of, the disgusting post-war activities of the American Empire, and a naiveté as to what caused the Soviet Union to collapse from within.
It is most amusing to recognize there is more than enough to argue about with those who believe in the best of Enlightenment era values without having to spend much time arguing with Dark Age and feudal era apologists, such as Patrick Daneen. The best book on the subject Daneen tackles is Michael Harrington's The Politics at God's Funeral, published in 1983. Harrington gets at precisely what I am hopefully articulating here, and does so without the nostalgia for a pre-Enlightenment era. Sadly, I don't see anyone engaging with Harrington's works, especially this topic. This is true of even young DSAers. As we descend into the madness which rejects democratic and republican (lower case, please!) values, we need Harrington's voice more than ever. Too bad we are not going to get it.
It is most amusing to recognize there is more than enough to argue about with those who believe in the best of Enlightenment era values without having to spend much time arguing with Dark Age and feudal era apologists, such as Patrick Daneen. The best book on the subject Daneen tackles is Michael Harrington's The Politics at God's Funeral, published in 1983. Harrington gets at precisely what I am hopefully articulating here, and does so without the nostalgia for a pre-Enlightenment era. Sadly, I don't see anyone engaging with Harrington's works, especially this topic. This is true of even young DSAers. As we descend into the madness which rejects democratic and republican (lower case, please!) values, we need Harrington's voice more than ever. Too bad we are not going to get it.
