[lbo-talk] What Is a Liberal?

[shag carpet bomb]

hmm. since both kinds of liberals put their faith in method, maybe
they should be called "methodological liberals" ha ha. man, if i do
say so myself, below would make a good book!
>
>> Beyond this central conviction of the necessity to persuade the the
>> unconvinced and uncommitted to a true world view, Liberal
>> Intellectuals
>> vary greatly, and probably one cannot find further defining traits.
>> Shag's hisotoricist account is interesting and probably accurate but
>> ahistorical in finding the core or meaning of liberalism in the
>> past.
>> The sources of liberalism must be first located in the present.
>>
>> Carrol
>
> totally agree. the one book i'd mentioned, Brian Fay's _Social Theory
> and Political Practice_, provides a concise historical treatment with
> reference to the Saint Simonioans and Comte who are typically studied
> in sociology as giving birth to the enlightenment liberal world view
> in terms of its political practice: advancing technological and social
> progress, the perfectibility of society through he application of
> science, a class of experts to lead and guide such movement. What is
> utterly crucial to this world view is that society becomes a thing
> that can be managed and social engineered. Andrew Seligman explores
> the rise of this concept with the Scottish Enlightenment and the birth
> of "civil society" -- the cleavage between market, state, civil
> society, a rupture that emerged with capitalism. there's more but I
> don't have the book with me to prompt memory.
>
> Another thing that he explores are two kinds of liberals - and here
> I'm going to, again, highlight why Liberalism cannot articulate a
> vision of the good society. it isn't a lack of will and it isn't a
> lack of ideas. refusal to articulate the worldview AS ideology IS at
> the heart of enlightenment liberalism. conservatives escape this
> straightjacket, but only by getting one arm free, for reasons I'll
> elaborate later.
>
> 1. the technocratic liberal (my phrase) who puts her faith in the
> power of science and technology to fix social problems. this kind of
> liberal loves hard data, numbers, surveys, general trends because then
> society is like a project which and you have goals that can be
> measured so you can track output and progress. Fay never writes any of
> this quite this way. It's my spin.
>
> 2. the interpretive liberal (my phrase) who puts their faith in
> communication. The best illustration of this is in Bellah et al's
> _Habits of the Heart_ where they explore "therapeutic individualism"
> as it is articulated in interviews with people talking about
> everything from activism to marriage. Therapeutic individualism is the
> view that since there is no way to resolve disputes by reference to
> some objective truth - god, etc. - then all we have is communication
> and all we have then are rules as to how communication must proceed to
> negotiate conflict. What becomes crucial in keeping a marriage
> together in their study is commitment not to anything larger than the
> marriage, but to the process of communication itself.
>
> you can see where i'm going with this, yes? With the interpretive
> liberal, there is no god to mediate political conflict. thus, there
> can be no ideals to both with, nothing with which to actually convince
> - because nothing grounds the truth of those ideals. As a consequence,
> all the interpretive liberal can do is fetishize the process of
> communication between conflicting parties in the polity.
>
> thus, the concern with informed citizenship. If you just follow the
> rules or process, where the individual must be informed (which, btw,
> is a common sense articulation of the ideal of rational autonomy - so
> nyeh nyeh to SA, such ideals are manifested in everyday speech), then
> people will elect the best people to office. there is nothing to
> adjudicate what the best is, what political leadership is -- for we
> cannot agree to any ideals. but what we can have is a 'free market' in
> the polity in which politics is like the market: composed of atomized
> individuals with their preferences toted along in a knapsack. they
> whip out those preferences and vote. interpretive liberals think that,
> if those preferences are truly informed, then people will naturally
> love liberals ideas.
>
> this is all buttressed by the way our political system is supposed to
> work in the ideal. enlightenment liberalism conceded that no god and
> its truth can adjudicate what is good and true in political life.
> therefore, you have only process and method left. in the justice
> system, it is the adversarial process. no judge decides the fate of
> the defendant alone. instead, two attorneys duke it out - and then we
> throw a little "people's democracy" into the mix.
>
> this utter faith in the inevitability of progress leading to the
> instantiation of liberal ideals is this is what conservatives
> correctly suss out in their claims about elitism.
>
>
>
> Jefferson quote that I always think illustrates liberal enlightenment.
>
> "The generation which commences a revolution can rarely complete it.
> Habituated from their infancy to passive submission of body and mind
> to their kings and priests...their experience, their ignorance and
> bigotry make them instruments in the hands of the Bonapartes and
> Iturbides, to defeat their own rights and purposes. This is the
> present situation in Europe and Spanish America. But it is not
> desperate. The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of
> printing has eminently changed the condition of the world..It
> continues to spread... To attain all this, however, rivers of blood
> must yet flow and years of desolation pass over. Yet the object is
> worth rivers of blood and years of desolation, for what inheritance so
> valuable can man leave to his posterity?"
>
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