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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521875288 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/06/2007 |
| Series: | Ideas in Context , #83 |
| Pages: | 242 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.79(d) |
About the Author
David Weinstein is associate professor of political science at Wake Forest University, North Carolina.
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Cambridge University Press
9780521875288 - Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism - by D. Weinstein
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
ANALYTICAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
The converging currents of Anglo-American political theory have swept away much of English political theory’s distinctiveness including the latter’s greater sensitiveness to its own historical past. For all its many virtues, contemporary Anglo-American political theory has become an impoverished history of ideas, having substituted a truncated eulogized canon for the richness of its predominantly English historical tradition.
This historical amnesia stems, in large part, from the legacy of logico-positivism, which discredited normative political theorizing as just another variety of emotivist venting and unmeaning metaphysical gibberish. Fortunately, Hart’s The Concept of Law (1961) and Barry’s Political Argument (1965) resurrected normative political theory. Rawls followed with A Theory of Justice (1971), which, in turn, unleashed an industry of criticism that shows no signs of abating.1 Ironically, then, English analytical philosophy eviscerated English-speaking political theory early on in the last century only to redeem it fifty years later. And what it redeemed quickly spread elsewhere, becoming what we now know as Anglo-American politicaltheory.
Whereas English political theory may have lost much of its identity in its confluence with Anglo-American political theory, the latter remains robustly at odds with the continental philosophical tradition. Whatever English political theory has become, its analytical rigor and empiricism extensively immunized it from the counter-Enlightenment preoccupations of continental theory. This is not to say that Anglo-American political theory has been uninfluenced by continental theorizing, especially recently. Continental motifs have also informed late nineteenth-century English idealism, Berlin’s value pluralism and even, as we shall momentarily see, the Cambridge School of textual interpretation.
Despite Anglo-American political theory’s homogenizing interpolation, English theorists have resisted forsaking intellectual history more than their American counterparts. The triumph of conceptual analysis caused American political theorists to lose interest in the history of political thought except as a way of certifying their current theoretical positions. Canonical theorists were typically invoked (Nozick’s use of Locke) as remarkably prescient in purportedly anticipating – or at least identifying – solutions to current conceptual disputes.
By the 1970s, the Cambridge School of political thought, led by Skinner, Pocock, Dunn and later Tuck, began challenging such interpretative strategies, countering that the meanings of past political philosophical texts could only be recovered with difficulty by historically contextualizing them. Contemporary English political theory has struggled to resist marginalizing the history of political thought in face of the ascendancy of philosophical analysis. Indeed, the parochialism of analysis has rejuvenated the former, which has, in turn, rebounded to the practice of analysis itself. For the Cambridge School, intellectual history remains a veiled analytic exercise. Both its method and purpose are fundamentally linguistic. What words formerly meant can help us refine our own meanings and consequently improve our own philosophical thinking. Intellectual history, when not rational reconstruction, can be analytically provocative and therefore “educationally mandatory.”2
Pocock is less vexed than Skinner about the dangers of parochialism, which may partially account for the similarities between his method of doing intellectual history and continental political theory. For instance, his emphasis on the determining roles played by discursive paradigms makes his interpretative methodology structuralist. Yet, his interpretative methodology is equally post-structuralist insofar as meanings are unstable since he claims that every textual interpretation invariably spins, recasts and multiplies meanings in ways unintended by the author. As one post-structuralist insists, “our meaning always escapes any unitary conscious grasp we may have of it, for language, as ‘writing,’ inevitably harbors the possibility of … an indefinite multiplicity of recontextualizations and reinterpretations.”3
Contemporary Oxford political theory has not been entirely swept aside by the vogue of philosophical analysis either. Isaiah Berlin early on abandoned analytical theorizing for Herderian-inspired history of ideas. Like Pocock, he affirms that the “history not only of thought, but of consciousness, opinion, action too, of morals, politics, aesthetics, is to a large degree a history of dominant models.” In examining any civilization, “you will find that its most characteristic writings … reflect a particular pattern of life which those who are responsible for these writings … are dominated by.”4 Echoing Skinner, he writes that “unless you try by some act of imagination to reconstruct within yourself the form of life which these people led … your chances of truly understanding … their writings and really knowing what Plato meant … are small.”5 In short, in order to interpret Plato properly, we must contextualize him as best we possibly can by re-imagining the form of life in which he lived and philosophized.
More recently, Oxford’s Freeden has championed conceptual political theory but also without forsaking the value of the history of political thought. Following Gallie, Freeden agrees that conceptual disputes are unavoidable but locates the source of these disputes in the underlying ideological structure of political theorizing. For Freeden, political ideologies are distinct systems of interrelated conceptual interpretations. The disagreements between liberalism and socialism about liberty are tethered, for example, to their respective disagreements about the meaning of equality. Hence, conceptual disputes are always disputes about a host of interconnected political ideas. Political ideas come in distinctive conceptual packages. Diligent intellectual history is crucial in sensitizing us to the nuanced variety of these conceptual packages, reminding us of the contested nature of all normative political concepts and thus commemorating the always unfinished nature of political theory.6
In sum, analytical English political theory has never forsworn the history of political thought as much as its American counterpart. It has not relegated intellectual history to the margins of scholarship despite the ascendance of Anglo-American philosophical analysis. And in taking intellectual history seriously, English political theory has been less historically nearsighted and less prone to mistake its purported discoveries for unwitting duplications of past debates.7
Nevertheless, for all its greater historical sensitivity to its own past, contemporary English political theory has not entirely avoided following American political theory in dichotomizing this past, reducing varieties of liberalism, utilitarianism, communitarianism and socialism to mutually exclusive, rival discourses. Dichotomizing conceptual analysis has encouraged contemporary analytic liberals to reconstruct rationally their own very uncertain tradition in accordance with their analytical preoccupations, compressing the history of liberalism into a slim and convenient canonical tale full of pregnant anticipations. This study will try to renarrate an undervalued piece of this history, hoping to restore it to prominence in the liberal canon.
More particularly, this study examines two historical versions of two purportedly rival theoretical discourses, namely nineteenth-century English utilitarianism and turn-of-the-century, English new liberalism. I suggest, first of all, that new liberals borrowed more from nineteenth-century English utilitarianism than they rejected. In my view, the new liberalism, including Green’s new liberalism, was fundamentally consequentialist if not always straightforwardly and traditionally utilitarian. Secondly, I insist that precisely because the new liberalism absorbed more utilitarianism than the received view acknowledges, contemporary critics of utilitarianism should proceed more judiciously in condemning utilitarianism as fundamentally incompatible with liberalism. In other words, the new liberalism’s actual historical debts to nineteenth-century utilitarianism reinforces the cogency and promise of recent analytical attempts to liberalize utilitarianism by investing it with respect for strong moral rights and robustly celebrating individuality.8
IDEALISM, UTILITARIANISM AND THE NEW LIBERALISM
Utilitarianism reigned in England during the nineteenth century, gradually giving way to analytical egalitarian liberalism during the twentieth. As English political theory lost its distinctively utilitarian identity, it also lost its distinctively English identity, becoming just another comforting voice in the homogenizing discourse of Anglo-American, egalitarian liberalism.
Egalitarian liberalism’s pedigree emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries via English new liberals such as Green, Hobhouse, Hobson and Ritchie who were, in turn, powerfully influenced by the British idealists.9 Hence, the history of the triumph of Anglo-American egalitarian liberalism requires taking account of its undervalued indebtedness to the new liberalism. And insofar as the new liberalism borrowed heavily from idealism, including especially the latter’s criticisms of Benthamite utilitarianism, we must reach back into idealism too if we wish to understand properly the emergence of egalitarian liberalism. So the history of Anglo-American liberalism should include the legacy of the new liberalism and idealism much better than it does. As we shall see, this legacy is, in turn, considerably more indebted to nineteenth-century utilitarianism than we have otherwise been misled to expect. This study makes a sustained and extensive effort to substantiate these much underrated debts.
British idealists combined a coherence theory of truth with neo-Hegelian historical teleology. For them, thinking partially constitutes whatever we describe, explain or interpret. Facts are never simply discovered nor just speak for themselves but are mediated by cognition. When we theorize, we make and organize facts according to our systems of value, interpretative perspectives and preoccupations. Hence, the more coherently we theoretically mediate and organize the world, the more truthful our understanding becomes. And as we theorize the world with increasing sophistication, we realize universal history more completely.
British idealists like Bradley and Bosanquet were as much indebted to Hegel for their social ontology and moral and political theory as for their conception of history. Bradley argues that individuals are socially constituted, making morality deeply social in the sense that acting morally requires acting for others rather than simply leaving them alone. Hence, insofar as Bradley regards good as self-realization, acting morally means promoting everyone’s self-realization, not merely one’s own. Being so interdependently constituted, we best promote our own self-realization by simultaneously promoting our fellow citizens’ and they best promote theirs by promoting ours.10 Moreover, because our identities are socially encumbered, rationalistic moral theories like utilitarianism and Kantianism are misconceived and self-defeating. Both theories share the misguided pre-Hegelian delusion that we can somehow detach ourselves from our social milieu when determining how to act. Acting morally primarily entails embracing one’s socially constituted identity by fulfilling “one’s station and its duties.” Nonetheless, fulfilling the duties of one’s station is not the whole of morality since the kind of society in which one lives also matters. For Bradley, conventional morality must not be taken uncritically.
Bosanquet’s The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899) takes up politically where Bradley’s Ethical Studies (1876) leaves off. Bosanquet agrees with Bradley that, insofar as our identities are socially constituted, others are not merely external constraints on our self-realization. Societies are free according to how well they manipulate social relations so that everyone flourishes. For Bosanquet, and for new liberals as well, freedom consists in being empowered by meaningful opportunities (“positive or political … liberty”) as well as being left alone (“negative or juristic liberty”). “It … must be maintained … that the ‘higher’ liberty is also … the ‘larger’ liberty, presenting the greater area to activity and the more extensive choice to self-determination.”11 For Bosanquet, higher freedom also entails mastering oneself in the sense of giving “effect to the self as a whole, or remov[ing] its contradictions and so mak[ing] it most fully what it is able to be.”12 Being fully free is therefore being autonomous.
Moreover, being positively free entails juridical security: Our “liberty … may be identified with such a system [of rights] considered as the condition and guarantee of our becoming the best that we have it in us to be.”13 Self-realization is most effectively promoted indirectly by a system of strong, though not indefeasible, rights. As with liberal utilitarianism, rights function as ready-made decision procedures. Like habitual bodily activities such as walking or even just breathing, acting justly by respecting other’s rights usually demands “no effort of attention” enabling citizens to devote themselves to “problems which demand … intenser efforts.”14 And whenever citizens lose their justice habit, liberal states swiftly reeducate them through punishment. While states can never make citizens just, they can encourage just behavior indirectly by maintaining a system of rights. By enforcing rights, they “clear the road to true volition” thus securing the conditions of self-realization.15 And insofar as states restrict themselves to hindering “hindrances of the good life,” they warrant our loyalty.16
As we shall shortly see, new liberals theorized self-realization, freedom and rights much like idealists such as Bradley and Bosanquet. Few readers will find this similarity surprising. But what many might find surprising are their similar criticisms of Benthamite utilitarianism (or at least what they took Benthamite utilitarianism to be) and, even more remarkably, their similar receptivity to improved Millian utilitarianism. Idealists famously attacked utilitarianism on many fronts, which new liberals mimicked without explicitly acknowledging. However, like new liberals, they were not unambiguously anti-consequentialist. Furthermore, though they were clearly more hostile to utilitarian consequentialism than new liberals, they never rejected utilitarianism in toto. They followed Green, conceding that utilitarianism possessed at least some practical value. The story of the relationship between idealism, utilitarianism and the new liberalism is complicated and nuanced.
Bosanquet was much less preoccupied with utilitarianism than Bradley though he criticized Bentham, Mill and Spencer especially in Chapter III of The Philosophical Theory of the State. Mostly, Bosanquet took issue with what he regarded as Bentham, Mill and Spencer’s excessive individualism, which he felt their respective theories of liberty presupposed. Nevertheless, Bosanquet treats utilitarianism briefly on occasion such as where he discusses Sidgwick critically in the “Introduction to the Second Edition” of The Philosophical Theory of the State. For instance, there, Bosanquet says that every person and organization “must take account of the consequences” of their actions, which entails that “limitations on veracity, justice, and good faith (I take Sidgwick’s cases) become more and more imperative.”17 For Bosanquet, in other words, utilitarian considerations matter for determining right action. They also matter because “taking perfection as our criterion we are not barred from recognizing pleasure as an evidence … of certain elements in it.”18
According to Nicholson, Bradley and Bosanquet admired each other greatly. In Nicholson’s view, Bradley’s Ethical Studies especially influenced Bosanquet, causing him to describe Bradley as his “master.” Bradley, in turn, wrote Bosanquet that he valued his opinion most of all. However, Nicholson believes that neither Bradley nor Green knew one another particularly well nor seem to have directly influenced each other much, which is surprising.19 Moreover, unlike Green as well as unlike Bosanquet, Bradley avoided political philosophy. Whereas as one might say that Ethical Studies complements Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, Bradley never explored the political implications of his moral theory as Green did in Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation or as Bosanquet did in The Philosophical Theory of the State.
Nevertheless, as we are about to see in the chapters that follow, Bradley’s ambivalence towards utilitarianism not only matched Green’s in crucial respects but also reappeared in Hobhouse, Ritchie and Hobson. Though Bradley may not have influenced Green directly (and vice versa) nor Hobhouse, Ritchie and Hobson, still much in the new liberalism resembles Bradley’s idealism, including their respective assessments of the then dominant utilitarianism. But my concern here is principally with the new liberalism and its philosophical debts to utilitarianism. British idealism shared some of these debts but not nearly so extensively.
New liberals, then, shared some of Bradley’s ambivalence about utilitarianism. And they also followed Bradley and Bosanquet in combining a moralized theory of freedom and strong rights with a communitarian social ontology. For Green, Ritchie, Hobhouse and Hobson, moral self-realization was unconditionally good. Realizing oneself morally meant being fully free by being both “outward[ly]” and “inward[ly]” free. Such freedom meant, as Green famously said, having the enabling “positive power or capacity of doing … something worth doing” and actually “doing … something worth doing.”20 Or as Hobhouse put it, morally realizing oneself meant being “moral[ly]” as well as “social[ly]” free.21
For new liberals as well, rights indirectly promoted everyone’s self-realization by enabling each with opportunities to flourish. And to the extent that each flourished morally, each, in turn, promoted common good by respecting the rights of others. Thus, for Hobhouse, common good was “the foundation of all personal rights.”22 In Green’s words, rights realize our moral capacity negatively by “securing the treatment of one man by another as equally free with himself, but they do not realise it positively, because their possession does not imply that … the individual makes a common good his own.”23
In addition, new liberals invoked strong rights in defense of robust equal opportunity. Although they concurred with politically cautious idealists like Bosanquet that possessing property was a potent means of “self-utterance” and therefore crucial to externalizing and realizing ourselves successfully, they also stipulated that private property was legitimate only as long as it did not subvert equal opportunity.24 In Hobson’s words, “A man is not really free for purposes of self-development … who is not adequately provided” with equal and easy access to land, a home, capital and credit.25 New liberals, therefore, transformed English liberalism by making social welfare, and the state’s role in promoting it, pivotal. But this story is a slightly more familiar one. Much less familiar, if not entirely unfamiliar, is the extent to which they also transformed utilitarianism.
Regrettably, contemporary Anglo-American political theory has under-appreciated the new liberalism both for the way in which it accommodates liberalism with what we now call communitarianism and for the way in which it additionally accommodates liberalism with utilitarianism. No doubt the new liberalism has gone undervalued partly because it makes these accommodations and partly because it constitutes an idiosyncratic medley of neo-Kantianism, consequentialism and perfectionism.26 Rather than creating an interconnected, legitimizing narrative, these mixed allegiances have caused contemporary liberals and communitarians to disable themselves, due to their historical insensitivity, in their struggle for theoretical accommodation.27 Contemporary liberals
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