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Timothy continues to meditate about institutions and their discontents.
Everything that works about institutional life rests on the habitus of professionals, bureaucrats, experts, on whether they are stewards or parasites, whether they recognize the fragile possibility of a better world or are just looting the till, whether they are humble in the face of wider and more distributed experience and knowledge or whether they are contemptuous of anything besides their own immediate power. We all know it: this is Arendt’s banality of evil. We do not need to fear the person at the top, but instead the mass force of institutional action. The libertarian answer, to sweep away all institutions (save those of private capital: a blind spot that I still find baffling), is no answer at all, any more than jumping off a cliff is a way to prevent being in an automobile accident.Though I consider myself more of a left-Popperian than right, or at least aspire to be, there is much that I agree with in this Manzi post: Conservatives and LibertariansOnce the world all knew that this was the danger we faced, after 1945 (and have had it demonstrated repeatedly since), there has been no way to trust that some day the state or other institutions could be continually perfected until the danger would pass for all time. It will never pass, it can never pass.
I am a conservative, but consider myself to be very close to a small-l libertarian. . .I suspect that Timothy would find much to agree with here as well, and that bears on his bafflement about libertarian thinking. I suspect that he does not make a sufficient distinction between libertarian and Libertarian, and that he could, in part, be considered a somewhat diffident fellow traveler - at least judging from some of his writings.Bill Buckley got to the essence of the first distinction 25 years ago in an interview with Reason magazine in which he said that he “shares about 90 percent of the views of most libertarians”
A central insight of Hayek, Popper & Co. was that our ignorance of human society runs deep. We need the experimentation of an open society not only because different people often want different things, but even more importantly because we’re never sure what works. I generally support, for example, a high degree of legal toleration of behavior that I find personally objectionable. I recognize, though, that others believe that what I think should be tolerated goes too far and threatens social cohesion, or what Buckley called morale. How do we resolve this impasse?
The best answer for conservatives or libertarians is federalism, or more precisely, subsidiarity – the principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest competent authority. After all, a typical American lives in a state that is a huge political entity governing millions of people. As many decisions as possible ought to be made by counties, towns, neighborhoods and families (in which parents have significant coercive rights over children). In this way, not only can different preferences be met, but we can learn from experience how various social arrangements perform.
The characteristic error of contemporary conservatives in this regard has been a want of prudential judgment in trying to enforce too many social norms on a national basis. The characteristic error of contemporary Libertarianism has been the parallel failure to appreciate that a national rule of “no restrictions on non-coercive behavior” (which, admittedly, is something of a cartoon) contravenes a primary rationale for libertarianism. What if social conservatives are right and the wheels really will come off society in the long run if we don’t legally restrict various sexual behaviors? What if left-wing economists are right and it is better to have aggressive zoning laws that prohibit big-box retailers? I think both are mistaken, but I might be wrong. What if I’m right for some people for this moment in time, but wrong for others or wrong the same people ten years from now? The freedom to experiment needs to include freedom to experiment with different governmental (i.e., coercive) rules.
To hear a conservative advocating subsidiarity, as I have done many times, and squaring the circle by recognizing the necessity of right-of-exit in such a diversity of norms and preferences, is attractive. If this was how modern conservatives believed I would have far fewer objections.
Oh, I'm very attracted to small-l libertarian thinking, as you know. The only thing is that I see corporations as a form of institution like any other, and hence subject to most of the same concerns that attach to the state, or to civic organizations, or to professional associations. I don't quite get the fetishism about the state in Libertarian thought (as opposed to libertarian thought).
I do think though that even small-l libertarianism is often not very thoughtful about the social and historical character of ideas, practices, ideologies, private beliefs, individuality, and so on: it tends to take the private and personal as sui generis. In one sense, they are: our personal and private lives are a mystery even to ourselves, and in any event, neither can be nor should be explained glibly in terms of social, collective, biological or historical determinants. But at the same time, we are shaped by histories, forces, structures, etc. that are bigger than ourselves--so you can't just say that our identities, our practices, our decisions are nobody's business but our own, and come from nowhere and have no consequences.
Small-l libertarianism seems healthiest to me when it's a persistent skepticism about institutionalized forms of power that claim to know best about how to order, organize and dispose of human lives. The state is at the top of the list of entities deserving that persistent skepticism, but companies no less so. The idea that our relationship to private capital is wholly consensual and voluntary while our relationship to the state is compulsory strikes me as naive at best.
Posted by: Timothy Burke at March 5, 2008 12:07 PMDo you agree that there is an imperfect, but significant, distinction in that governments maintain a reasonably effective monopoly on armed power?
Yes, I get that corporations rely on police who ultimately rely on the backing of the amred forces to enforce contracts and so forth, but the rules under which they operate (whether explicit or implicit) are ultimately created by those whom the armed forces (broadly defined) will obey.
Posted by: Jim Manzi at March 5, 2008 02:29 PMArmed power is one kind of power, and in general, modern states have a monopoly over it. But this is what I mean by saying that we have to have more subtle ideas about power in the picture, too. It's one thing to say that a person freely contracts his labor (as opposed to being born a citizen) but property rights and so on aren't "natural" in the sense of preceding the social and individual worlds we navigate. They're established structural facts that are there before we ever make our choices as individuals, and they constrain those choices very strongly, exert power over our lives in many ways. You can say that as an adult, I have the choice not to sell my labor, not to work, and that's true. But it's not much of a choice--and in some ways is a much more constrained choice than a peasant farmer in a kin-based society might have faced.
This isn't a bad thing, necessarily--I'm not an anarchist, either. It's just that if we're going to be concerned about the power that the state, civic institutions, professions and so on exert over individual liberty, there's no reason to exclude various kinds of power that capital exerts over liberty as well.