I would argue that people like Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold are important for Ame
ID: 108116 • Letter: I
Question
I would argue that people like Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold are important for Americans to read because they are skeptical about the freedoms that are routinely associated with democracy and capitalism. We don’t need to agree with these writers, and we certainly don’t need to reject the political and social institutions with which we have grown up. Nevertheless, these writers are valuable, because they invite us to think critically about things that too often we don’t think about at all. So I’m curious to hear your response to this unit’s criticism of modern freedoms. What parts of the readings did you find most compelling? What parts did you find specious or flawed? Clearly, there’s a connection between this discussion and last week’s debate about selfhood. Does modern capitalist democracy make every man a Manfred?
Explanation / Answer
Western civilization is unique among world cultures in the special significance and value it accords to the idea of freedom. Already a central value in Greco-Roman and Christian thought, modern liberalism has exalted freedom as the central human and political value. The effort to secure individual liberty in the religious, political, cultural, and economic spheres lies at the heart of the whole modern project. The liberal doctrine of individual liberties with its intellectual roots in the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is enshrined in the founding documents of the American and French revolutions.
America in particular a nation “conceived in liberty” as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address has deeply identified itself with the cause of freedom. One of President George W. Bush’s first seemingly spontaneous responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was to say that “freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward.” What distinguishes the two? Perhaps the most influential account of liberalism’s distinctive concept of freedom came from one of its key twentieth century champions, Isaiah Berlin, who emphasizes the notion of negative freedom as the defining element of the liberal political tradition. This is basically the idea of freedom from external constraint. This seems to be indeed what is ordinarily meant by the civic freedoms of contemporary liberal democracies. One has “freedom of speech” or “freedom of religion” to the degree one can speak as one desires or practice one’s faith without external constraint, especially from the state and its law. Such are the familiar freedoms guaranteed, for instance, by the American Bill of Rights.
We shall argue, however, that this definition is inadequate. The ancients fully understood the notion of negative freedom but believed that freedom considered as merely “unrestrained action” tends to undermine itself, giving birth to tyranny within the soul and within the city. The real distinction then is that the Greek philosophers did not see negative freedom as an end in itself. They warned not only of the tyranny of external constraints but also of the tyranny of the passions. The classical Greek conception is therefore more inclusive and capacious in connecting freedom directly with the question of virtue. The contrasting failure of modern liberalism to relate its idea of freedom intelligibly to any more universal conception of the Good is at the very heart of its present crisis. Excavating the classical conception of freedom will therefore be helpful in raising critical questions about the direction of the modern political order. It is first necessary, however, to provide an adequate account of modern freedom.
We need to brace ourselves by recalling the familiarity of the experience of lostness. Not long after Marx saw capitalism melting down community, J. A. Froude wrote of "the intellectual lightships all breaking from their moorings", and just around the corner of the century lay T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse. Lostness and liquefaction have been with us since the first declaration of modernity. Not that it is much consolation, and Bauman's condemnations of the colossal self-indulgences unleashed by headlong consumerism since the great boom began to resound have dateless force. Surely rightly said in reservation? Perhaps the author is not robust enough in making the argument turn on the issue of liberalism. Both he and (on his account) Bauman define freedom pretty well as Isaiah Berlin did in his Cold War propaganda essays, as "freedom from ..." and "freedom to ...". This version of freedom then dwindles down to the pinpoint of "choice". The free chooser is, however, hardly the free citizen. In the struggle for liberty before liberalism, as Quentin Skinner has many times reminded us, freedom was found by Milton in self-government and self-reliance. In Amartya Sen's powerful attempts to make freedom the recoverable condition of the world's poor, it is created out of those local "capabilities" that may truly serve a free person's free "functioning".
New institutionalism has emerged as one of the most prominent research agendas in the field of comparative politics, political economy, and public policy. This article examines the role of institutional variation in political/economic regimes in shaping tax burdens in industrialized democracies. Countries are conceptualized and statistically modeled in terms of majoritarian, shifting coalition, and dominant coalition governments. Regression analysis and cluster analysis are used to statistically model cross-national tax burdens relative to the strength of labor organization and party dominance in parliament. This study finds that political and economic institutions are important in explaining tax policy variation. Specifying the structure of political and economic institutions helps to explain the size of the state in modern capitalist democracies. This article specifies and demonstrates which institutions matter and how much they matter.
However, the extent to which parties influence public policy is to a significant extent contingent upon the type of democracy and counter majoritarian institutional constraints of central state government. Large partisan effects typify majoritarian democracies and states, in which the legislature and the executive are ‘sovereign’. More complex and more difficult to identify is the partisan influence on public policy in consensus democracies and in states, in which the political-institutional circumstances allow for co-governance of the opposition party. Narrowly circumscribed is the room to maneuver available to incumbent parties above all in political systems which have been marked by counter majoritarian institutional pluralism or institutional ‘semi-sovereignty’. The article suggests, that it would be valuable if direct effects and interaction effects of the party composition of government and state structures featured more prominently in future research on comparative public policy. Our point of departure is to find out to what extent political variables matter and which other factors may account for the above relationship.
The main result is that, apart from the impact of ‘politics’, the existence of a corporatist mode of interest-mediation and conflict-regulation consistently strengthens the explanation of policy-formation and policy-performance. In addition, it appears that, especially after 1974, political factors gain influence, albeit more often than not in circumstances of political consensus and where right-wing parties are relatively weak. If the interdependence between ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ is managed in a consensual fashion, it will lead to a better economic performance and may be an adequate response to the ongoing crisis. Unchecked corporate power and a massive commodification, infantilization, and de-politicization of the polity have become the totalitarian benchmarks defining American society. In part, this is due to the emergence of a brutal modern-day capitalism, or what some might call neoliberalism. This form of neoliberal capitalism is a particularly savage, cruel, and exploitative regime of oppression in which not only are the social contract, civil liberties and the commons under siege, but also the very notion of the political, if not the planet itself.
Yet, there is a growing recognition that casino capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence and form of self-sabotage and that if it does not come to an end what we will experience in all probability is the destruction of human life and the planet itself. In the midst of this dystopian nightmare, there is the deepening abyss of inequality, one that not only separates the rich from the poor, but also increasingly relegates the middle and working classes to the ranks of the precariat. Concentrations of wealth and income generate power for the financial elite and unchecked misery for most people, a fear/insecurity industry, and a growing number of social pathologies. Accompanying the rise of a savage form of capitalism and the ever-expanding security state is the emergence of new technologies and spaces of control. One consequence is that labor power is increasingly produced by machines and robotic technologies which serve to create “a large pool of more or less unemployed people.” Moreover, as new technologies produce massive pools of unused labor, it also is being used as a repressive tool for collecting “unlimited biometric and genetic information of all of its citizens.”