Double Betrayal. - Review - book review

Reason, March, 2001 by Loren Lomasky

Is liberalism its own worst enemy?

The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 248 pages, $28.95/$14.95 paper

In the long march from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton, liberalism has undergone a personality change--several, in fact. Originally a political philosophy predicated on safeguarding the individual from unwelcome intrusions, especially intrusions by an overbearing state, eventually it transmogrified into the view that the only way individuals can be adequately protected from each other and from themselves is via a large and ever-growing batch of state interventions. This transformation is now an old and familiar story. Less often recounted, though, is the corresponding transformation of opposition to liberalism. What is it to be an anti-liberal today? Is it to reject the primacy of individual rights in favor of the claims of tradition and community, or is it to affirm those rights against a century of distortion? The evidence of this collection is that it is both, and that the combination is fundamentally incoherent.

It is appropriate that a volume wrestling with itself should carry an ambiguous title. Is "the betrayal of liberalism" a betrayal carried out on liberalism or one carried out by liberalism? If the former, then liberalism is the disfigured victim; if the latter, it is the perpetrator. The 10 essays contained herein are split; some identify liberalism as the aggrieved party and some as the culprit, and a couple confusedly stumble back and forth, certain that there's something in the political atmosphere that doesn't smell right but unable to identify the offending scent. That a compilation of independently prepared essays manifests a variety of viewpoints is unsurprising, but here we have pieces all of which first appeared in The New Criterion, a major intellectual outpost of the new right, and which are advertised by the editors as deployed against a common foe. If a coherent conservative philosophy isn't to be found here, then it likely exists nowhere.

For former Thatcher adviser Roger Scruton, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the primordial snake in the Edenic garden of traditional civil society. By insisting on holding up the credentials of ancestral institutions to rational scrutiny and justification, Rousseau began a process of undermining their authority, the costs of which are ongoing and incalculable. For Rousseau and his successors, that which has not been grounded in first principles known to reason has no claim on the allegiance of thinking, self-directed people. Obeisance to traditional forms of life is an unworthy intellectual servitude we must throw off. Familiarity does not count in favor and novelty does not count against, so the efforts of enlightened social engineers to improve old ways are to be welcomed. And if the suggested alterations are radical rather than reformatory, sweeping away venerable customs in the name of progress, well, all the better.

The fallacy in Rousseau's reasoning is that, unlike mathematical theorems, salutary social practices typically are not susceptible to step-by-step rational analysis. Rather, they have arisen via inscrutably complex processes of spontaneous adjustment and readjustment, and they resist being pigeonholed in tidy theoretical niches. This rebuttal to political rationalism was pioneered by F.A. Hayek and Michael Oakeshott, and Scruton borrows freely from them. However, he spectacularly muddles their insights.

On the one hand, Scruton observes that Hayek's arguments support institutions in which the transactors are voluntary cooperators, not pawns of a monolithic bureaucracy. On the other hand, the essay is largely given over to fulminating at modernity's corrosive effect on the authority of Parliament, churches, the military, and schools. These are hardly paradigms of voluntary association and spontaneous order. What they share is hierarchical structure and authority grounded on prescription rather than consent. Scruton is nostalgic for the days when these institutions enjoyed unquestioning deference, but what he considers the corrupted heirs of the Enlightenment insistently demand a peek at their credentials. So in a halfhearted way, Scruton obliges. By way of affording them a jerry-rigged defense, he pilfers an argument central to liberal theory and then twists it into an indictment of liberalism. This is not merely a quirky conservatism but one that completely misidentifies its own foundations. Even the eccent ric Jean-Jacques did it better.

Rousseau was a brilliantly original theorist, but he also embraced several potentially tyrannical ideas. For example, his enthronement of the "general will" as overruling the chosen ends of individuals is not simply a bad idea within liberalism; it is flatly illiberal. Although Scruton wildly overstates his prominence within the history of liberalism--Rousseau more often does duty as patron saint to Marxists and other partisans of command-and-control Politics--at least Scruton knows his culprits when he sees them.