Yes, MacIntyre's caricature of 'Enlightenment Liberalism' is an absurd misrepresentation which he carried over directly from his New Left days, when he was more likely to use 'bourgeois positivism' or some other hackneyed phrase to sneer at vast swathes of political writing that he had never bothered to read.
But the roots of that caricature are not so much 'Marxist' or even really directly Polanyian as they are Tawneyan and Leavisite (Polanyi soaked up the same ideas through Cole and Tawney that MacIntyre did through Thompson and Williams). MacIntyre's repulsion of liberal individualism has much in common with longstanding English romantic ideas shared by a wide range of conservatives and ethical socialists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has much more in common with Shaftesbury or Salisbury than Marx.
The truth is that Liberalism and the liberal tradition have in fact been exceptionally attuned to questions of community, culture, history, and the common good. And that is the reason why post-liberalism is both historically inaccurate and morally flawed. It is the tradition of Enlightenment Liberalism that pioneered political liberty, democratic reform, and industrial capitalism, made Britain a tolerant and free nation, encouraged voluntary association, created a vibrant and pluralistic civil society, built the trade union, cooperative, friendly, and organised charity movements, gave rights to working people and families, and, in the form of 'social liberalism', culminated in that great civic zeal which underpinned the modern welfare state.
I think the post-liberal ahistoricism which most easily springs to mind is the insistence that the nuclear family is a post-war (or at earliest a twentieth century) phenomenon, which replaced the more natural extended family structure.
Indeed. I also suspect that we will find evidence that the nuclear family was a relatively normal arrangement in countries more and more distant from the NW European 'core' in the coming decades. Insofar as it wasn't, I suspect it was often for quite practical, economic reasons (nb., the logic of family structure would vary based on the agricultural environment), rather than due to any genuine preference.
This is a fantastic essay. There is an essay by the controversial Nigel Carlsbad that compliments this one. It is quite a lengthy essay that explores what Liberalism actually was and the context from which it emerged; the slow destruction of Liberalism over the course of the period from c. 1870 to c. 1945; and some of the deficiencies of the writings of the various post-liberals. Like this essay, it shows how post-liberalism is a meaningless distraction for those who genuinely want radical change. Similarly, the essay by Stone Age Herbalist about the evolution of individualism in northern Europeans again helps to highlight how unnatural our communitarian regime is.
I believe that Nigel Carlsbad deleted his blog and disappeared from the internet a few years ago. I am not sure if he is back, but someone managed to download all of his essays and created a PDF archive.
I’ve liked this article but recognising an article can’t say everything it leaves some questions unanswered. The Bourgeois Fusion (John Carroll) of individualism, religion and nationalism which held sway in the modern era until relatively recently in the Anglosphere has not held with significant consequences that we are now seeing. So the question remains what are the ties that bind? I agree with Roger Scruton that communitarianism fails not because looking to restore pre-political ties is wrong but because they want to do it without nationalism or any notion of exclusion which all communities must have to share identity.
Fascinating article. Question for Mr. Chardon: if the West does not suffer from hyper-individualism, as you say, then what do you believe accounts for transgenderism or American gun culture (which is heavily premised on individual rights)? Do you believe the fertility crisis is at all linked to excess individualism?
I would say the opposite. "Transgenderism" is a mental illness, and its widespread societal "acceptance" is intertwined with the communitarian society that has developed in Britain. Trannies are interwoven into the communitarian stakeholder society, with unelected bodies and self-appointed "community leaders" being the voice of the LGBT+ lot. Their entire sense of identity is dependant upon community approval and acceptance, which is quite distinct from American gun culture that fosters a genuine community formed by freedom of association.
I am not the author, but I will respond to your points, including a partial repetition of something that I had said earlier.
- American gun culture: this is nothing bad, as it is connected to pre-existing ideas of individual rights, the right to self-defence, and freedom of association to form voluntary groups. The problem with gun violence is due to black people and their greater predisposition towards violent crime. Crime in the US seems to have gotten worse with the emergence of minoritarianism etc.
- Fertility crisis: fertility is largely a meme, wherein people have similar numbers of children as those around them. Decades of panicking about overpopulation have probably helped to contribute to a negative feedback loop that encourages people not to have kids, that then encourages more people not to have children etc. This can be seen in how there are fertility crises across the world in both individualistic and communitarian societies.
- Transgenderism: "Transgenderism" is a mental illness, and its widespread societal "acceptance" is intertwined with the communitarian society that has developed in Britain. Trannies are interwoven into the communitarian stakeholder society, with unelected bodies and self-appointed "community leaders" being the voice of the LGBT+ lot. Their entire sense of identity is dependant upon community approval and acceptance. The growth in tranny numbers is again connected to this way in which individual identity is increasingly formed by membership of communal bodies of "kin", whether religious, ethnic or sexual.
This is a transparent attempt to pre-empt post-liberalism through guilt by association and lame caricature. It's also insufferably snide, oozing megalopolitan contempt for traditional people and provincial life: 'gossipy, parochial, suspicious'. What you are advocating has nothing to do with conservative thought or the English political tradition.
You are undeniably well-versed in MacIntyre’s work —I’ll grant you that. But setting aside the ad hominem —MacIntyre is by no means an authority in any real sense— you put forward two arguments:
1) You claim that shutting down the economy by decree or confining people to their homes for two years over a case of the flu is an example of communitarianism, when in reality, it is quite the opposite: the state can only do such a thing precisely because a true community does not exist. Otherwise, it would not dare to tyrannize people in this way, as it would risk, as in Fuenteovejuna (Lope de Vega), an uprising of the people—the community—against it. In fact, if a genuine community did exist, those responsible for locking people in their homes against all evidence or for forcing universal vaccination would have been held accountable, but nothing of the sort has happened. Furthermore, to enforce these restrictive measures, the state relies on human nature, which is unchanging and inherently possesses a sense of community, love for one’s neighbor, and the willingness to sacrifice for others. As Professor Cruz Prados explains, “Liberalism has been able to sustain itself because, in reality, it relied on institutions that provided society with substantive ends and values, without liberalism having contributed to their creation or maintenance (…). Liberalism, like a parasite, feeds off what it does not produce and is not even aware of its dependency. Liberal premises alone have never been sufficient to uphold the values proclaimed by the liberal tradition. Locke was able to sustain his model of society because he invoked faith in God and the doctrine of Natural Law...” Ultimately, in moments like the pandemic, the state exploits this deep-seated communal awareness within man to tyrannize him at will; and since no true community exists, nor any power capable of rivaling its own, the state —those who govern it— know full well that no one will hold them accountable afterward.
2) Perhaps the most outrageous claim is when you assert that an independent farmer would have recognized himself in a 20th-century City of London stockbroker and that a medieval wool merchant would have felt at home in Victorian Manchester. This argument is absurd for two fairly straightforward reasons. First, the independent farmer, unlike the stockbroker, was the owner of the conditions of his existence—he cultivated land that belonged to him (and whose fruits were also his, even if he gave a portion to his lord in exchange for protection). Moreover, for the farmer, his work was an extension of his humanity; he recognized himself in his labor. He was not speculating with invisible entities —numbers, stocks, assets— that might not even belong to him. The second reason that dismantles this nonsense is that for the medieval wool merchant to leave the lands where he sheared sheep and move to the factories of Manchester, around five thousand enclosures (Inclosure Acts) had to take place, stripping him of land to cultivate or, in his specific case, land for his sheep to graze. If the process had been as spontaneous as you suggest, these expropriations and enclosures would have been entirely unnecessary —just as it would have been unnecessary in France to behead a king and slaughter two hundred thousand Vendeans to impose liberalism. Lastly, of course, the wool merchant calculated his profits, but profit calculation is by no means exclusive to the capitalist system. Or are we to believe that merchants in Greece or Rome did not seek to maximize their gains? The real issue is at what cost they do so, whether individual interest takes precedence over the common good, and whether the prevailing system encourages harmful human inclinations (as capitalism does, by sacralizing selfishness and turning it into a driving force of progress) or seeks to channel and regulate them.
He conflates communitarianism with collectivism; The kind of internalized constraint that comes from embedded obligations to family and neighbors Usually within a religious context versus state directed top down impositions, Backed up by laws and sanctions. One is generative And in fact, regenerative, Implicit And con contingent on a dense lattice of relationships. The other pertains to atomized billiard ball individuals - linked only by Thin abstract transactional Patterns of interdependence. —- Excuse my writing , I’m talking to the phone and it didn’t go to grammar school.
"Those who lament the decline of ‘community’ should acknowledge that the English have long preferred voluntary associations to unchosen relations of neighbourhood and kin. Those who condemn ‘neoliberalism’ should recognise that commercial society has been the bedrock of English prosperity and freedom for generations."
Isn't the author forgetting that in former centuries, the tendency to prefer 'voluntary associations' and 'commercial relations' was occurring against a backdrop of necessarily "thick" social, familial, and communitarian ties? Before transportation and communication technologies reached the level of development they enjoy today, you could "prefer" a voluntary and commercial association all you wanted... you still had to talk to your father-in-law over the fence every day and seek loans from people that long knew you. Those "thick" relations made possible the liberalizing tendency, allowing a freedom that wasn't totally ungrounded from the needs of human existence. Now you are able to circle the globe at breathtaking speeds, Zoom with people in different timezones, and otherwise develop brief commercial (and emotional) transactions with total strangers quite easily.
The challenge is always to explain why we should return to a past that we were once so eager to leave behind. The answer is (usually) that the technology and social developments that were our path out of those old problems contained in themselves the seeds of problems even worse than the things we left behind. But that doesn't tell us *how* to do it, now that those seeds have fruited. How do we keep the benefits of global air travel and the freedom to escape to Marbella for the weekend, without also turning up our nose at Blackpool at the same time?
Brilliant article. Cuddihy's "Ordeal of Civility" wrung the romanticized Tolkien-esque view of village life right from my bones. Protestant Europe (and with it, America) simply isn't a collection of Hobbits on the shtetl, and pathologizing individualism is as recent as Freud.
The most significant event in Western culture is the rise of women. Some pundits did speculate on what would happen if women could dispense with men to reproduce. This has happened and it is all around us (It is called single parenting).
Yes, MacIntyre's caricature of 'Enlightenment Liberalism' is an absurd misrepresentation which he carried over directly from his New Left days, when he was more likely to use 'bourgeois positivism' or some other hackneyed phrase to sneer at vast swathes of political writing that he had never bothered to read.
But the roots of that caricature are not so much 'Marxist' or even really directly Polanyian as they are Tawneyan and Leavisite (Polanyi soaked up the same ideas through Cole and Tawney that MacIntyre did through Thompson and Williams). MacIntyre's repulsion of liberal individualism has much in common with longstanding English romantic ideas shared by a wide range of conservatives and ethical socialists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has much more in common with Shaftesbury or Salisbury than Marx.
The truth is that Liberalism and the liberal tradition have in fact been exceptionally attuned to questions of community, culture, history, and the common good. And that is the reason why post-liberalism is both historically inaccurate and morally flawed. It is the tradition of Enlightenment Liberalism that pioneered political liberty, democratic reform, and industrial capitalism, made Britain a tolerant and free nation, encouraged voluntary association, created a vibrant and pluralistic civil society, built the trade union, cooperative, friendly, and organised charity movements, gave rights to working people and families, and, in the form of 'social liberalism', culminated in that great civic zeal which underpinned the modern welfare state.
I think the post-liberal ahistoricism which most easily springs to mind is the insistence that the nuclear family is a post-war (or at earliest a twentieth century) phenomenon, which replaced the more natural extended family structure.
Indeed. I also suspect that we will find evidence that the nuclear family was a relatively normal arrangement in countries more and more distant from the NW European 'core' in the coming decades. Insofar as it wasn't, I suspect it was often for quite practical, economic reasons (nb., the logic of family structure would vary based on the agricultural environment), rather than due to any genuine preference.
Strong societies look to a great future while weak societies are stuck in an imagined past.
This is a fantastic essay. There is an essay by the controversial Nigel Carlsbad that compliments this one. It is quite a lengthy essay that explores what Liberalism actually was and the context from which it emerged; the slow destruction of Liberalism over the course of the period from c. 1870 to c. 1945; and some of the deficiencies of the writings of the various post-liberals. Like this essay, it shows how post-liberalism is a meaningless distraction for those who genuinely want radical change. Similarly, the essay by Stone Age Herbalist about the evolution of individualism in northern Europeans again helps to highlight how unnatural our communitarian regime is.
Much obliged.
Do you happen to know what the Carlsbad essay is titled? Or where one might find it?
It can be downloaded from here:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/ajf3ee43kyt6ket/Why_Post-Liberalism_Failed_Carlsbad_1819.pdf/file
I believe that Nigel Carlsbad deleted his blog and disappeared from the internet a few years ago. I am not sure if he is back, but someone managed to download all of his essays and created a PDF archive.
I’ve liked this article but recognising an article can’t say everything it leaves some questions unanswered. The Bourgeois Fusion (John Carroll) of individualism, religion and nationalism which held sway in the modern era until relatively recently in the Anglosphere has not held with significant consequences that we are now seeing. So the question remains what are the ties that bind? I agree with Roger Scruton that communitarianism fails not because looking to restore pre-political ties is wrong but because they want to do it without nationalism or any notion of exclusion which all communities must have to share identity.
Simply excellent.
Fascinating article. Question for Mr. Chardon: if the West does not suffer from hyper-individualism, as you say, then what do you believe accounts for transgenderism or American gun culture (which is heavily premised on individual rights)? Do you believe the fertility crisis is at all linked to excess individualism?
Not the author, but I do think that the fertility crisis is the strongest counter-argument to this.
I submit that transgenderism best exemplifies the hyper-individualism lamented by post-liberals.
I would say the opposite. "Transgenderism" is a mental illness, and its widespread societal "acceptance" is intertwined with the communitarian society that has developed in Britain. Trannies are interwoven into the communitarian stakeholder society, with unelected bodies and self-appointed "community leaders" being the voice of the LGBT+ lot. Their entire sense of identity is dependant upon community approval and acceptance, which is quite distinct from American gun culture that fosters a genuine community formed by freedom of association.
I am not the author, but I will respond to your points, including a partial repetition of something that I had said earlier.
- American gun culture: this is nothing bad, as it is connected to pre-existing ideas of individual rights, the right to self-defence, and freedom of association to form voluntary groups. The problem with gun violence is due to black people and their greater predisposition towards violent crime. Crime in the US seems to have gotten worse with the emergence of minoritarianism etc.
- Fertility crisis: fertility is largely a meme, wherein people have similar numbers of children as those around them. Decades of panicking about overpopulation have probably helped to contribute to a negative feedback loop that encourages people not to have kids, that then encourages more people not to have children etc. This can be seen in how there are fertility crises across the world in both individualistic and communitarian societies.
- Transgenderism: "Transgenderism" is a mental illness, and its widespread societal "acceptance" is intertwined with the communitarian society that has developed in Britain. Trannies are interwoven into the communitarian stakeholder society, with unelected bodies and self-appointed "community leaders" being the voice of the LGBT+ lot. Their entire sense of identity is dependant upon community approval and acceptance. The growth in tranny numbers is again connected to this way in which individual identity is increasingly formed by membership of communal bodies of "kin", whether religious, ethnic or sexual.
This is a transparent attempt to pre-empt post-liberalism through guilt by association and lame caricature. It's also insufferably snide, oozing megalopolitan contempt for traditional people and provincial life: 'gossipy, parochial, suspicious'. What you are advocating has nothing to do with conservative thought or the English political tradition.
Hmmm a friendly rebuttal. Not very polished. https://open.substack.com/pub/oswald67/p/postliberalism-a-very-quick-response?r=2r3au&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
You are undeniably well-versed in MacIntyre’s work —I’ll grant you that. But setting aside the ad hominem —MacIntyre is by no means an authority in any real sense— you put forward two arguments:
1) You claim that shutting down the economy by decree or confining people to their homes for two years over a case of the flu is an example of communitarianism, when in reality, it is quite the opposite: the state can only do such a thing precisely because a true community does not exist. Otherwise, it would not dare to tyrannize people in this way, as it would risk, as in Fuenteovejuna (Lope de Vega), an uprising of the people—the community—against it. In fact, if a genuine community did exist, those responsible for locking people in their homes against all evidence or for forcing universal vaccination would have been held accountable, but nothing of the sort has happened. Furthermore, to enforce these restrictive measures, the state relies on human nature, which is unchanging and inherently possesses a sense of community, love for one’s neighbor, and the willingness to sacrifice for others. As Professor Cruz Prados explains, “Liberalism has been able to sustain itself because, in reality, it relied on institutions that provided society with substantive ends and values, without liberalism having contributed to their creation or maintenance (…). Liberalism, like a parasite, feeds off what it does not produce and is not even aware of its dependency. Liberal premises alone have never been sufficient to uphold the values proclaimed by the liberal tradition. Locke was able to sustain his model of society because he invoked faith in God and the doctrine of Natural Law...” Ultimately, in moments like the pandemic, the state exploits this deep-seated communal awareness within man to tyrannize him at will; and since no true community exists, nor any power capable of rivaling its own, the state —those who govern it— know full well that no one will hold them accountable afterward.
2) Perhaps the most outrageous claim is when you assert that an independent farmer would have recognized himself in a 20th-century City of London stockbroker and that a medieval wool merchant would have felt at home in Victorian Manchester. This argument is absurd for two fairly straightforward reasons. First, the independent farmer, unlike the stockbroker, was the owner of the conditions of his existence—he cultivated land that belonged to him (and whose fruits were also his, even if he gave a portion to his lord in exchange for protection). Moreover, for the farmer, his work was an extension of his humanity; he recognized himself in his labor. He was not speculating with invisible entities —numbers, stocks, assets— that might not even belong to him. The second reason that dismantles this nonsense is that for the medieval wool merchant to leave the lands where he sheared sheep and move to the factories of Manchester, around five thousand enclosures (Inclosure Acts) had to take place, stripping him of land to cultivate or, in his specific case, land for his sheep to graze. If the process had been as spontaneous as you suggest, these expropriations and enclosures would have been entirely unnecessary —just as it would have been unnecessary in France to behead a king and slaughter two hundred thousand Vendeans to impose liberalism. Lastly, of course, the wool merchant calculated his profits, but profit calculation is by no means exclusive to the capitalist system. Or are we to believe that merchants in Greece or Rome did not seek to maximize their gains? The real issue is at what cost they do so, whether individual interest takes precedence over the common good, and whether the prevailing system encourages harmful human inclinations (as capitalism does, by sacralizing selfishness and turning it into a driving force of progress) or seeks to channel and regulate them.
He conflates communitarianism with collectivism; The kind of internalized constraint that comes from embedded obligations to family and neighbors Usually within a religious context versus state directed top down impositions, Backed up by laws and sanctions. One is generative And in fact, regenerative, Implicit And con contingent on a dense lattice of relationships. The other pertains to atomized billiard ball individuals - linked only by Thin abstract transactional Patterns of interdependence. —- Excuse my writing , I’m talking to the phone and it didn’t go to grammar school.
"Those who lament the decline of ‘community’ should acknowledge that the English have long preferred voluntary associations to unchosen relations of neighbourhood and kin. Those who condemn ‘neoliberalism’ should recognise that commercial society has been the bedrock of English prosperity and freedom for generations."
Isn't the author forgetting that in former centuries, the tendency to prefer 'voluntary associations' and 'commercial relations' was occurring against a backdrop of necessarily "thick" social, familial, and communitarian ties? Before transportation and communication technologies reached the level of development they enjoy today, you could "prefer" a voluntary and commercial association all you wanted... you still had to talk to your father-in-law over the fence every day and seek loans from people that long knew you. Those "thick" relations made possible the liberalizing tendency, allowing a freedom that wasn't totally ungrounded from the needs of human existence. Now you are able to circle the globe at breathtaking speeds, Zoom with people in different timezones, and otherwise develop brief commercial (and emotional) transactions with total strangers quite easily.
The challenge is always to explain why we should return to a past that we were once so eager to leave behind. The answer is (usually) that the technology and social developments that were our path out of those old problems contained in themselves the seeds of problems even worse than the things we left behind. But that doesn't tell us *how* to do it, now that those seeds have fruited. How do we keep the benefits of global air travel and the freedom to escape to Marbella for the weekend, without also turning up our nose at Blackpool at the same time?
Brilliant article. Cuddihy's "Ordeal of Civility" wrung the romanticized Tolkien-esque view of village life right from my bones. Protestant Europe (and with it, America) simply isn't a collection of Hobbits on the shtetl, and pathologizing individualism is as recent as Freud.
The most significant event in Western culture is the rise of women. Some pundits did speculate on what would happen if women could dispense with men to reproduce. This has happened and it is all around us (It is called single parenting).
See https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/gareth-southgate-and-the-matriarchy
Gun culture started decades ago - the modern trend is an attempt to suppress it. Women in general favour transgender rights.