APPARENT LIBERAL OPTIMISM AS TECHNOCRATIC CONTROL

Many on the contemporary left will claim that if liberal rights began as the defence of property and the self-possessed individual, they were later rein- terpreted, around the French Revolution, as emancipatory rights of liberation

from all oppressive personal and property-based constraints. Yet the revolu- tionary account of rights, whether after the 1790s or the 1970s, is not a simple subversion of the property-based account of right.108 Rather, it is the case that property and revolution are twins. Just because the new prime duty of the state is to protect life and property, Hobbes (never mind Locke) claimed that the legitimacy of government lapses if it fails to do so.109 This implies a new individual or mass right to rebellion that is quite different from traditional medieval Ôrights to resistÕ that empowered lesser constitutional bodies to overturn higher ones if they had grossly lapsed in their exercise of responsi- bility. Indeed, many still interpreted the legitimacy of the rebel causes in both the English civil war and the Glorious Revolution in these ÔancientÕ terms.110

What one can anachronistically but validly describe as the ÔliberalismÕ of Hobbes and Locke was concerned primarily with the freedom of inequitable property ownership as secured by the state with a monopoly on violence. Thus political liberalism initially had a bent to the authoritarian and not the democratic. But once such a state has started to remove the various particular liberties and customary privileges that had existed at a lower level, then inevi- tably Ôcounter-rightsÕ start to be asserted against the original rights Ð rights to extend the franchise in order that the state be not merely on the side of big property, rights to equality of entry into social and economic competition.

In consequence, the revolutionary traditions have continued to be fixated on ownership, while demanding a more egalitarian access to it. Although the non- statist traditions of socialism refused the language of rights in the name of distributive justice and social reciprocity,111 welfarist social democracy has been largely concerned with rights as entitlements. Even Marxism remains focused on the rightsÐpropertyÐrevolution triangle insofar as it thinks of a general will as controlling collective property and suggests that equity means the ÔrightÕ of the individual to receive all she needs. This is matched with the equal collective right of the general will to demand from each such individual the full measure of her means.

Marx recognised the liberal revolutionary suppression of the social, and realised that social contract implies a channelling through state power, and not complete suppression, of an originally supposed anarchic, natural violence, precisely in order to tame it. Thus the stateÕs claim to act as guardian of absolute rights also depends, with the same paradox, upon a continuous infringement of this absoluteness. This occurs in terms of its constant decisions as to what are effectively ÔexceptionsÕ to the regular but impossible equal exercise of contractual balance between isolated absolute wills, in which its establishment of its own sovereignty must always finally consist: ÔThe limits within which each individual can move without harming others are determined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a stakeÕ. Arbitrariness alone can mediate between freedoms by arbitrarily

limiting them because Ô[t]he liberty we are dealing with here is that of man as an isolated monad who is withdrawn into himselfÕ,112 and who therefore must Ôsee in others not the realisation but the limitation of his own freedomÕ.113

However, Marx finally reduced the social to an ÔimmediateÕ Leibnizian coincidence of the individual with the species, downplaying the primacy of reciprocal bonds of agreement as to social value.114 For him, the content of rights must be technologically determined according to supposedly objective criteria, and the operator of an ensuing social machine must initially be an evermore bureaucratic government. Thus, if the nineteenth century in its liberal aspect came to exacerbate, as with Malthus and Ricardo, the suppos- edly ÔnaturalÕ character of the economy, it also exacerbated the supposedly ÔartificialÕ and ÔscientificÕ character of the political.115 The ÔpoliceÕ aspect of the pre-politico-economic mercantilist state, which still sought to increase national wealth in a more ÔdirectÕ fashion, did not, after all, go away, even if it was now exercised with more subtlety. From the Scots philosopher Adam Ferguson onwards, liberal political economy concluded that the state must continue to create an environment within which the market can flourish by attention to education, the arts, sanitation, crime, poverty and demography.116 If the market was concerned with a supposed release of free choice (under- girded by individual property rights), then the political aspect of civil society had to do with material interests at the point where this is also an inescapable aspect of the economic sphere.

In this way, from early on, the rise of the Ôfree marketÕ and of Ôpolite societyÕ and an accompanying political ÔindirectionÕ, which regarded the market and cultural spheres as freely non-political, nonetheless involved also an unprecedented growth in the power of the central sovereign state.117 The economy and the political order were radically sundered, just because they were secretly so united. The liberal minimalism of government conceals from view a new maximisation of the same that is more sinister than the old archi- tectonic role of the state, being less mediated by decentred foci of sovereign power and more amorally self-directed. On the one hand, this maximisation is exercised indirectly, as we have seen, through persuading people into a fantasy of nature whereby they can now only receive social recognition and quasi- honour through adopting the new role of sheerly ÔeconomicÕ and ÔcivilÕ individual actors. On the other hand, the new political-economic state inter- venes directly with a more technocratic (rather than architectonic) artifice. It does so not to shape peopleÕs ethical habits educationally, but, rather, to determine their material conditions, strength and contentment in a scarcely disguised contempt for higher human possibilities that is at once Protestant, Jansenist and utilitarian. The implicit contract here involves a trade-off between the security of the individual, as increasingly guaranteed by the state, and his political indifference and lassitude Ð together with the compounded

military and economic strength of a nation-state made up of increasingly healthy, happy and passive human persons.118

Thus this ÔdirectÕ power concerns an increase in political artifice as outright amoral techne, in contrast to the supposedly ÔnaturalÕ operation of self- interest in the economic and of ÔsympathyÕ in the social sphere. But in reality, such a novel governmental art operates, as Foucault argued, to control and manipulate human ÔanimalÕ life as the context within which economic processes can nestle119 Ð hence an entirely new and mostly unprecedented governmental attention to health, demography, sanitation, technical education and public entertainment. Previously, medicine, education and artistic-craft activity had been more diffused through ÔsocialÕ management, predominantly by the Church, city-state or borough, and these activities participated in polit- ical rule to the degree that they shared in the governmental aim to promote human flourishing and virtue.120 Now a more centralised politics intervenes more immediately in peopleÕs lives, but less holistically, since it is only to the degree that these are mere lives Ð examples of a proper human bios that can be subjected to outright political manipulation in order to produce a new sort of humanÐanimal hybrid. This is quite other to the integrally rational, social, cultural and religious animal envisaged by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.

For the new human construct is by contrast schizophrenic Ð a hybrid of the purely animal and the purely and arbitrarily artificial, as if reason, sociality, creativity and the political architectonic of virtue were in no way our natural destiny. But this model does not work, as we now know, even for beavers.121 We see only the germ of this bio-political combination of ÔnaturalÕ market and ÔartificialÕ sovereign state in the later eighteenth century. In the course of the next two centuries and beyond, its scope has been vastly intensified and extended, so rapidly that today even the pre-1970s politico-social landscape looks somewhat ÔAristotelianÕ compared with what we now experience.

If, on the politically economic model, the state political aspect is relatively artificial but in reality works upon the infrastructure of economic and civil nature, then we can see the same liberal inversion at work in the case of the individual. Like the collective state actor, she is deemed to be at base amorally free, not naturally constrained to any ethical goal. This means that many of her economic and social choices are regarded as trivial: a matter of lifestyle or preference in a sphere that must be indulged for the sake of contentment. Likewise, state technical artifice must be matched by state sponsorship of the arts, now regarded as a libidinously free realm of leisure-time indulgence or else as a quasi-religious refuge from the objective realm for the isolated subject.

However, her objectively crucial choices concern those to which she is formally bound by contract. Economic choices are of this kind, and they are

artificial both to the degree that they reflect personal whim and insofar as they are yet secured as permanent through the shackles of a legal fiction that is ÔbindingÕ. Nonetheless, it is assumed that people enter into the pretence of this bond in order to secure their very real material interests or welfare, besides their ultimately corporeal desires. The freedom of the Ôpolitically economicÕ and Ôcivilly politeÕ subject is, indeed, a freedom rooted in rights, which presuppose a ÔspiritualÕ notion of free will. But this is paradigmatically linked to the self-government of mere animal nature, which takes into account only utility and an animal or egoistic sympathy for the material needs of others. When the French revolutionaries spoke of social hierarchy as only justified in the interests of Ôpublic utilityÕ, they by no means had a reduced Benthamite notion of the useful in mind. Yet the voluntarist emptiness of the notion of foundational rights that they espoused invites this investment in a measurable, merely hedonistic utility Ð in parallel to the way ultra-capitalist abstraction must ultimately be coordinated with starkly reduced material need.

Hence, as Foucault puts it, material ÔinterestÕ in the liberal model always overflows rights.122 Accordingly, the notion of the cultivation of civility degenerated (most of all in Britain, yet also elsewhere) into a government- sponsored but socially diffuse promotion of the Ôgreatest happiness of the greatest numbersÕ (Bentham) by educative and disciplinary programmes more designed to induce a regularity of behaviour than to induce any dis- cernment of personal talents or vocation.123 So where it might appear that liberalism is primarily about personal freedom, on account of its bio- political character it turns out in the long run that it is more fundamentally to do with material interest or with (individual and collective) ÔwelfareÕ.

Statism Trumps Individualism

Here one can go further. The duality between the political and the biological means that, in the end, it is the freedom of the state and not the freedom of the individual that is primary for liberalism, once it has been deconstructed: for the liberty of the subject is only in historical reality allowed as an indirect device of ÔgovernmentalityÕ in order to increase the power of governance. And in this sense, the mercantilist model was never really abandoned, only surreptitiously refined. The market promotes, first of all, the welfare of the individual, but the state promotes the market, providing a legal contractual framework as its condition of possibility. Its aim in doing so is mainly to promote the welfare of the entire political body, wherein the formal interests of each and every one are taken, ever since Hobbes, to coincide, but are inevitably also over-determined, and perhaps primarily determined, by the interests of a governing class.

This can be evidenced by the way in which modern state tax-and-spend does not so much serve the purpose of rooting out poverty or inequality as seizing control of civil society and ensuring that it operates in the Ferguso- nian sense of support for a strong economy, state security and military power. Indeed, compared with the impact of the exigencies of mass warfare, such measures alone have done very little to diminish inequality, even though they have improved base levels of health and security, if not of literacy and numeracy. Thus the welfare states variously in place since 1945 have ultimately proved unable to prevent the rise in power once more of inherited and earned wealth.124

Meanwhile, apparent direct attacks by governments on capital accumulation have fared no better. For example, the legal abolition of primogeniture and entail under the Napoleonic code did not prevent the return of economic disparities to levels as high or higher in France than in the United Kingdom by the end of the nineteenth century. As in the case of later social expenditure, these measures may have weakened the socio-political role of patrimonial power, but not the economic power of patrimony, which is now rendered all the more irresponsibly private, and yet more recruitable to the service of a centralised political oligarchy linked to a supposed Ôorder of meritÕ. One can suspect that this effect was the prime objective intention of such measures all along: for, as Burke noted, the French Revolution attacked absolutely every- thing except the national debt, which had to a large degree occasioned it, but which it proceeded to deploy as an excuse speculatively to plunder existing ecclesial and social patrimonies.125

The executive usurpation of the common sovereign will by the governing class becomes almost inevitable under liberal assumptions, where no tacit bond of a mutually acknowledged common good any longer places rulers and ruled within a shared horizon. But in the case of either the presumptively shared or covertly ruling interests of a new utilitarian elite, an increase in supposedly natural power or collective material strength will be the first prerogative. And so it is logical that later, with the advent of the economic doctrine of marginalism, the always latent assumption of political economy that the economic operator is a utilitarian calculator is explicitly recognised, beyond even BenthamÕs perception. Later still, with the neo-classical ideas of Kenneth Arrow and then the Chicago school in the twentieth century, this calculation is extended to the working of bureaucracies and finally even to things such as education, sex and procreation Ð thereby economising the entire social field.126

At this point, the overturning of all inherited human wisdom is complete. No longer is the economy embedded in society regarded as reciprocal exchange. Instead, all of human life is supposedly economic and so capable of being ÔnaturalisedÕ, if one strips away the many veneers of custom in

the name of liberal reform. In consequence, the artificial directness of state bureaucracy and re-crafting of civil society starts increasingly to merge with the ÔnaturalisingÕ indirectness of rule through the marketplace.

So, for example, today in the United Kingdom, central government intervention by regulation and diktat in the operation of the non-monetary public professions of education, medicine, law, policing and emergency aid has reached unprecedented heights. But the aim of this intervention is often newly to enforce an internal market that displaces self-control through adherence to standards of professional honour, with an internal market that negatively motivates by pitting individuals in accentuated competition with their peers and is happy, for example, to put public policing and prison management out to tender to private security forces. Here indirection comes entirely to coincide with direction, the invisible with the visible hand: for a supposedly natural competitiveness can only be released through the all too artificial imposition of targets, checks, quantification of achievement and accountability (that shiftily liberal word.

But the economic, as we have seen, like the liberal sovereign state, finally concerns entirely material interest or ÔwelfareÕ. It is this primacy of welfare that allows us better to understand and deconstruct the duality of state and market. In a first historical phase (approximately from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century), a still mercantilist concern with the welfare of the entire body of the nation-state caused the deliberate construction through primary accumulation Ð via enclosures, abolition of guilds and privileged corporations at home, and colonisation abroad Ð of the sphere of the ÔnaturalÕ market governed only by the price mechanism in the balance of supply and demand.127

Then after the interval of classical political economy in the eighteenth century (which ostensibly stressed freedom, but, in fact, inserted a more subtle rule of indirection), during a third historical phase in the nineteenth century, the still-lurking shadow of human psychic and spiritual freedom gives way more and more to the socio-Darwinian fantasy of a sheerly animal humanity, which a better evolutionary science by no means requires.128 So it is ÔeconomismÕ itself (the doctrine of material accumulation as the fundamental socio-political reality, rather than the seeking of social recognition) that returns us full-circle to the primacy of welfare and so to the primacy of the state as the authoriser of a predominantly capitalist market in the first place. Crucially, this includes the dependence of the emergence of a professional political class upon the creation of a national debt.

Moreover, if market choice is gradually acknowledged to be a mode of indirect and dispersed public utilitarian calculation in the disguise of apparently foundational respect for individual rights, it remains the case that the market cannot fulfil the whole of utility or of welfare even from

a dogmatically liberal point of view. As Polanyi noted, the arrival of an unlimited market in labour, land and money in Britain in the 1830s coincided with an unprecedented extension of state power in terms of the collecting of statistics, of policing and of promotion of scientific education, civic sanita- tion and national transportation. So from its inception, the free market was always linked to the authoritarian state Ð a model that Mrs Thatcher would later revive and extend.129

And as Polanyi also pointed out, the subsequent emergence of state welfare structures in the second half of the nineteenth century was not primarily a reaction against laissez-faire, but, rather, a problematic extension of its tendential logic.

We have seen how the liberal invention of capitalism rests on the fusion of the free market with the centralised state in the following terms: first, the bio- political assumption of human division between a nature without value or meaning and an artifice that is either objectively technological or else