Republican Liberty

INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY IS AN OXYMORON:

Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes (Ernst Roets, May 12, 2024, European Conservative)

[Charles] Taylor’s remarkable book Sources of the Self was published in 1989—sixteen years before Revenge of the Sith. The book deals with the history of modern identity and the way we think about who we are. Even though Taylor does not claim to champion either liberalism or conservatism, he cautions throughout about the risk of modern disengagement. The disengaged self is an individual who has lost contact with his community, culture, and tradition, predominantly under the pretext of being an independent individual.

Taylor claims to endorse a certain version of the modern conception of freedom, while also expressing concern that a certain—we might even say, mainstream—strand of the modern conception of freedom is in important ways becoming unendurable from a philosophical perspective. The modern conception of freedom has become, in Taylor’s words, a “deeply confused” one. This is because it is built on two cornerstones that cannot be reconciled with one another.

The first is that the modern conception of freedom is primarily driven by a (new) conception of what constitutes the good. Where the traditional Western view teaches that freedom is bound up with the recognition of the common good within the context of the community, the modern view teaches that freedom is the result of liberation of the individual. It teaches, thus, that freedom of individual choice is the ultimate good that must be pursued. The second idea that underpins the modern conception of freedom is that it is ‘good’ to repudiate qualitative distinctions and to reject constitutive goods as such. The notion here is that it is not desirable for anyone to decide on anyone else’s behalf what constitutes the good, as this is something to be decided by every individual for themselves.

The problem here is that the former is in itself a qualitative distinction of what constitutes the good, while the latter claims that one should not work with qualitative distinctions of what constitutes the good. If the former is true, the latter cannot be true, and if the latter is true, the former cannot be true. Put differently, if it is indeed true that individual choice is the highest form of the good, then one cannot simultaneously claim that qualitative distinctions on what constitutes the good should be done away with. And if it is indeed true that qualitative distinctions on what constitutes the good should be done away with, then one cannot simultaneously claim that individual choice is the highest form of the good.

Or, to put it even more bluntly, to claim that every individual should decide for himself what constitutes the good, is not reconcilable with the idea that individual freedom is indeed the ultimate good. The liberal claim that individual freedom is the ultimate good is the logical equivalent of Obi-Wan’s claim that only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Of course, it is precisely because liberalism requires that our law-making be participatory and that all laws apply universally that it is neither absolutist nor individualist. Indeed, it is rather disinterested in individual freedom.

CONSERVATISM SEEKS TO CONSERVE LIBERALISM:

On Liberal Centrism Thomas D. Howes, 3/15/24, Vital Center)

Liberal centrism, as I defend it here, is not so much an ideology as an approach. It is “liberal” in the old sense that connotates both liberty and generosity. This was how it was used by Adam Smith when he wrote of a “liberal plan” for the economy, and by George Washington when he referred to America’s “liberal policy” of religious liberty. Centrism, moreover, is inseparable from liberalism. Among other things, it is an attitude in the context of disagreement that looks for solutions that everyone can at least live with. Thus, according to this conception of liberal centrism, “liberal” and “centrist” are mutually reenforcing terms. To be centrist is to be liberal, and to be liberal is to be centrist. And there have been plenty of self-described liberals and centrists who see themselves in this way.

The United States is a model context for what I call liberal centrism because it was founded with an emphasis on the basic equality of people, and governance by consent. Moreover, its form of governance, with its separation of powers, checks and balances, and rule of law, provides time-tested tools for resolving conflict peacefully and fairly, and in a way that everyone can live with.

Liberal centrism, in sum, is an approach to politics that is attentive to the health of a political community comprised of equals, and thus it is attentive to respect for the implicit and explicit rules that govern our political relationships.

SOLA SCRIPTURA:

Reel in the Agencies (Patrick Pullis, Apr 05 2024, City Journal)

The Chevron deference principle implicated in Loper stems from a landmark Supreme Court decision in Chevron USA, Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984). The ruling empowered administrative agencies, absent direct congressional guidance, to interpret federal statutes, provided that courts did not deem their interpretation “unreasonable.” Subsequent decisions narrowed the scope of agencies’ power to interpret federal law, but bureaucrats still wield significant influence in the rulemaking process. […]

If the Court allows the NMFS rule to stand, agencies will be emboldened to interpret statutes without regard for the costs or regulatory burden their rules impose on private businesses. Such overreach typically bothers libertarian-minded conservatives, but should also worry progressives, who typically support the administrative state.

Imagine, for example, that Donald Trump wins the 2024 election and wants to use federal power to crack down on ESG-based investment funds for failing to act in accord with their fiduciary duties. If Loper is not struck down, the Court would effectively give the Securities and Exchange Commission the green light not only to regulate these funds more closely but also to require them to pay for the potentially high costs associated with those regulations. Those progressives who advocate upholding the rule in Loper would be wise to consider how it could be used against them when the executive is controlled by a Republican president.

To avoid such scenarios, the Supreme Court should strike down Loper.

The Executive is not the Legislative.

REPUBLICAN LIBERTY DETERMINES THE COMMON GOOD:

Raymond Aron’s Liberal Virtues (Paul T. Wilford, Ethan Cutler, Mar 01 2024, City Journal)

Liberal democracy stakes its claim to justice on securing individual liberty for each by granting legal and political equality to all. […]

At the heart of Aron’s lecture is a penetrating threefold distinction among kinds of liberties—the personal, the political, and the social—that he employs to correct the abstract thinking that keeps us from recognizing, and thus from making good use of, the rights we already enjoy.

Aron elaborates his typology of liberties beginning with personal liberties, which he defines as the protection of individuals from various forms of coercion. Among them are freedom of movement, choice of employment, and freedom of conscience, which, in increasingly secular societies, has grown from religious liberty to include the freedom to express differing political ideologies—even those that are illiberal or anti-liberal. Such guarantees of personal independence are complemented by the political liberties that assure citizens the possibility of active participation in the political process, which “may be summed up by three words: voting, protesting, and assembling.” Mediating between the personal and the political are the social liberties, which depend immediately on material welfare without directly involving either political participation or freedom from coercion. These include the aims of the welfare state, such as “the liberty of being cared for, or that of being educated,” as well as the freedom of groups (such as unions) to organize for their interests within civil society. This final kind of liberty mitigates the socioeconomic inequalities that are a necessary consequence of equality before the law.

If Aron’s stress on the reality of individual liberty indicates his distance from the Left, his defense of forms of collective liberty distinguishes him from the libertarian Right. But Aron cannot be pinned on such a spectrum––not even in its center—because each position on it prizes a particular kind of liberty above others, which is just what he avoids. When liberal democracies are at their best, Aron observes, personal, political, and social liberties counterbalance rather than subsume one another. Liberal regimes flourish, he maintains, when personal, social, and political liberties check and balance one another; they decay when just one form of liberty is considered the true end of political life, rendering the others mere means.

THE LONG GOODNESS:

Virtue in the Age of Neo-Machiavellianism: a review of Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena by James Hankins (Reviewed by Jesse Russell, 3/10/24, University Bookman)

One of the strongest currents in American literature and film is the interlacement between hard boiled detective novels and film noir. With such literary figures as Raymond Chandler and the more recent (perhaps too risqué) James Ellroy as well as such classic films as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Third Man (1949), the bleak world of noir revealed the allegedly corrupt underbelly of the American century. Noir is, of course, one of Machiavelli’s (and St. Augustine of Hippo’s) misguided offspring. But film noir, like all works in the Machiavellian tradition, does contain an accurate picture of how the world sometimes works. However, rather than giving into the bleakness of how things can be, it is perhaps better to heroically strive for moral goodness and political peace and order, and in Political Meritocracy, James Hankins provides a qualified but much needed road map for human flourishing.

Or, as Chandler put it:

“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. […]

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

ARBITRARY POWER, THAT IS:

Against power: As a republican, Sophie de Grouchy argued that sympathy, not domination, must be the glue that holds society together (Sandrine Bergèsis, Aeon)

The Letters on Sympathy, Grouchy’s only known, and signed, authored work, were published in 1798 as an appendix to her translations of the final edition of Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1792) and of his essay A Dissertation on the Origins of Languages (1792). These remained the standard translations of Smith’s key works for two centuries. Consequently, Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy remained in wide circulation too, and were able to influence the growth of political ideas. […]

But for fuller evidence of her more radical views, we need to turn to the newspaper she founded together with Condorcet, Paine and others: Le Républicain. Published in 1791, the journal included anonymous articles by Grouchy and her translations of some of Paine’s work. She became known as a ‘fierce’ republican, and, not surprisingly, as an anti-monarchist she was mocked and caricatured in royalist journals.

In one of these articles, Grouchy attacked monarchy as an economic extravagance, and at the same time showed that it served no purpose beyond a ceremonial one by proposing that the king and his entourage be replaced by automata. Given the cost of the real ‘moving sculptures’ and the difficulty of producing and maintaining them in good working order, the claim that automata would represent a significant cost-saving was a direct attack on royal extravagance. But more than an economic cost, it was the psychological cost of monarchy that Grouchy was most worried about. In the second article (which she may have redrafted from an earlier one by her friend Dumont), Grouchy took on a theme she developed in her Letters on Sympathy: the moral and psychological cost of domination, the kind of domination characteristic of monarchy.

Being dominated is the chief and most pervasive political harm for republicans, because, Grouchy argues, it removes our liberty. In this, republicans differ somewhat from liberals, who see liberty threatened by interference. To be dominated is not necessarily the same thing as being interfered with. Being dominated means being subject to an arbitrary power that has the potential to interfere at any point in time. Grouchy argues that a king who is unconstrained by the law always dominates. Even a benign king who does not wish to interfere with his subjects’ personal lives dominates. Louis XVI insisted that he cared above all about the happiness of his subjects, yet his power over them was unregulated by law, and therefore arbitrary and dominating in this sense. And, given that a king’s attitude may change over the course of his reign, and that he will, one day, be replaced by his heir, his benevolence cannot be relied on to prevent future harms from interference. So, the king’s character does not make a difference to whether we should accept rule by monarchs: they still dominate, no matter how well meaning.