You can see this in liberal criticisms of anti-liberal movements as well. For instance, the "nu-Right" as simply "a bunch of sore loser men who are upset about too much equality and liberty." That is, liberalism has provoked an angry (perhaps now even existential) response by being too good and too just.

Whereas for the nu-Right, their liberal detractors (at least the non-elite/non-"winner/dominator" ones) are castrati, betas, cuckolds, bovine consumers who have accepted a pale simulacra of freedom and allowed all the depth to be sucked out of life. And this criticism arises from a certain sort of self-hatred within the nu-Right, for this is how the nu-Right often sees itself as well (which is why "conversion stories" are so common in nu-Right spaces, the story of one's "awakening to the reality of life" and "greater depths"). The movement is, I would argue, in many ways chiefly a revolt of Nietzsche's Last Men (Nietzsche himself being a great precursors critic to modern liberalism). After all, who else would have more reason to fetishize the Overman than the Last Man?

- :100: :up:

Peter Simpson's "Political Iliberalism" is another example. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have been reading this. With the subtitle included it reads, "Political Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom."

Liberalism is failing, and I think it is now important to have proper alternatives so that we don't fall into something worse.

Liberalism is failing, — Leontiskos

It's not failing; it's being beaten down by more aggressive forces. This is because liberalism can thrive only so long in a capitalist society. The essence of capitalism is the haves using up the have-nots and keeping them have-nots as long as they're useful. The only time there is any redistribution of resources, opportunity, wealth and power is a short period following a major breakdown in the capitalist system: recession, depression or war. As the grabbers and users recover, they claw back more and more of everything. They also control the organs of propaganda to stoke dissatisfaction and displace their own wrongdoing onto convenient targets, thus turning gullible people against their neighbours as well as their own self-interest.

I think it is now important to have proper alternatives so that we don't fall into something worse.

We have already fallen into something much, much worse. What do you propose as a 'proper' alternative?

The OP offers a broad indictment of liberalism. But there is no clear argument. You've written a mood piece. The dissatisfaction is real, but the reasoning is thin. Liberalism is accused of being hollow, flattening, spiritually dead. But the case is assumed rather than made.

The critique depends on a conflation. Liberalism is equated with consumer capitalism, secularism, and moral relativism. But this is not self-evident. It’s not clear why Rawls’s political liberalism—or Nussbaum’s capabilities approach—must collapse into late-modern malaise. Both offer accounts of human flourishing. Both recognize the need for moral depth, social meaning, and institutional justice. These are not libertarian apologies for consumer choice.

At its core, the critique chafes at pluralism itself. It wants one truth, publicly affirmed and normatively binding. Liberalism refuses this. It does not deny truth—it refuses to coerce consensus. That refusal is treated here as decadence. But it is, in fact, a guardrail against authoritarianism. The demand that a culture publicly reflect a metaphysical or theological unity is a recipe for repression—of minorities, of dissenters, of difference. Liberalism protects that space. It allows communities to pursue deep, even ultimate, goods—so long as they don’t do so by coercion. That is not a bug. It is the point.

The deeper issue is metaphysical. Liberalism is faulted for not being a theology. It doesn’t offer a doctrine of eros, virtue, or transcendent meaning. But that’s by design. Liberalism is a political framework. It permits those deeper views—it doesn’t impose one. If that’s the flaw, then name the alternative. A confessional state? A return to teleology? A politics grounded in love? Perhaps. But that needs to be argued, not implied through nostalgia and allusion.

Without that, this is not a critique of liberalism. It’s a lament that liberalism isn’t something else.

Along with , I would like to understand your proposed alternative.

I’ve often remarked that the tacit slogan of liberalism is ‘nihil ultra ego’ - nothing beyond self. The individual conscience the sole arbiter of values. I agree that liberalism is preferable to collectivism or theocratic culture where values are imposed. But at the same time, there is a kind of hollowness at the core of the secular culture with which liberalism is entwined.

This is a theme well explored in an essay by Buddhist scholar David Loy, Violence in the God-Shaped Hole: Confronting Modernity's Identity Crisis, which was written in the aftermath of 9/11 as an exploration of the causes of those dreadful events:

Although religious critiques of modernity usually focus on our faith in self-sufficient human reason, that is not the central point to be explored in this article. The key issue is identity, and the security that identity provides – or the anxiety that lack of secure identity arouses.

Traditional premodern religion provided an ontological security, by grounding us in an encompassing metaphysical vision that explains the cosmos and our role within it.

Modernity and postmodernity question such transcendental narratives and therefore leave us with ontological anxiety about the apparent meaninglessness of the universe and the ungroundedness of our lives within it. The result is that we are afflicted with “a deepening condition of metaphysical homelessness,” which is psychologically difficult to bear (Berger, P. (1973). The Homeless Mind.)

By promoting secular values and goals, the modern world cannot avoid undermining the cosmic identity and therefore the ontological grounding that religion traditionally provides. Modernity offers us some other identities – as citizens, as consumers – but this-worldly alternatives cannot provide the ultimate security that we cannot help craving. Our modern identities are more obviously humanly constructed roles that can be exchanged, which therefore offer us no special place or responsibility in a meaningful Cosmos.

Loy then goes on to explain, without in any way defending, the impetus behind Islamic terrorism as a response to the secular negation of religious identity:

...If one’s self-image involves internalizing the perceptions that others have of us, the anonymity of mass society is part of modernity’s lack-of-identity problem. How to distinguish oneself, if, as DeLillo has also said, “only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith,” is taken seriously in modern society (Juergensmeyer 125)? Better to be known as someone who was willing to die for his beliefs, than not to be known at all – than to be no one at all.

This helps us to understand why terrorist attacks such as those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which seem strategically absurd and self-defeating, can nevertheless be desirable. They are not instrumental means to realize political goals but symbolic. ...

Transcendental struggle can provide a heroic identity that transcends even death, for death is not checkmate when you are an agent of God. What grander destiny is possible, than to be part of the cosmic forces of Good fighting against Evil?

He then moves onto the historical origin of secular culture. Notice the convergence with this point:

Despite the fact that it seems obvious that all cultures indoctrinate their children into the dominant ideology, liberalism often seems to think it is excluded from this historical norm, such that any alternative form of education seems like pernicious indoctrination — Count Timothy von Icarus

Loy affirms:

The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed. ...

'Most of us' includes, I am sure, most of us readers and contributors. He goes on:

By privatizing an unmediated relationship between more individualized Christians and a more transcendent God, Luther’s emphasis on salvation-by-faith-alone eliminated the intricate web of mediation – priests, sacraments, canon law, pilgrimages, public penances, etc. – that in effect had constituted the sacred dimension of this world. The religiously-saturated medieval continuity between the natural and the supernatural was sundered by internalizing faith and projecting the spiritual realm far above our struggles in this world.

The newly-liberated space between them generated something new: the secular (from the Latin saeculum, “generation, age,” thus the temporal world of birth and death). The inner freedom of conscience was distinguished from our outer bondage to secular authorities. “These realms, which contained respectively religion and the world, were hermetically sealed from each other as though constituting separate universes” (Nelson 1981, 74-75). The sharp distinction between them was a radical break with the past, and it led to a new kind of person. The medieval understanding of our life as a cycle of sin and repentance was replaced by the more disciplined character-structure required in the modern world, sustained by a more internalized conscience that did not accept the need for external mediation or the validation of priests (admirably documented by Weber in The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism - wayfarer)

As God slowly disappeared above the clouds, the secular became increasingly dynamic, accelerating into the creative destruction that today we must keep readjusting to. What we tend to forget in the process is that the distinction between sacred and secular was originally a religious distinction, devised to empower a new type of Protestant spirituality: that is, a more privatized way to address our sense of lack and fill up the God-shaped hole.

By allowing the sacred pole to fade away, however, we have lost the original religious raison d’etre for that distinction. That evaporation of the sacred has left us with the secular by itself, bereft of the spiritual resources originally designed to cope with it, because secular life is increasingly liberated from any religious perspective or supervision.

My sense is that the West is no longer characterized by liberalism, but rather social constructivism.

Liberalism is a fig leaf used by the elite classes, who see Man as essentially an automaton that can be made to do or believe anything given the right inputs, and it is up to them to structure society in such a way that it produces the "ideal" outcome.

This ideal is communist (authoritarian egalitarian) in nature, which is why liberalism is attacked equally as often. Whenever individuals use their liberty to make decisions that do not correspond with the desired outcome, freedoms must be curtailed, "responsibilities must be taken!", etc.

Egalitarianism is being sold as liberalism - if everybody is equal, everybody is "free".

If you want to poke a hornet's nest in any western academic circle, you need only to criticize communism, and it betrays the elite's true colors.

Social constructivism is the means, communism the endpoint.

To the political elite, communism is seen as an efficient way of exercising total control over a large, ethnically diverse population. (Incidentally, that's why the Soviet Union and China adopted it as an alternative to fascism.) To the controlled masses, communism is a religion that sanctifies weakness and the victim - moral dickwaving (aka "liberal" virtue-signaling) the opium that has mobilized the useful idiots since time immemorial.

My main point is, most problems that people attribute to liberalism stem from a formerly liberal society that is currently being steered by communist ideals.

I agree that liberalism is preferable to collectivism or theocratic culture where values are imposed. — Wayfarer

Why? What has been said that proves liberalism is better than collectivism? And what is collectivism according to you?

The essence of capitalism is the haves using up the have-nots and keeping them have-nots as long as they're useful. — Vera Mont

And the essence of liberalism is to justify capitalism with the ideology of equality, individual liberty and property rights.

And not only to justify capitalism, but to justify colonialism, slavery, and class hierarchy. This is described pretty well in Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History, although he goes too far for my liking --- unlike him (as I recall) I do think there is a lot of good in liberalism.

Anyway, what I've just written is a facile and old-fashioned Marxist criticism, but it does remind us that liberalism is bound up with capitalism and is often on the same side, rather than being opposed to it (that would be socialism).

Modern social justice liberalism, and perhaps Nussbaum and Rawls, might represent a late twentieth century patch-up job prompted by the realization that capitalism, the supposed vehicle of liberty, doesn't actually deliver it (as if nobody had pointed this out before).

@Count Timothy von Icarus Interesting OP; who knows, maybe I'll get around to responding to it.

what is collectivism according to you? — Benkei

I had in mind China and the CCP, but it's not a point I wish to press. And the saying 'the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.'

Maybe be more precise in your rejections then? There's a rather rich body of collectivist thought. If you're interested, aside from Hegel and Marx, there's more recent authors that could be interesting. Happy to give you a bit of a reading list...

Just as the most obvious point, most collectivist thought wants to maximise democratic processes where they are currently barred due to the structure of liberal/capitalism. I mention it because I assume you're rather fond of democracy considering your stance towards Trump.

Right. Maybe collectivism wasn't the word I was looking for. I was saying that by criticising liberal individualism, I didn't mean to endorse societies which suppress individualism and individual rights.

Now, I think that's a valid criticism, but that wasn't quite what I had in mind. That's still the sort of criticism liberalism is comfortable with because it's more a criticism about "systemic disequilibrium" (something technocrats can perhaps one day eliminate). It's not a criticism that says that human freedom and flourishing is not best accomplished by liberalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I originally wrote something fatuous here, which I retract. I don’t actually have a significant interest in liberalism, so I should probably stay quiet. That said, it does feel like we’re living in a capitalist dystopia rather than any ideal of liberalism.

And the essence of liberalism is to justify capitalism with the ideology of equality, individual liberty and property rights.

And not only to justify capitalism, but to justify colonialism, slavery, and class hierarchy. — Jamal

:strong: :mask:

most collectivist thought wants to maximise democratic processes where they are currently barred due to the structure of liberal/capitalism. — Benkei

:up: :up: e.g. Demarchic-Economic Democracy (i.e. libertarian socialism) ... as you, no doubt, know.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

This comes from my position of jumping right into being a kind of socialist from being relatively apolitical, but my perception of liberalism is that it's a sort of meme that involves identification with a disparate array of intellectuals that we bundle through thematics, which is why there are such a wide range of identification labels from neoliberals to those with mild social democratic sympathies. It being not such a coherent collection of ideas is why I'm not as focused on treating it as some kind of enemy the Left has to defeat. Like sure it's helpful to decode it, but it's a sort of history of thought analysis rather than making progress about how the world works, what we should value, and what to advocate, etc.

If I were to air my main objections, I don't really buy into their vocabulary. It's been noted that liberal advocates routinely fail to broach critiques of capitalism & imperialism, but it goes well beyond this. Those who call themselves liberals advocate discussions about freedom & democracy which tend to be articulated in a very abstract manner, in a way that I don't see useful for illuminating political realities and power struggles that help the implementation of programs that help the public. Although I have issues with Marxist & Anarchist vocabulary too (I don't think capitalism as a historical mode of production is a coherent concept which is why it's been a complete mess to identify its origins pace Brenner/Wood) my baseline preference is that I'm a staunch consequentialist with a radical egalitarian ethos who wants to implement heterodox economic ideas which will require sweeping institutional changes.

:up:

Traditional premodern religion provided an ontological security, by grounding us in an encompassing metaphysical vision that explains the cosmos and our role within it.

Modernity and postmodernity question such transcendental narratives and therefore leave us with ontological anxiety about the apparent meaninglessness of the universe and the ungroundedness of our lives within it. The result is that we are afflicted with “a deepening condition of metaphysical homelessness,” which is psychologically difficult to bear (Berger, P. (1973). The Homeless Mind.)

Great quote, and I think my point would be that this "questioning" tends to result in its own sort of dogmatism. The standards by which such questioning procedes, particularly what counts as valid philosophical evidence, is held to the rigid epistemic standards of Anglo-empiricism. This tends to exclude a lot of philosophy from the outset, and tends to dismiss a good deal else as "pseudoproblems" that aren't worthy of engagement. But more than that, these epistemic standards are often seen as absolutely inviolable. They are beyond questioning because they aren't even seen as the sort of thing that should be subject to questioning, even though they are fairly recent innovations, and even though they have a produced a tradition whose answer for "what can we know?" seems to be "not much of anything."

But this perhaps is what feeds into the "bourgeois metaphysics," the notion that "one has the right to choose the truth," or "live your own truth," because nothing much can be said about capital T "Truth" (or Goodness) anyhow.

...If one’s self-image involves internalizing the perceptions that others have of us, the anonymity of mass society is part of modernity’s lack-of-identity problem. How to distinguish oneself, if, as DeLillo has also said, “only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith,” is taken seriously in modern society (Juergensmeyer 125)? Better to be known as someone who was willing to die for his beliefs, than not to be known at all – than to be no one at all.

This helps us to understand why terrorist attacks such as those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which seem strategically absurd and self-defeating, can nevertheless be desirable. They are not instrumental means to realize political goals but symbolic. ...

And it's worth noting here that the standard profile of "First Wave" Islamist terrorists in the West were younger men who were raised in, or at least spent their adolescence in, the West. A great deal were engineers or engineering students as well, and a great deal had serious difficulties with any romantic relationships, which is a recurring theme in terrorism in the Western context. That profile is far different for suicide attackers within the context of MENA and Central Asia's civil wars (who are often developmentally disabled, fed drugs, etc., and have much less agency in the whole situation). By contrast, the "First Wave" terrorists and many of the ISIS inspired "lone wolves" in the US and Europe seem to have a lot in common with racially motivated right-wing terrorists in the West and apolitical spree killers.

The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed. ...

I agree. This is very reminiscent of Charles Taylor's assault on "subtraction narratives" of secularism, that it is just "what you get when superstition and authoritarian control pass away." It leads to a sort of transparency of ideology where it cannot be recognized as such.

By privatizing an unmediated relationship between more individualized Christians...

Through and because of which (through a positive feedback loop), we get Taylor's "buffered self," and Weber's "disenchanted cosmos." This feeds into the unfreedom many see in liberalism. If one thinks that one must be free from the vices to be truly free, and that freedom from the vices is not easily accomplished, then there must be a positive education in and training of virtue to attain freedom (e.g. the ascetic disciplines and spiritual exercises that characterized Pagan, Christian, and Eastern philosophy and education until the modern era).

The buffered self needs no such training. First, because it is pure ratio and can slip back into a disengaged, buffered reasoning as needed, and second because, having denied man any "rational appetites" (i.e. the appetites of Plato's "rational part of the soul"), reason is itself just a tool for meeting the demands of desire; it is and ought only be the slave of the passions (it's worth noting that Hume's recommended dictum, so common today, is a concise summary of the conditioned of the damned in Dante's Hell, and would be seen by him as literally the definition of slavery.

The OP offers a broad indictment of liberalism. But there is no clear argument. You've written a mood piece. The dissatisfaction is real, but the reasoning is thin. Liberalism is accused of being hollow, flattening, spiritually dead. But the case is assumed rather than made.

But it isn't a broad critique of liberalism? I mentioned a broad array of very different "external" critiques of liberalism that see it as incompatible with human flourishing and freedom (i.e., precisely because liberalism offers up a myopic and desiccated vision of human freedom, and Rawls certainly would be a target of some of these critiques; Simpson's title is an explicit response to Rawls). I mentioned several because I figured people might be familiar with at least some of them.

My point, however, was that liberal apologists aren't able to digest these critiques because they cannot get past the presupposition that the liberal conception of freedom is the only possible valid conception of freedom. Hence, they always frame dissent as advocating a "return to authoritarianism," or a desire to "trade freedom for some other good," which often entirely misses the point. And this is because liberalism is often not seen as an explicit ideology by its proponents, but rather "the freedom to choose any ideology."

To wit, your response is a great example:

At its core, the critique chafes at pluralism itself. It wants one truth, publicly affirmed and normatively binding. Liberalism refuses this. It does not deny truth—it refuses to coerce consensus. That refusal is treated here as decadence. But it is, in fact, a guardrail against authoritarianism. The demand that a culture publicly reflect a metaphysical or theological unity is a recipe for repression—of minorities, of dissenters, of difference. Liberalism protects that space. It allows communities to pursue deep, even ultimate, goods—so long as they don’t do so by coercion. That is not a bug. It is the point.

The deeper issue is metaphysical. Liberalism is faulted for not being a theology. It doesn’t offer a doctrine of eros, virtue, or transcendent meaning. But that’s by design. Liberalism is a political framework. It permits those deeper views—it doesn’t impose one. If that’s the flaw, then name the alternative. A confessional state? A return to teleology? A politics grounded in love? Perhaps. But that needs to be argued, not implied through nostalgia and allusion.

Is liberalism really just a framework that "permits those deeper views," without "imposing one" of its own? Are the only options aside from it a return to the oppressive institutions of the past? Does it really only "protect spaces" of discourse and not impose discourse or indoctrinate its citizens in its own dogmas and doctrines?

To quote the OP:

Indeed, despite the fact that it seems obvious that all cultures indoctrinate their children into the dominant ideology, liberalism often seems to think it is excluded from this historical norm, such that any alternative form of education seems like pernicious indoctrination. That's one of the perils of "bourgeois metaphysics," is that it becomes transparent and cannot be recognized as an ideology. It can default into the claim that it "isn't an ideology," but rather "the freedom to have any ideology one wishes." That's the myopia of liberalism in a nutshell, ideology gone transparent, a historically distinct (and historically quite narrow) vision of freedom become totalized and absolutized.

This reminds me on the thread on classical education, where the immediate fear was that an education in a framework of virtue ethics (the norm in East and West for most of history) would be "indoctrination," as if modern liberal education was "value-neutral" and free from any such indoctrination. It isn't.

Liberalism is equated with consumer capitalism, secularism, and moral relativism.

Can you name a single society where they haven't gone together? These issues are certainly written about across the Anglophone world, Europe, Korea, and Japan. Eastern European writers came to similar conclusions and reflect on the "shock" it brought, which has led to the phenomena of "Soviet nostalgia" in the former Warsaw Pact nations.

Consider this alternative view of freedom from a quote from St. Augustine:

Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices.

We might fault Augustine for a certain privilege in saying this, but it's worth noting that Epictetus, who was a slave, said the same thing, just not as pithily.

Now, does liberalism do a good job at educating and training individuals in the virtues so as to avoid the unfreedom that comes with being vice-addled? Does it even see this as desirable or an important function of a "liberating society?"

I would say it doesn't. Kids are plied with caffeinated corn syrup slush from grade school, and are now exposed to hardcore pornography through the internet on a regular basis from about the same age. Everywhere, one sees powerful examples of the ideal of freedom as freedom to consume, to "live one's truth," and to "fulfill one's appetites and desires." And as noted in the OP, "capitalist realism" attempts to backwards project these norms onto all prior epochs.

The role of education for the upper classes is rather to gain markers of success so that one might attend a good college, so as to attain more markers of success, so as to attain a good job, so as to earn a lot of income, so as to fulfill one's desires. Perhaps those desires involve a "prosocial" element. Perhaps they don't. That's the individual's choice after all. The education system is there to empower them to make those choices (and to sort them by "merit"), not to help them discover what is "truly good and choice-worthy," or "truly just."

But obviously this view conflicts with other powerful visions of freedom. It certainly conflicts with those views that see ignorance of what is truly best as a limit on freedom. "Freedom" to do as one pleases, on these views, isn't freedom if one is bound by ignorance about what is truly better. It's merely "being a slave to appetite, instinct, circumstance, culture, and the passions." The presupposition that an "education in virtue" is somehow a pernicious form of indoctrination is, of course, itself a doctrine that people are taught from their youth. As noted above, Hume's vision of freedom is pretty much identical to Dante's picture of spiritual slavery; to claim one is right is to claim the other is wrong. They cannot equally be respected by a "value-neutral" system. The purportedly "value-neutral" system we have sides heavily with Hume.

Nor need we only look to the pre-modern tradition. Han is a great contemporary example. Nietzsche has one of the fierier condemnations of the way in which liberalism leads to unfreedom.

We could consider Huxley's "A Brave New World," here. What makes it dystopian? The heavy use of shallow media, endemic drug use, reduction of sex and romance to pleasure, etc? The desiccation of the human experience and removal of beauty? From the liberal point of view, I would imagine it must instead be the centralized control, caste system, and conditioning. Yet the conditioning is just a more extreme form of the incentive-based "nudging" that has come to dominate liberal technocrats' approach to problem solving. E.g., on the problem of rampant obesity and spiking rates of diabetes, the solution is "nudging" via vice taxes and reminder warning labels.

At any rate, if the caste system were removed, the centralized planning done away with, and the more extreme forms of conditioning and social pressure reduced, and the adults of the society consented to it (recall, those who dissent get to leave the society and go to their own private "Galt's Gulch" for romantics and intellectuals), it's hard to see what the liberal critique could be. "A Brave New World," is an "almost-utopia."

They also control the organs of propaganda to stoke dissatisfaction and displace their own wrongdoing onto convenient targets, thus turning gullible people against their neighbours as well as their own self-interest.

If liberalism creates citizens who are so easily manipulated, who are so ignorant, then doesn't this directly impugn its claims to empower freedom? For, ignorance can easily be seen as a limit on freedom.



I had this conversation with Joshs before. He said that American's urban centers, NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. represented the "economy of the future." I do believe he is right, but I think this "future" looks a lot less like how its advocates envision it and much more like Saudi Arabia or Guatemala.



The problem is that the mainstream of thought can only think of addressing this by moving consumption around. I'd argue that this, at best, moves us back to America's post-war boom years, and doesn't address the problem of staggering global inequality (leading to a staggering demand for migration), nor any of the deeper problems of modernity. It would maintain the same focus on consumption that seems to be leading us towards both ecological and spiritual exhaustion. Not to mention such a move is probably quite impossible now, the public's appetite for socialism has been undercut by the eroding of the nationalist identities that originally supported redistribution. Liberal democracy sublated its nationalist and socialist foes, incorporating key components of each into itself, but new global issues, particularly off-shoring and large scale migration, have set these two "pillars" in conflict with one another.

Here is Han from The Agony of Eros:

Achievement society is wholly dominated by the modal verb can—in contrast to disciplinary society, which issues prohi bitions and deploys should. After a certain point of productivity, should reaches a limit. To increase productivity, it is replaced by can. The call for motivation, initiative, and projects exploits more effectively than whips and commands. As an entrepreneur of the self, the achievement-subject is free insofar as he or she is not subjugated to a commanding and exploiting Other. However, the subject is still not really free because he or she now engages in self-exploitation— and does so of his or her own free will. The exploiter is the exploited. The achievement-subject is perpetrator and victim in one. Auto-exploitation proves much more efficient than auto-exploitation because it is accompanied by a feeling of liberty. This makes possible exploitation without domination.

Foucault observes that neoliberal Homo oeconomicus does not inhabit disciplinary society—an entrepreneur of the self is no longer a disciplinary subject1—but he fails to notice that this entrepreneur of the self is not truly free: Homo oeconomicus only thinks himself free when in fact he is exploiting himself. Foucault adopts a positive attitude toward neoliberalism. Uncritically, he assumes that the neoliberal regime—the system of “the least state” or “frugal government,” which stands for the “management of freedom”2—enables civil liberty (bürgerliche Freiheit). Foucault fails to notice the structure of violence and coercion under writing the neoliberal dictum of freedom. Consequently, he interprets it as the freedom to be free: “I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free.”3 The neoliberal dictum of freedom finds expression in the paradoxical imperative, Be free. But this plunges the achievement-subject into depression and exhaustion. Even though Foucault’s “ethics of the self” stands opposed to political repression and auto-exploitation in general, it is blind to the violence of the freedom that underlies auto-exploitation.

You can produces massive compulsion, on which the achievement-subject dashes him- or herself to pieces. Because it appears as freedom, self-generated compulsion is not recognized as such. You can exercises even greater constraint than You should. Auto-compulsion proves more fatal than auto-compulsion, because there is no way to resist oneself. The neoliberal regime conceals its compulsive structure behind the seeming freedom of the single individual, who no longer understands him- or herself as a subjugated subject (“subject to”), but as a project in the process of realizing itself (entwerfendes Projekt). That is its ruse: now, whoever fails is at fault and personally bears the guilt. No one else can be made responsible for failure. Nor is there any possibility for pardon, relief, or atonement. In this way, not only a crisis of debt occurs—a crisis of gratification does, as well.

Relief from debt, financial and psychological, and gratification both presume the Other. Lack of a binding connection to the Other is the transcendental condition for crises of gratification and debt. Such crises make it plain that capitalism—counter to widespread belief (e.g., Benjamin)—is not a religion. Every religion operates with both debt (guilt) and relief (pardon). But capitalism only works with debt and default. It offers no possibility for atonement, which would free the debtor from liability. The impossibility of mitigation and atonement also accounts for the achievement subject’s depression. Together with burnout, depression represents an unredeemable failure of ability—that is, it amounts to psychic insolvency. Literally, “insolvency” (from the Latin solvere) signifies the impossibility of paying off a debt.

Eros is a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability. Being able not to be able (Nicht-Können-Können) represents its negative counterpart. The negativity of otherness—that is, the atopia of the Other, which eludes all ability—is constitutive of erotic experience: “The other bears alterity as an essence. And this is why [we] have sought this alterity in the absolutely original relationship of eros, a relationship that is impossible to translate into powers.”4 Absolutizing ability is precisely what annihilates the Other. A successful relationship with the Other finds expression as a kind of failure. Only by way of being able not to be able does the Other appear:

Can this relationship with the other through Eros be characterized as a failure? Once again, the answer is yes, if one adopts the terminology of current descriptions, if one wants to characterize the erotic by “grasp ing,” “possessing,” or “knowing.” But there is nothing of all this, or the failure of all this, in eros. If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power.5

Quote from Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other

I find it interesting that Levinas mentions "knowing" here. This problem itself comes from a certain conception of knowing, this is knowing as a "possessing (of representations." This is not the knowing of ecstasis one finds in Plato and much of the pre-modern tradition, or the "knowing by becoming" of the Neoplatonic ascent, but rather a knowing where a static self lays hold of the other and makes it a part of itself. There is no "going out" or "being penetrated" in such a view, but merely "acquisition."

This makes perfect sense when one considers the modern reduction of man's rationality to discursive ratio alone. Aquinas himself says that ratio is to acquisition (and movement) as intellectus is to possession (and rest). The latter is, of course, likened to "possession," but this is as respects a rest in its goal, a rest in the other as an end, rather than a frenetic, never-ending movement, a need to extract from the other as means.

If liberalism creates citizens who are so easily manipulated, who are so ignorant, then doesn't this directly impugn its claims to empower freedom? For, ignorance can easily be seen as a limit on freedom. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No ism creates citizens. Citizens are first human beings: individually quite sensible and reasonably co-operative, collectively gullible and manipulable and always potentially both altruistic and vicious. The very same kind of people who were persuaded to capital, to industrialization, to Islam, to monarchy; by every exploiter and war-monger who ever sent them to kill and enslave one another, to suffer and die in heaps, and lately to upend a civilization that had been working fairly well for most of a century.

Unfortunately, unlike theocracy and autrocarcy that allow for no original ideas, personal freedom or opposition, liberalism lets humans be as good and bad, as smart or stupid as they choose to be and live with the consequences of their collective choice. Once they've bollixed it up good and proper, they blame a vaguely defined system, declare it 'broken and demand that Somebody fix it for them.
Hence the Jesus-shaped hole.

nd the essence of liberalism is to justify capitalism with the ideology of equality, individual liberty and property rights.

And not only to justify capitalism, but to justify colonialism, slavery, and class hierarchy. This is described pretty well in Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History, although he goes too far for my liking --- unlike him (as I recall) I do think there is a lot of good in liberalism. — Jamal

I must be using the wrong dictionary. Oxford has the meaning as

1.willingness to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; openness to new ideas,
- the holding of political views that are socially progressive and promote social welfare.
- the belief that many traditional beliefs are dispensable, invalidated by modern thought, or liable to change.

2. a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

Not a word about colonialism or slavery, class hierarchy or capital, unlewss all enterprise is capitalistic. However, once all of those conditions have prevailed for a few centuries, there is no way to establish a brand new social structure except to tear the old one down - with all the death, destruction and lasting bitterness that entails. (And maybe end up with the travesty into which communism slid.) All a liberal can do is introduce small, incremental easements - against fierce resistance from the deeply vested powerful interest groups.

If I have to nitpick at your last few posts, I think the focus on consumerism is unnecessary.

First, consumerism is not as a foundational mechanism of capitalism, but rather a necessary consequence of capitalism’s structural imperatives, particularly its demand for perpetual growth. In my view, consumerism is symptomatic rather than causal, it emerges because capitalism requires ever-expanding markets.

Second, the problem with consumerism is not that people buy things they don’t strictly need. There's nothing inherently wrong with pleasure, desire or personal expression through material things. The critique shouldn’t rest on some moralistic asceticism or a return to “just the essentials.” Instead, the issue lies in how and why consumerism emergesas a structural solution to capitalism’s growth imperative and within a system of production that is exploitative, ecologically unsustainable and alienating.

On the first point, I think this becomes apparent when asking why a capitalist system is dependent on endless consumption.

In a capitalist society money is no longer just a mediator between commodities but it is capital. The most straightforward expression of it is Marx' M' = M + ΔM (Money - Commodity - Money(+profit). The goal becomes the accumulation of surplus value and the reinvestment loop makes this accumulation theoretically unlimited. Hence capital's continued quest to valorise everything in terms of money, clean air are carbon credited, fairness is pursued through true pricing, your music purchase isn't exhausted with a record but becomes a monthly recurring subscription where you own nothing, etc. etc.

But I digress, I was meaning to make a point on capitalism dependency on continuous growth and how this must necessarily lead to consumerism. Capitalist grwoth can can happen by expanding through:

• Increasing productivity through technological innovation
• Cutting costs (including wages and working conditions)
• Finding new markets (imperialism, globalization)

But these have limits; diminishing returns on technological innovation, reduction in wages undermine demand and at some point new territories cannot be added. But there's a fourth and that is increasing consumption per capita. Under normal circumstances, demand would cease when need is met and this would be a limit in itself. But consumerism breaks that limit because it is no longer about need but manufactured demand. This is achieved through:

• Advertising and branding (emotional appeal over function)
• Planned obsolescence (products designed to wear out or go out of style)
• Fashion and tech cycles (inducing dissatisfaction with the old)

So you buy identity, lifestyles, status and experience. In other words: meaning.

Point 2, though, is the damning part of this dance between supply and demand. Under capitalism our desires are serviced by a mode of production that exploits labour, depletes resources, externalises social costs (pollution, waste, inequality) and concentrates wealth. In that sense, consumerism justifies capitalism. It creates the appearance of fairness by foscuing on freedom to choose between a big mac and a whopper, while obscuring the lack of freedom in production where almost everyone is a wage slave, have no say how a company is run, have no control on the externalisation of social costs and has no say how the use of resources can be equitably distributed among existing and future generations.

True freedom should therefore involve collective democratic control over production to decide what gets produced, how it's produced and for whom.

My other beef with capitalism involves how it encroaches on public goods, financialises it and makes a profit of it. But this is a work in progress for me how I should accurately state it. I'm thinking of how clean air (which should be a human right) is now measurable in carbon credits, gives the right to pollute and offset it even if achieved on the other side of the globe (we have strong winds in the Netherlands, but not that strong). Or bottling water and privatising municipal water systems. Patenting genes, seeds or personal data from DNA tests. The whole personal data market. Pollution of public space through advertisement. Eco-tourism and selling "tranquility" as an experience.

I don't think the answer is found in a dicitionary but a history book. Liberalism and capitalism developed in tandem and share core assumption about the individual, property and greedom (that was a typo but I like it).

The critique shouldn’t rest on some moralistic asceticism or a return to “just the essentials.”

It's perhaps my fault for having too many different critiques in mind to start. So, I will just home in on my favorite here. Disparate thinkers have considered it the case that people only choose to worse over the better out of:
A. Weakness of will
B. Ignorance about what is truly best.
(and we might add C., coercion by external constraints, or we could just apply A and B to the situations fortune provides people with).

Many of these thinkers would also maintain that weakness of will and ignorance of what is truly good represent limits on freedom. This is a reflexive, or "inner" freedom, as Axel Honneth puts it in his typology, a freedom over the self. This was long considered the most important type of freedom, because without it no amount of wealth, status, or freedom from external constraints leads to happiness (e.g. miserable celebrities committing suicide).

So, the argument here doesn't reduce to "moralistic asceticism" about the necessary evils of overconsumption. Indeed, advocates of this view say things like: Food is not evil, but gluttony is. Money is not evil, but avarice is. Glory is not evil, but vainglory is. Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse (St. Maximus the Confessor).

To be ruled over by vices is to not rule over oneself (Plato's "civil war in the soul" in the Republic, or St. Paul's "death in sin" in Romans 7), and so it is to be unfree.

Consumerism, that people spend a vast deal of their lives doing things they dislike in pursuit of wealth, status, and sensuous goods that do not make them happy, demonstrates a lack of freedom on this view. This does not mean that doing work one likes, or doing onerous work to procure things that truly make one happy, is bad. It is rather, the pursuit of what makes one unhappy, or what fails to lead to flourishing, i.e. an inability to tell the better from the worse, a sort of unfreedom.

Liberalism, because of how it envisions freedom, is generally blind to how it fails to offer its population this sort of freedom and the way this reflexive freedom needs to be fostered. Furthermore, because of what Benkei points out re consumption and growth, it actually tends to foster the exact opposite of this sort of freedom. Huge efforts are made to "boost consumption," and people are bombarded by marketing and a "culture of consumption." All the old wisdom about how wealth, status, power, etc. are not what leads to "living a good life," or "being a good person," falls into the background at best, or is openly disparaged as "a defunct order" at worst. After all, if freedom is actually about lack of constraint and ability to consume, then the old view is such a constraint, and perhaps an apologia for not focusing on consumption as a good to be sought by the state.

To Vera's point, if freedom is a good, and "the people" turn on it for lesser goods, or out of sheer ignorance, then, on this older view, they were never free to begin with. If freedom isn't a superior good, then so much the worse for liberalism.

Basically, if this knowledge and reflexive freedom is missing, liberalism is failing to provide freedom. This would be my same charge against Fukuyama. If liberalism cannot provide a huge swath of the population with recognition, a basic human need, then it cannot be the "end of history." Movement continues until a state of rest. He can only see liberalism as "the end of history" because he cannot escape liberalism's deficient notions of human flourishing and freedom.

I must be using the wrong dictionary. Oxford has the meaning as — Vera Mont

Not a word about colonialism or slavery, class hierarchy or capital — Vera Mont

What said. What I said about colonialism, slavery, and class hierarchy was an expression of a position in political philosophy, and a position with respect to liberalism's historical and social role, which I explained was a common Marxist position --- so you're unlikely to find it in a dictionary. What you've effectively done is just dismissed my position, perhaps because you found my response rude, I'm not sure (if so, I apologize). In any case, you can't engage in a discussion --- unless, that is, you are trying to be positively disrespectful --- using appeals to dictionary definitions.

A better description of liberalism is on Wikipedia:

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. — Liberalism

I think it's fair to approach this from a historical perspective to see how liberalism developed, and I don't think you have to be a Marxist to see its association with the development of capitalism. As for colonialism, slavery, and all those bad things, well, there are many examples of liberalism's role in justifying these things. I'll give two.

1. Liberalism's egalitarian principles applied explicitly only to "the community of the free," which meant reasonably wealthy white men, everyone else being either inferior or not quite ready for the benefits of civilization.

2. Colonialism, usually violent and coercive, was justified by liberals as a part of a civilizing mission to save the backward races from their benighted condition.

An interesting question here might be to what extent one can say, trans-historically, that these examples represented an infidelity to some true liberalism. I personally think that's an impossible position, although many hold it, but while I see the way that liberalism was shaped by the social reality of expanding capitalism, the ideas that came out of that were not all bad.

Anyway, probably none of this comes close to responding to the OP, so maybe I should quit now.

I don't think the answer is found in a dicitionary but a history book. Liberalism and capitalism developed in tandem and share core assumption about the individual, property and greedom (that was a typo but I like it). — Benkei

There are a lot of people that seem to confuse the boundaries of what it means to be a liberal (a libertarian - the true liberals). There are some on the left that like to support the idea of making your own personal choices, wearing what one wants to wear, smoking what one wants to smoke in the privacy of their own home, making love to who they want in the privacy of their own home, etc. but then go beyond that to coercing others into supporting or affirming what they do or think.

There are some on the left that like to support the idea of economic freedom (greedom as you put it), having more of your money in your pocket to participate more freely (afford more) in the market, etc., but then go beyond that to supporting monopolies, and the hoarding of resources, that limit economic freedom and competition.

Then are those in the middle, the moderates, which are the actual liberals - that want to live without coercion and do not have incessant need to force others to support or affirm their own choices and behaviors. The left and the right like to co-op the term "liberal" to make themselves more appealing to growing number of independent moderates but you simply have to look at how they are using the term to find that they really mean is having the freedom to coerce others into their way of thinking and behaving.

A pessimistic view is that capitalists need freedom to operate, so they champion liberalism because it diminishes religious and governmental interference.

:up:

EDIT: I mean, I think that's a big part of how liberalism grew. I'd back off from describing it in conspiratorial terms.

I don't think the answer is found in a dicitionary but a history book. Liberalism and capitalism developed in tandem and share core assumption about the individual, property and greedom (that was a typo but I like it). — Benkei

A pessimistic view is that capitalists need freedom to operate, so they champion liberalism because it diminishes religious and governmental interference. — frank

:100:

The OP offers a broad indictment of liberalism. But there is no clear argument. You've written a mood piece. The dissatisfaction is real, but the reasoning is thin. Liberalism is accused of being hollow, flattening, spiritually dead. But the case is assumed rather than made. — Banno

There is something right about this critique, and it gets at what I have called, "The 30,000 foot view." This goes back to my first thread on TPF, where I advocated for argument that is transparent and which exhibits vulnerabilities for others to engage. Ideally an argument or position should provide opportunities for an opponent to object and engage. Overly broad critiques are not altogether cut off from this possibility, but in fact what happens is that only opponents who have an extremely wide foundation of learnedness are able to properly engage broad critiques.

With that said, I don't think there is anything unusual or grievous about this OP. This strikes me as a TPF-wide issue.

I don't think the answer is found in a dicitionary but a history book. Liberalism and capitalism developed in tandem and share core assumption about the individual, property and greedom — Benkei

In tandem from 4000BC Sumeria onward? If that's the case, no wonder we don't have a firm definition for the idea we're arguing about!
Historically, every conceivable form of governance and all of their opposing counterparts have been in effect somewhere for some period of time, alongside every conceivable economic and social organization. So, yes, human ideas exist in tandem, in time.
What, precisely are these [correct/myopic/misguided/duplicitous/ridiculous/laudable/damnable] core assumptions?

To Vera's point, if freedom is a good, and "the people" turn on it for lesser goods, or out of sheer ignorance, then, on this older view, they were never free to begin with. If freedom isn't a superior good, then so much the worse for liberalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The fact that some philosophers declare people unfree for various reasons does not invalidate the good intentions of liberals who attempt to lessen the misery of those who don't know how to or are not allowed to choose what's good for them. That's not about consumption, that's about social justice.

Certain kinds of freedom are harmful to the individual and society. The constraints and punitive repression of theocracy don't replace harmful freedom with good, it simply makes the lack of choice less unpalatable with false promises.

In any case, you can't engage in a discussion --- unless, that is, you are trying to be positively disrespectful --- using appeals to dictionary definitions. — Jamal

No, it wasn't disrespect, it was a desire for a clear idea what is being discussed under this wide, blurry heading. If there is no definition other than what American politicians hammered out, then I can't engage.