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| Image credit.Continued from Government, the State, and Freedom (4) - John Gray's Account |
Summary and Conclusion of the sequence Government, the State, and Freedom.
The state is built around rights, which
logically precede it, rather than the state being the originator of these
foundational rights. If we look at the state as a conduit of democratic
pressures, however, we may well regard it an originator of rights. However, this implies that a process of self-government is productive of the rights –
not the discretion of an aloof institution levitating over the people. In a word:
sovereignty is invested in the people and imparted upon the state as the
custodian of popular sovereignty.
For the state to act as the people’s steward,
it needs to be tied to rules not of its own discretionary making, that limit
its range of operation and competence.
The liberal conception of the state as
custodian of popular sovereignty implies limited government.
Popular sovereignty also implies a tension
between limited government (constitutionalism) and self-government (democracy)
which I shall be dealing with in a sequel to “Precommitment …”
Limited government is not necessarily tantamount to a demand
for minarchism, which latter requires a small state confined in its competences to the
protection of rights and the upholding of justice.
The temptation to interpret limited government
as small government, however, reveals an inherent indeterminacy in the liberal
conception of the state. The rights on which liberalism insists are
double-edged in the sense that on one hand they are simple and clear in their
meaning, whereas on the other hand they are open-ended and contestable – just think of
“contractual freedom.” The "lucid," easy to understand and endorse edge of this sword seems to imply that all the
ramifications of this particular right are obviously connected with its lucid
part and that therefore there are unequivocal answers to whatever further questions
there may raise. But this not so. The base of a liberal consensus on liberal
rights does not extend too far into their practical ramifications. All the more,
as the system of liberal rights is multi-nodal with many different rights requiring a balancing of their core demands with myriads of interpretable implications.
Liberal principles quickly become an impetus "instigating" a pluralist discourse
that cannot, in their turn, be decided by recourse to a uniform set of liberal principles. Thus
the liberal concept of the state is really the starting signal for a broader
political competition in which liberal principles are but one of many
inputs. This also elucidates what I mean by robust conditions of freedom – these
are liberal principles that are accepted by the entire pluralist community,
including non-liberal partisans. In so far as some of their implications and
readings are contested, they are non-robust, malleable, often even non-essential and disposable.
The soft belly of liberal rights, the more
opaque or indeterminate or non-robust part of them that is open to diverging
interpretations invites an expansive vision of the state. Put differently:
since the robust conditions of freedom do not provide an impenetrable frontier blocking interpretations that entail expanded state competences, over time
people will focus on extensions of the state that show promise to enhance their interests
(while respecting by and large the robust conditions of freedom.
Minarchism is
an illusion. And limited government is not a prescription for an exclusively
liberal understanding of government. Amenable to competing construal, in
certain respects liberal rights simply do not vouchsafe anything that could be
called THE LIBERAL STATE, a uniquely liberal institution. Believing in liberal rights is like standing in a
fog, where the immediate surrounding is clearly visible, while what lies
further away becomes increasingly hazy (= subject to different
interpretations).
In the first part of the sequel, I also note
that public perception of liberalism is focused on extreme variants: the
monarchism propagated by many of liberalism's most visible exponents, on the one hand,
and modern (American type of) liberals, on the other hand, who may be called illiberal to the
extent that they substantially discount the need to keep government controlled
by criteria of state limitation. But then again, these criteria are subject to
the “fog effect,” whereby the degree of illiberalism in granting larger scope
to the state is not always easy to establish.
Does freedom require a specific type of
government or is she to be achieved under different forms of government: I tend
to emphasise that for practical reasons freedom is not enduringly possible
without democracy, while logically she does not seem to be defensible in the
absence of political freedom –meaning, what is “free and equal” supposed to
mean when there is a class of citizens that may determine the political fate of
society and another that is barred from exerting political influence? A
society without political freedom (defined as the possibility of every citizen
to participate in political competition) cannot have limited government,
because not all citizens are empowered to define and protect their rights - the privileged rule setting by a caste of "law makers" resulting in arbitrary impositions on a subordinate class of mere "law takers."
In a word: it is inscribed into the liberal
conception of the state that neither the state nor freedom at large are going
to be an exclusively liberal project.
Whereas in the first sequel I tried to work out the two zones of liberal
implications: the core zone of robust conditions of freedom, which are clear,
liable to enlist widespread understanding and support, and the more diffuse
zone - farther removed from the core zone -, in which the choices that we need
to make among potentially correct implications ramify to become numerous not rarely rival branches. The
strength of the core convictions quickly peters out when it is confronted with
practical questions entailing multiple contestable implications.
Here, now, I emphasise the ideological allure
to which the liberal may succumb in replacing logic by aesthetics. It is
possible to make the world fit my premises by virtue of biasing my perception conveniently to replace fact-controlled logic with
harmony-controlled aesthetics. The ideologically tempted liberal takes the inner resonance of her theory as the
ultimate test of its validity, rather than its resilience in standing up against implacable facts. Among the multiple contestable implications, the liberal chooses the
one’s that imbue her theory with harmony.
Here I examine another stage in the
transformation of liberal principles into ideological preconceptions – the
abuse of fetishist patterns. I pay particular attention to the liberal
desideratum of non-arbitrariness. Again, we are dealing with a robust condition
of freedom that is starkly obvious in certain situations, but does not preserve
this success as a general quality to be applied to any number of different
situations. In a word: the insistence of non-arbitrariness can mutate into a
fetish, a misapplied criterion. And again, the reason why the criterion loses
its magic touch is that situations may occur where non-arbitrariness entails
multiple contestable implications or no clear implications at all, or only very
vague and provisional ones. These issues must be sorted out on their own merits
rather than with reference to the spurious assumption that certain principles
are of uniform applicability.
In conclusion:
The liberal theory of the state exposes the
narrow limits of any uniform account of the state. It teaches us a lesson concerning the
temptations and dangers awaiting a doctrine that overestimates the universalisability
of its premises. In looking at the liberal theory of the state we arrive at one of the many
battles in which liberalism tries to escape its inevitable fate as the actuator
of its own demise – or shall we say: diffusion into an amalgam of competing
views that mutually affect their evolving meaning.
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