The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought

The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought

Description

Of all the strands of European social theory, few have proven so enticing and, above all, so enduring as antiliberalism. The political arm of the Counter-Enlightenment, as it might be called, has enjoyed a long and, by most standards, immensely successful career. It drew inspiration—and borrowed indignation—from Rousseau; the list of its nineteenth-century adherents, from Joseph de Maistre to Friedrich Nietzsche, could not have been more illustrious; on the Continent, during the 1920s and 1930s, it achieved something close to cultural dominance; and it continues to spawn articulate and influential proponents even today. This unbroken continuity deserves stressing because contemporary antiliberals, such as Alasdair Maclntyre, Roberto Unger, and Michael Sandel, frequently neglect it. They typically furnish a stylized, even sanitized, genealogy for their central ideas. Maclntyre, for instance, gladly invokes Aristotle. But he makes no mention of the bitter attacks on liberal theory and institutions that have loomed so large in nineteenth· and twentieth-century political thought. This omission is no accident. For one thing, antiliberals like to present themselves as iconoclasts. For another, every antiliberal argument influential today was vigorously advanced in the writings of European fascists. Brilliant but retrospectively discredited theorists, such as Giovanni Gentile and Carl Schmitt, violently assailed the liberal tradition. They excoriated liberalism for its atomistic individualism, its myth of the prosocial individual, its scanting of the organic, its indifference to community, its denial that man belongs to a larger whole, its belief in the primacy of rights, its flight from “the political,” its uncritical embrace of economic categories, its moral skepticism (or even nihilism), its decision to give abstract procedures and rules priority over substantive values and commitments, and its hypocritical reliance on the sham of judicial neutrality. These are much the same arguments one hears today. By mentioning the fascist interlude in the history of antiliberalism, I do not mean to convict today's antiliberals of harboring dangerous thoughts. (They benefit from historical circumstances that make them politically harmless.) I want to draw attention, instead, to the fundamentally ahistorical character of their thinking. Antiliberals talk endlessly about rootedness and tradition, but they nonchalantly disregard their own intellectual descent. They could easily distinguish themselves from their most unsavory precursors, I suppose. Yet they make no effort to do so—leaving readers perplexed. They blithely deplore what they consider the liberal individual's lack of “constitutive attachments,” for example, but they never mention that this complaint was long the centerpiece of anti-Semitic propaganda, of political attacks on “uprooted” and cosmopolitan Jews. They apparently want to rehabilitate fascist rhetoric without fascist connotations. Their failure to consider the grim history of antiliberalism is therefore a serious mistake. Silence about disagreeable antecedents makes it difficult to provide a balanced and fair assessment of their thought. By depicting liberal morality as in “a state of grave disorder,” Maclntyre casts himself in a clinical role. He appears as a doctor of disorder, a therapist for sick theories and hapless societies infected by unwholesome ideas. Because antiliberals are focused so single-mindedly on the ailments before them, in fact, they almost always neglect themselves. I intend to compensate for this self-neglect—to right the balance, return the favor, and supply for them what they have bountifully provided for liberal thought: a diagnosis of antiliberalism's own inner pathologies. The appropriateness of a diagnostic approach is suggested by, among other things, their implausible assumption that, in the century of Hitler and Stalin, liberalism remains the Great Enemy of mankind. Antiliberalism is more a mind-set than a theory. It is more a “culture” or cluster of shared prejudices than a closely argued system of thought. For an analysis of the most popular contemporary American versions of this omnipresent and inveterate outlook, questions of intellectual influence are relatively unimportant. I will focus, instead, on recurrent patterns—on the basic conceptual confusions and historical distortions that invariably becloud the antiliberal mind. I shall try to catalogue and dissect the enduring fallacies of antiliberalism. Economy of presentation requires the construction of an ideal type. No single theorist, not even Maclntyre, is a perfect antiliberal. Liberalism's cleverest critics often qualify their attacks, making important concessions to the enemy. Many of them supplement their criticisms of liberal thinkers with criticisms of rival antiliberal thinkers as well. Despite these complexities, antiliberalism retains the shape of a coherent attitude, if not of a cogent doctrine. Above all, an identical set of mistakes and misdescriptions surfaces, with astonishing regularity, in almost every antiliberal work. After a fairly exhaustive survey, I have managed to identify twenty fundamental fallacies or intellectual failings of antiliberalism: six theoretical confusions and fourteen historical errors. These fallacies have been a permanent feature of Western political theory since the French Revolution. No criticism or exposé will make them disappear. We may shame them into hiding temporarily, but they will soon resurface in a slightly altered guise. The best we can aspire to achieve is not a cure but a list of symptoms. Such an identity kit may nevertheless be of some value. Those who want to think seriously about the problems and deficiencies of the liberal tradition risk being pointlessly sidetracked by antiliberalism's confused and confusing barrage of charges. A survey of the misunderstandings and blunders of our most prominent antiliberals should, however briefly, help keep spurious accusations at bay.

Source Publication

Liberalism and the Moral Life

Source Editors/Authors

Nancy L. Rosenblum

Publication Date

1989

The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought

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