The Myth of Liberalism Individualism

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

This book challenges us to look at liberal political ideas in a new way. Colin Bird examines the assumption, held both by liberals and by their strongest critics, that the values and ideals of the liberal political tradition cohere around a distinctively ‘individualist’ conception of the relation between individuals, society and the state. He concludes that the formula of ‘liberal individualism’ conceals fundamental conflicts between liberal views of these relations, conflicts that neither liberals nor their critics have adequately recognized. His original and provoca¬ tive study develops a powerful criticism of the libertarian forms of ‘liberal individualism’ which have recently risen to prominence, and suggests that by taking this term for granted, theorists have exaggerated the unity and integrity of liberal political ideals and limited our perception of the issues they raise. Colin Bird is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia.

V

The Myth of Liberal Individualism Colin Bird

Thomas

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J. Bata Library UNIVERSi i V

PETERBOROUGH. 0!"IARIO

Cambridge UNIVERSITY PRESS

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PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, United Kingdom http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA http://www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Colin Bird 1999 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1999 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Times 10/12pt

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Bird, Colin. The myth of liberal individualism / Colin Bird, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 64128 4 (he) 1. Individualism. 2. Liberalism. I. Title. JC571.B547 1999 98-38601 CIP ISBN 0 521 64128 4 hardback

To my mother and father

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

page viii 1

1

Individualism as a political ideal

27

2

Individualism as a theory

43

3

Public agency and conceptions of collectivity

83

4

Individualist distributions of liberty

97

5

Self-ownership and individual inviolability

139

6

The myth of liberal individualism

180

Bibliography Index

212 218

vii

Acknowledgements

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Robert Amdur and Raymond Geuss for their unstinting support, and for their painstaking advice and guidance which have improved this book immeasurably since its uncertain beginnings. I would also like to thank Kent Greenawalt, David Johnston, Ira Katznelson and Thomas Pogge, both for their encourage¬ ment and for their many and varied criticisms and suggestions, all of which have been very helpful to me. I am also indebted to several of my fellow graduate students at Columbia, Lynn Jansen, Noah Kaplan, Eric Mitchko, Sarah Tobias, Steve Wall, and Ken Ward, not only for reading and commenting on earlier chapter drafts, but also for their comradeship and support. Special thanks are due to Steve, who, at an early stage of the project, provided me with a set of characteristically acute written comments that helped me to focus my thoughts about self-ownership. I must also thank the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia for providing financial support, and to Eileen Gillooly and the staff of the Contemporary Civilization programme at Columbia College for the opportunity to gain valuable teaching experience. Since leaving New York, I have incurred a number of other debts. First and foremost, I must express my gratitude to my new colleagues at the University of Virginia for supporting me and my work. I am particularly grateful to George Klosko for commenting in detail on the argument of chapter 2. I must also thank my former colleagues and students at the University of Richmond for making my brief stay there so pleasant. Special thanks are due to Sheila Carapico, for helping to arrange my appointment at Richmond, and to Ellis West for reading and discussing chapter 5 of this book, and for the many other kindnesses he and his wife Phyllis have shown me. In his capacity as a referee for Cambridge University Press, Will Kymlicka provided an extremely insightful and detailed critical commentary on the manuscript as a whole. His criticisms and suggestions proved invaluable during the final revi¬ sions, and I am indebted to him, once again, for his help. I am very grateful to Dr David Kim and Mrs Grace Kim for generously allowing viii

Acknowledgements

IX

my wife and me (and our dog Poirot) to live in their vacant house in Arlington during the past year: it provided an ideal environment in which to complete the final version of the book. I must also thank Hilary Gaskin of Cambridge University Press for her patience, expert assistance and advice on preparing the manuscript, and Julie Beckwith for her help in preparing the index. Finally, I record my special thanks to the three people to whom I am most indebted: my parents for their generosity, kindness and constant support over the years, and my wife Adrienne for her love and encour¬ agement during the final stages of research and revision. I could not have finished this book without them.

v

■

Introduction

I believe in the supreme worth of the individual, and in his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

John D. Rockefeller

These words are proudly emblazoned on a plaque overlooking Rocke¬ feller Plaza in the heart of New York City. Few of the weary pilgrims who trudge past this famous monument will think that they merely express Rockefeller's personal credo. Surrounded by the towering symbols of American capitalism, many will conclude that they also give voice to a fundamental tenet of the Anglo-American liberal tradition: its commitment to individualism. For at least half a century, an appeal to individualism has helped liberals to define their own position and to identify their ideological enemies as ‘collectivists’ of one sort or another. As David Johnston has recently put it, ‘liberal individualism - the claim that only individuals count - is the substance and strength of the liberal tradition’.1 This study is a critical examination of the idea of ‘liberal individu¬ alism’. But it is not another condemnation of the atomistic, egoistic, anomic values that ‘liberal individualism' has allegedly fostered. Nor is it an attempt to defend liberal values against such attacks by claiming that liberalism is, in important and unacknowledged ways, collectivist or ‘communitarian’. Adopting either of these approaches would reinstate precisely the assumptions that this book calls into question. This book asks whether, and on what terms, it makes sense to classify liberal values as ‘individualist’ (rather than ‘collectivist’) in the first instance. Along the way, it challenges a number of assumptions associated with this classifi¬ cation, assumptions that I believe have exercised a malign and distorting influence on contemporary debates about liberalism. The book explains

1 David Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 191. See also, Robert Leach, British Political Ideas (Hemel Hempstead: Phillip Allan, 1991), p. 59: ‘Individualism is perhaps the most fundamental assumption underpinning liberal ideas.’ 1

2

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

and documents these distortions and suggests a way of looking beyond the framework of ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’ that so often seems to lurk behind theoretical discussion of liberal ideas. This framework is a cause and a symptom of two influential and closely related assumptions, both of which this study questions. The first is the claim that liberal political ideals are underpinned by some under¬ lying theoretical commitment to the ‘priority of the individual' over the collectivity as a whole. Despite the fact that liberals continue to advertise (and critics to denounce) the ‘ontological’, ‘methodological’ or ‘axiolo¬ gical’ foundations of their views as ‘individualistic’, I argue (in chapter 2) that there is no straightforward and well-understood theory of individu¬ alism to which these advertisements and denunciations refer. The second, and more important, assumption is the thought that liberal values revolve around a characteristic and stable view of the relation between ‘the individual’, society and the state. The appeal to ‘liberal individualism’ has encouraged the assumption that the ideals expressed by Rockefeller rely upon a single and distinctive account of the relation between the individuals who comprise a political community and the public institutions that claim to act on their collective behalf. I suggest that this is a mistake. The major part of this book is devoted to correcting the errors that this assumption has encouraged. Most impor¬ tantly, I claim that key liberal commitments imply very different and conflicting conceptions of the relations between the state, the public and its constituent individuals. The conflicts between these different ‘concep¬ tions of collectivity’, as I will be calling them, have important impli¬ cations for the overall stability and integrity of the liberal project. A fundamental prejudice of our time, perhaps attributable to the infiltration of a party political model of deliberation into intellectual consciousness, is the expectation that political programmes and ideals coalesce into distinct ideological traditions. Political theorists often rely on these publicly recognized ideological poles, and the divisions between them, to give their contributions practical relevance. They suggest that their arguments contribute to the development of ‘liberalism’, for example, or to the effort to redefine ‘socialism’ in the post-cold war world. In so doing they appeal to a publicly recognized grid of ideological alternatives as a way of locating their often abstract contributions within a broader world-historical context. It is of course important for political theorists to respond and contribute to these political debates. But it is important also to correct errors in the way we map the ideological grid on which particular political ideals and norms are located. My main aim in this book is to show that the repeated incantation of the ‘liberal individualist’ mantra has resulted in a number of errors of just this sort.

Introduction

3

In so doing I hope to contribute to a more precise and accurate mapping of the relations among current political ideals. This is not just an issue of conceptual tidiness. The recent revival of normative political thinking in the Anglo-American intellectual tradition has been predominantly and self-consciously a revival of liberal thought. Although many have lamented the amorphousness of this ideological label, it continues to be used. This cannot be because there is general agreement on the substantive detail of liberalism, since this is simply not the case. But the liberal has a standard response to this observation. Even if we acknowledge that it is hard to pin down exactly what it is to which liberals are committed, he will say, it is at least clear what liberals oppose. The notion of ‘individualism’ has typically been invoked by liberals as part of a claim of this sort. No liberal claims that individualism specifies precisely the details of a coherent liberal position. Nor, indeed, do those critics of individualism who want to undercut the liberal project before these detailed issues are even broached. But, it is said, all liberals share a commitment to a general umbrella ideal of ‘individualism’ rejected alike by non-liberals. The fact that liberal values fall under this umbrella commitment to individualism reassures us that there is a coherent and distinctive liberal position to be worked out, one which fully honours a recognizably individualist manifesto. The notion of ‘individualism’ has thus been assumed to be a, perhaps the, basic identifying attribute of the whole family of liberal positions. If my arguments are correct, this loads more weight on the idea of ‘individualism’ than it can plausibly bear. Moreover, I suggest that the appeal to individualism has concealed fundamental conflicts between the values and commitments which characterize contemporary liberal theory. The argument is thus not just a large-scale debating point against liberals who wish to describe themselves as ‘individualists’, nor is it intended as a pedantic reconfiguration of the ideological presuppositions of liberalism for its own sake. Rather, the argument is that the idea of individualism imputes to the liberal tradition a false sense of unity. The coherence of that tradition has been taken for granted by both apologists and critics. That is, those who criticize liberal individualism rarely claim that it is an incoherent position; rather, they tend to concede that liberalism is consistent in its individualism, but deficient in other ways that it fails to account for the sociality and commonality of citizens, that it is blind to certain forms of domination and oppression and so on. But if my argument is successful, we should stop thinking of liberalism as a harmonious federation of moral ideals bound together under a consti¬ tution of individualism. It may be more accurate to portray it as an unstable alliance of antagonistic principles and ideals. This book suggests

4

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

that the appeal to individualism has served to conceal these antagonisms. By questioning the rhetoric of individualism, it brings these internal conflicts into the theoretical foreground where they belong. Correspond¬ ingly, it urges us to push the alleged boundary between ‘individualist’ and ‘collectivist’ or ‘communitarian’ conceptions of politics into the background. The expectation that the most important theoretical issues appear along this boundary is based on a particular map of the theoretical terrain, one that continues to dominate, and, to my mind, impoverish theoretical discourse about politics. There is now little more to say about the issues so framed. Progress in political theory is more likely to be made by dismantling the misleading assumptions that perpetuate these unsatisfying debates. This study suggests that we might profitably begin by recognizing the unhelpfulness of the dominant idiom of ‘individualism’ through which contemporary liberal theories have been expressed, interpreted and vigorously criticized.

Clarifying ‘individualism’ The term ‘individualism’ has acquired a dizzying range of meanings and applications. Steven Lukes discerns no fewer than eleven different forms of individualism, and he adds, dishearteningly, that the items on his list are not intended to be mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive.2 Because of the confusion that shrouds the term, it is important to set out precisely the kind of individualism that is relevant to the arguments of this study. We can begin by excluding from the analysis two aspects of the idea of individualism. First, I will not be concerned here with individualism understood as an empirical property, either of individuals or of societies. It is often suggested that social life under modern, advanced capitalist conditions encourages a psychological disposition towards self-reliance and personal independence. In this sense, individualism is a purported feature of the cultural and attitudinal landscape of modern Western society. The claim that a culture of social independence is a distinctive (and perhaps regrettable) aspect of modern Western life has been a favourite theme of social critics since (at least) Tocqueville.3 Moreover, theorists often insinuate a connection between these phenomena and the institutions 2 The list is: the supreme and intrinsic value of the individual human being, the idea of individual self-development, the idea of autonomy, the idea of privacy, the idea of the abstract individual, methodological individualism, political individualism, economic individualism, religious individualism, ethical individualism and epistemological individu¬ alism. S. Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 3 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Random House, 1945), vol. II, pp. 104ff.

Introduction

5

and practices of liberal democracy. Nothing that I say in this study is intended to deny (or confirm) that citizens of liberal democratic societies are in this sense more ‘individualistic’ than their fellows in other societies. This is an empirical claim about the nature of modern Western political culture and its behavioural correlates. The notion of individualism that is relevant (say) to Rockefeller’s remarks cited above expresses a normative ideal, not an empirical generalization about liberal civilization, and it is the directly nonnative connotations of individualism that this book seeks to address. I therefore set these empirical issues aside and make no effort to evaluate them.4 Second, this study says nothing about individualism as a form of egoism or selfishness, whether as an empirical or as a normative commit¬ ment. The idea that liberal institutions in fact discourage altruism and public-spiritedness has a long history, as does the suggestion that liberal doctrines somehow imply that ‘greed is good’ (at least to the extent that it is counterproductive and politically dangerous to try to curb indi¬ viduals’ selfish instincts). But whatever merits they may have, we can set these sorts of claims aside. The reason for this is that liberals invariably vehemently protest against any attempt to confuse their kind of individu¬ alism with egoism or with the celebration of ruthless self-interest.5 Of course, many continue to use the term ‘individualism’ as a synonym for greed and selfishness, but the important point is that liberals have always claimed that the kind of ‘individualism’ to which they are committed is an entirely different idea. Excluding these two aspects of individualism still leaves us with an enormous range of potentially relevant ‘individualisms’, however. The 4 Of course, I do not mean to suggest that individualism in this empirical sense is normatively irrelevant; recent communitarian arguments often assume that the lack of some appropriate sense of social solidarity in modern society indeed sets the agenda for the ethical debate. For them, ‘the circumstances of modern life ... [are] ... eroding those forms of community ... that situate people in the world and provide a source of identity and belonging’; M. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 294. But it is important to distinguish this (alleged) empirical phenomenon from the underlying normative theory that classifies it as a symptom of a politically significant disease. In this scheme the empirical phenomenon of individualism is ethically relevant only because communitarians presuppose an underlying ethical view that judges individualist social forms, and the ethical framework that claims to legitimate them, to be morally incomplete, or ‘impoverished’. And that is because they reject, not only individualist forms of life, but, at a deeper level, individualist normative ideals which focus on rights, liberty and privacy to the exclusion (allegedly) of communitarian values. It is individualism in this normative, rather than purely descriptive, sense that this book addresses. 5 See, for example, K. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 2 vols., vol. I, pp. lOOff; F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Ark, 1986), p. 44; J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 147-8; D. Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory, p. 19.

6

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

ongoing effort to differentiate the species ‘liberalism’ from its ideological competitors has generated no single, transparent conception of individu¬ alism’. Rather, to invoke the notion of‘liberal individualism’ is to gesture towards a rich network of ideas, whose complexity is belied by its familiarity. However, that network of ideas has a characteristic structure that is in many ways as important as the substance of its component concepts. I take this network to be configured roughly as follows. (1) Liberalism, as with any distinct social and political theory, is committed to two sorts of claims: (a) certain first-order normative commitments and values that define a social or political ideal (b) certain second-order methodological or theoretical axioms that determine the underlying social theory on which this ideal rests (2) The ‘individualism’ of liberalism is reflected at both of these levels: (a) liberalism is committed to a number of first-order norms that comprise an individualist ideal: e.g. the value and security of the individual, the primary importance of individual interests, free¬ doms and individual rights, the need for privacy, and so on. (b) liberalism’s advocacy of this social ideal depends on a secondorder individualist metaphysic that proposes a general theory about the ontological, methodological or axiological priority of the individual over society as a whole. What is critical about this construction is the way in which individualism as an ideal as in 2(a) is held to be somehow dependent upon the theoretical individualism of 2(b).6 This potentially elevates liberalism from being a loosely related set of political commitments to being a coherent and intellectually powerful social and political theory. It is this construction of ‘liberal individualism' that this book sets out to explore in greater detail and to subject to critical scrutiny. As we shall see, this still implicates a potentially wide range of ‘individualist’ doctrines in the liberal worldview. But it excludes a number of those mentioned by Lukes (his notions of epistemic, religious and economic individualism, for example) and offers a preliminary classification of the relevant forms of individualism which remain in play. That is, it distinguishes the strictly methodological or theoretical axioms of individualist social theory from the purely normative commitments inherent in individualist political ideals. This network of ideas needs to be understood in the first instance as an historical artifact, not as a natural kind To understand more precisely 6 ‘it seems useful to distinguish individualism as a method of analysis and individualism as a norm for organizing societyJames Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 315.

Introduction

7

what ‘liberal individualism’ has come to mean for contemporary political theory, then, it is helpful to sketch some relevant features of its historical development. The evolution of ‘liberal individualisin' The most important source for the notion of liberal individualism that I have just set out was a group of liberal intellectuals writing in the middle of this century. The most prominent and influential were Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek (von Mises’s student) and Karl Popper, but I associate a number of other figures, including J. L. Talmon, T. D. Weldon and Isaiah Berlin, with this line of thought as well.7 The idea that individualist ideals rest on an independent individualist conception of society is especially clear in the following passage from Hayek’s essay, ‘Individualism: True and False’: What, then, are the essential characteristics of true individualism? The first thing that should be said is that it is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society.8

For Hayek and Popper, the individualistic values of liberalism, then, are grounded upon a deeper theoretical form of individualism.9 That latter idea is treated as an independent theoretical axiom of all liberal social and political thought. The idea that theoretical forms of individualism are separate from but allied with liberal and individualist ideals emerged from the writings of von Mises, Popper, Hayek, Talmon, Berlin and others as part of a concerted liberal response to the world wars and their aftermath. For the sake of convenience I will refer to these writers as the ‘cold-war liberals’. At a time when liberal principles seemed under threat from a number of directions, these writers sought to identify the intellectual sources of the various forms of illiberalism they deplored or feared, such as totalitar¬ ianism, nationalism, authoritarianism, socialism, corporatism, the 7 I do not mean to imply that these writers are the ultimate historical origin of the network of ideas laid out above. 1 mean merely that it is in their writings that the outlines of that network become especially clear and assume a form which was then mediated to and integrated into subsequent liberal theory. I suspect the real origin of the alliance was the idealist critique of the theoretical assumptions of utilitarian social theory which was so important in the development of the ‘New Liberal’ and Fabian socialist ideas that figures like von Mises and Hayek then made the targets of their attacks. See note 14 below. 8 F. A. Hayek, The Essence of Hayek (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), p. 135. 9 See Popper, Open Society, vol. I, p. 94; von Mises, Socialism (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), pp. 52, 55-6.

8

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

command economy, the welfare state, and so on. They aimed to restate liberal values by exposing the fallacies and errors on which these illiberal doctrines and institutions had historically depended. v The specific histories of totalitarian and liberal ideas which the cold war liberals proposed differed in many ways. Nonetheless, their general tenor is strikingly uniform, and a number of themes consistently reap¬ pear. The cold war liberals all stress repeatedly that liberalism is a ‘pragmatic’, unambitious doctrine compared with the utopian ideals of totalitarian political conceptions. The latter, they claim, tend to rest on theoretically ambitious claims about the trajectory of human history and about the possibility of a ‘final solution’ to social and political conflicts. By contrast, the liberal tradition is theoretically modest and politically cautious, always aware of the systematic limitations of human knowledge and insight. As result, liberal thinkers were better equipped to resist a series of intellectual ‘fallacies’ typically committed by the romantic, idealist, Hegelian and Marxist precursors of twentieth-century totalitar¬ ianism. For our purposes, the most important of these ‘fallacies’ con¬ cerned the tendency to depict the state or society as an entity in its own right, perhaps in organic or anthropomorphic terms, and as an indepen¬ dent and overriding focus of political activity. This sort of metaphysical and ontological extravagance was anathema to the liberal mind: not only did it attest to the mystical and obscurantist character of totalitarian collectivism, it also provided a theoretically unlimited excuse for coercing and oppressing individuals for the sake of the greater good of the ‘collectivity as a whole’. Despite their deep theoretical and moral antipathy to this kind of totalitarianism, the cold war liberals neverthe¬ less claim that it is understandable that politicians and intellectuals often find such utopian ideals deeply attractive. However, they repeatedly insist that to be wedded to such (utopian, rationalist, collectivist) ideals is symptomatic of a kind of philosophical and political immaturity which must be overcome if the civilized, humanitarian values of liberalism are to be secured.10 10 Jacob Talmon summed up his own project in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy in the following way: ‘The power of the historian or the political philosopher to influence events is no doubt strictly limited, but he can influence the attitude of mind which is adopted towards those developments. Like a psychoanalyst who cures by making the patient aware of his subconscious, the social analyst may be able to attack the human urge which calls totalitarian democracy into existence, namely the longing for a final resolution of all contradictions and conflicts into a state of total harmony. It is a harsh, but nonetheless necessary task to drive home the truth that human society and human life can never reach a state of repose.’ J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 254-5. I think this statement can also stand as a general summary of the common project in which the cold war liberals were engaged. For other examples of the claim about the fatal allure of

Introduction

9

This rather patronizing effort to discredit the intellectual heritage of totalitarianism launched the recent and contemporary career of the idea of liberal individualism’. Under the influence of von Mises, Popper, Hayek and many others this vague but rhetorically powerful idea was duly integrated into mainstream post-war liberalism and has remained with it ever since, accepted by proponents and critics alike. The conception of ‘individualism’ that they bequeathed to the liberal tradition was not invented by von Mises, Popper and Hayek de novo. Rather, it was itself an ill-defined amalgam of two different strands of thought with a longer history. The first of these involved a set of claims about social explanation which fall under the general heading of methodological individualism. Essentially, this methodological thesis states that all accounts of social phenomena must be expressed in terms of facts about the individuals who contribute to or participate in them. The origins of this line of thought have been traced to Hobbes.11 Methodological individualism has often been associated with the utili¬ tarian tradition and (partly as a result of utilitarian influence upon modern economic science) it has become a widely insisted upon, though disputed, precept of the social sciences in this century. The second strand had a more specific historical origin: the debates concerning the scope and limits of the expanding British state in the late nineteenth century. Although this debate was diverse and complex, two broadly opposed attitudes to the modern state emerged within it. On the one side were those who - like Herbert Spencer - continued to argue that the activities of the state should be restricted in order to protect the liberty of individuals.12 These advocates of the nightwatchman state were increasingly opposed by those who were prepared to envisage a more extensive state intervention in economic and political life. Within this specific British context, these two opposed groups were referred to as ‘individualists’ and ‘collectivists’ or ‘socialists’.13 ‘Individualism’ in this sense carried purely political connotations: individualism implied oppo¬ sition to ‘undue state intervention’ and a commitment to ‘laissez-faire’ and a nightwatchman state. Clearly, these two strands of thought are logically independent. It is possible to envisage, for example, a utilitarian defence of state welfare ‘collectivist’ arguments see Popper, Open Society, vol. I, pp. ix, 5, 165, 199-200; F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 101; I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 167-8, 171-2. 11 S. Lukes, Individualism, p. 110. 12 See H. Spencer, Political Writings, ed. J. Meadowcroft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 13 See W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition: vol. I: The Rise of Collectivism (New York: Methuen, 1983).

10

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

provision which was ‘collectivist’ in the second sense, but rigorously ‘individualistic’ in the first, methodological, sense. However, in the course of making their arguments about the respective origins of totalitarianism and liberal democracy, the cold war liberals pressed them together.14 Their arguments involved the second strand because they viewed the planned command economies of Fascism and Soviet com¬ munism as monstrous examples of what earlier British liberals like Spencer had warned against. Here (apparently) were precisely the overmighty states, crushing individuals and their liberty, that they had prophesied. Moreover, we need to remember that the cold war liberals were not only afraid of totalitarianism abroad, they were also concerned about the implications of the vastly expanded states that the tides of war had left behind in the Allied countries. Under the influence of Keynesianism and socialism, politicians and ‘planners’ were encouraged to deploy these new political resources to create a welfare state, licensed to interfere in the activities of private individuals in order to promote certain ‘social ends’. The writings of the cold war liberals were thus not ideologically inert accounts of intellectual history. They were also self-conscious efforts to question the welfare state by associating it with totalitarianism. The classic (and most extreme) version of this argument is Hayek’s The Road 14 Again, I do not claim that they were entirely original in this. Their work was, rather, a culmination of a complex intellectual process in which these two strands came together. What I maintain is that their contributions are largely responsible for the view - widely held today - that there are natural affinities between these different views. As I suggested earlier, the story of how Popper and Hayek found themselves associating methodological and political individualism is a complex one. It concerns the way in which new liberal, socialist and idealist writers had criticized the supposedly ‘atomistic’ methodology of much nineteenth-century utilitarian social theory. Because that social theory had been connected with a commitment to the doctrine of laissez-faire, it is easy to see why a renewed defence of laissez-faire against the post-war harbingers of the ‘planned society’ should become self-conscious about its supposed commitment to methodological forms of individualism. I do not believe that Bentham, Mill and the defenders of laissez-faire in Victorian Britain were particularly self-conscious about ‘methodological individualism’. But the arrival of Hegelian, idealist and sociological ideas in England at the end of the nineteenth century allowed critics of individualism to attack utilitarian ideas on a new front, and to make an issue out of utilitarian methods of analysis. This is presumably why it became important for proponents of classical liberalism like Hayek to consciously embrace methodological individualism and to try to make methodological collectivism look bad. Helpful studies of this historical background include M. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), ch.l, Sandra M. Den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation: a Study in Late Victorian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and E. Bristow, Individualism versus Socialism in Britain, 1880-1914 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987).

Introduction

11

to Serfdom, but the same theme surfaces more or less obliquely in the writings of von Mises, Popper, and even in the work of Jacob Talmon.15 In this way, the arguments of the cold war liberals were really a continuation of late Victorian anti-statism. For them, ‘individualism’ signified, in part, a commitment to (something like) a nightwatchman state, guardian over the ‘Open’ or ‘Great Society’ of ‘free individuals’ bound together only by the formal requirements of the ‘Rule of Law’. This became entangled with the first, methodological, conception of individualism because (especially) von Mises, Popper and Hayek claimed that the philosophies underwriting totalitarianism (and their supposed welfare-state derivatives) characteristically violated the canons of methodological individualism. Although this was by no means the only ‘fallacy’ of which socialists, Fascists, anti-humanists, planners (and other villains), were guilty, Popper and Hayek nevertheless repeatedly stressed that, in one way or another, they fall into versions of ‘methodological collectivism’.16 As Hayek put it, they ‘pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society, etc., as entities sui generis which exist independently of the individuals which compose them’.17 Thus, 15 Hayek was clearly opposed to the welfare state in any form: in The Road to Serfdom (p. 31) he makes it clear that there is for him no compromise between liberal individualism and the planned society: if we are ... rapidly moving towards [a centralized state] this is largely because most people still believe that it must be possible to find some Middle Way between ‘atomistic’ competition and central direction. Nothing indeed seems at first more plausible ... Yet mere common sense proves a treacherous guide in this field ... Both planning and competition and central direction become poor and inefficient tools if they are incomplete ... and a mixture of the two means that neither will really work and that the result will be worse than if either system had been consistently relied upon. Popper’s views about this are more flexible, but he was involved with Hayek’s ‘Mont Pelerin Society’, which was dedicated to the discussion and dissemination of classical liberal ideas. Moreover, many passages in The Open Society and its Enemies are reminiscent of, and clearly influenced by, Hayek, and Popper often mentions the dangers of political interventionism. See, for example, Open Society, vol. II, pp. 125-6, 130-3, 140, 178-9, 193-4, 331 nn. 28 and 29, 336 n. 15; Talmon’s views on the welfare state are much more moderate than those of Hayek or Popper. Nevertheless, he clearly expresses related concerns: With the growth of the Welfare State aiming at social security, the distinction between the absolutist and empirical attitude to politics has become more vital... The eighteenthcentury idea of a natural order, which originally shirked the question of a planned rational economic order, assumed full significance and began to threaten freedom only as soon as it became married to the postulate of social security. Is one therefore to conclude that economic centralization aiming at social security must sweep away spiritual freedom? This is a question which the progress of economic centralization has rendered vital. (Talmon, Origins, pp. 254-5) 16 Hayek, ‘Scientism and the Study of Society’, Economica (1943), pp. 41ff; Popper, Open Society, vol. II, pp. 91, 98, 323 nn. 8 and 11. 17 Hayek, The Essence of Hayek, p. 135; see also von Mises, Human Action (New Haven:

12

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

proto-totalitarians like Rousseau, Plato, Hegel and Marx, had falla¬ ciously allowed organic, anthropomorphic or other collectivist notions to infect their thinking.18 In such collectivist theories of politics, individuals’ interests have to compete with those of a discrete and prior collective "whole’. It was because Fascists, communists and ‘planners’ started with this premiss in place that they were encouraged to ignore the interests and liberties of individual citizens in order to realize the goals of the collective as a whole, or so the cold war liberals tacitly suggested. In this way ‘collectivism’ came to imply two things: first, a commitment to some version of social holism, and, second, a commitment to statist, interven¬ tionist political regimes in which individuals’ interests and liberty are ignored so that they may be enlisted in the achievement of the goals of the whole society.19 The rival liberal view claimed to dispense entirely with any ‘anthropo¬ morphic’ or collectivist assumptions. Liberals like Popper insisted instead that, ‘the “behaviour” and “actions” of collectivities, such as states and social groups, be reduced to the behaviour and actions of human individuals’.20 The cold war liberals hinted at a connection between methodological individualism and the thought that there could be no discrete collective entities with interests of their own competing against those of individuals.21 According to this suggestion, liberal individualism was not simply the opposite of totalitarian collectivism, reversing the priority of collective over individual interests. Rather, the individualist accused the collectivist of a kind of category mistake: individual claims are the only ones that could intelligibly be allowed to

18

19 20 21

Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 43, 143; von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc., 1978), pp. 78-9. Popper, Open Society, vol. I, pp. 79, 80, 100-2, 174, 190, 195, 199; vol. II, pp. 31, 37, 45, 51, 56—7, 66, 79, 91, 98-9, 126, 226; von Mises, Socialism, pp. 56, 263-5; Berlin, Four Essays, pp. 132, 158; see also J. Buchanan and G. Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, pp. 11-12. T. D. Weldon, States and Morals (New York: Whittlesey House, 1947), pp. 34-45, is a remarkably fair-minded approach. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, pp. 72, 81, 105, 109. Popper, Open Society, vol. II, p. 91. See von Mises’s comment that according to advocates of collectivism society is an entity living its own life, independent and separate from the lives of the various individuals, acting on its own behalf and aiming at its own ends which differ from the ends sought by the individuals. Then, of course, an antagonism between the aims of society and those of its members can arise ... If one assumes that there exists, above and beyond the individual’s actions, an imperishable entity aiming at its own ends, different from those of mortal men ... one cannot evade the question whose ends take precedence whenever an antagonism arises, those of the state or those of the individual, (von Mises, Human Action, pp. 145, 151) see also von Mises, Socialism, pp. 51-7, Popper, Open Society, vol. II p. 226, and Weldon, States and Morals, p. 37.

Introduction

13

count at all. On this view, there is really nothing else to which individual claims could be either prior or subservient. This methodological precept about the intelligibility ol claims made on behalf of discrete collectivities offered support to the anti-statist argument as well, at least superficially. For it implied that the state could not meaningfully be said to be responsible for any 'social’ or ‘collective’ goals. Rather, its sole legitimate function was to secure and promote the interests of individuals. As Hayek put it, though the conception of ‘value to society’ is sometimes carelessly used even by economists, there is strictly no such thing and the expression implies the same sort of anthropomorphism or personification of society as the term ‘social justice’. Services can have value only to particular people (or an organization), and any particular service will have very different values for different members of the same society. To regard them differently is to treat society not as a spontaneous order of free men but as an organization whose members are all made to serve a single hierarchy of ends. This would necessarily be a totalitarian society in which personal freedom would be absent.22

Under the influence of Popper, Hayek and the other cold war liberals, then, liberalism came to be associated with a hybrid concept of ‘individu¬ alism’ which is subtly different from the notion of individualism associ¬ ated with an earlier generation of liberal writers. For Sidgwick, Dicey or Spencer, individualism simply denoted laissez-faire and the nightwatchman state. There is no suggestion in their thought that individu¬ alism was, in addition, a special structural feature of the philosophic theories which supported it. It was just this idea which the cold war liberals added into the mixture: after their contributions, individualism became a doctrine about how both political theories and political institu¬ tions ought to be structured. Individualism was transformed into a political and a theoretical virtue, and this made possible the network of individualist ideas that I sketched above. That network implies a tight connection between an insistence on the theoretical primacy of ‘the individual’ and the advocacy of individualistic liberal values. As James Buchanan has put it: ‘the dominant role of individual liberty is imposed by an acceptance of the methodology of individualism’.23 Despite its shaky historical provenance and obvious unclarity, this conception of individualism has been an enduring and compelling feature of post-war liberal doctrine. Thus Anthony Arblaster declares that ‘the metaphysical

22 Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 75-6. 23 James E. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 2.

14

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

and ontological core of liberalism is individualism’.24 And as recently as 1996, we find one writer summarizing liberal individualist attitudes in the following way: Never would a liberal regard the state (or ‘society’) as an end-in-itself in the manner of the Hegelian collectivist school. No genuine liberal has ever taken part in the swindle involving ‘collective concepts’ (‘holism’). He is protected from doing so, particularly if he has a background in economics, to the extent that he subscribes to ‘methodological individualism’ or ‘nominalism’ - which is, after all, nothing other than scientific methodology applied to the social realm.25

Correspondingly, ‘collectivism’ came to designate any theory or poli¬ tical regime centred on a conception of the goals of the community as a ‘whole’, of the public interest, or of the ‘general will’ considered indepen¬ dently of individual interests. So James Buchanan deprecates the ‘collectivist-cum-elitist who is required to specify objectives for social action that are independent from individual values’.26 And J. E. Kingdom writes that ‘the ideological counterpoise to individualism is collectivism, a term used rather loosely in practice, but essentially taking the whole society, rather than the individual as the ethical starting point’.27 This set of assumptions undoubtedly helped to define the ideological framework of the post-war world, particularly in the Western countries. They encouraged us to view the ideological spectrum as a continuum between individualist and collectivist conceptions of politics. At one pole of the continuum lay Fascist and communist collectivisms, in which the individual was supposedly subordinated to a set of overriding and oppressive collective goals. At the other pole lay extreme anarchist or libertarian forms of individualism, in which the state played either a minimal or non-existent role in social life. In between lay certain compromise positions, such as mainstream liberalism, social democracy, -4 Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 15; Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 32, and A. Vincent, ‘Liberalism and Postmodernism’, in J. Meadowcroft, ed., The Liberal Political Tradition (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996), pp. 139-40. See also Jack Crittenden: ‘individualism refers to the theory of society as constituted by individuals whose goal is to fulfill private ends, largely through relationships seen as instrumental, and whose principal characteristic is the possession of individual rights that have priority over societal needs’: Beyond Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 3; B. Holden, Understanding Liberal Democracy (London: Harvester, 1993), p. 67. 25 Gerd Habermann, ‘Liberalism and Libertarians’, in Hardy Bouillon, ed.. Libertarianism and Liberalism (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 1996), p. 53. 26 James E. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty, p. 1. 7 J- E. Kingdom, No Such Thing as Society? Individualism and Community (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1992), p. 6; see also, Peter Merkl, Political Continuity and Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 43-56; Carlos Nino, The Ethics of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 155; R. Skidelsky, The Road From Serfdom (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 18, 42-3, 47.

Introduction

15

and the various views - ranging from the enthusiastic to the dismissive ot the Keynesian welfare state. Underlying this spectrum of ideological positions, then, was a corresponding range of theoretical claims about the constitution of the collectivity, and its relation to ‘the individual’. 1 hose who defended the welfare state, or anything more radical, were likely to be committed to a set of views about social solidarity, the common interest, or (at the extreme) the organic dependence of the individual upon the collectivity. And those who defended classically liberal or libertarian political views would obviously reject these forms of ‘collectivism’ and insist, as Margaret Thatcher once notoriously did, that ‘there is no such thing as society’.28

Liberal individualism today Although the cold war has come to an end, this ideological framework continues to influence and inform political debate.29 But more important for our purposes is the way in which these categories persist in and shape contemporary intellectual debates about liberalism. Arguably, the two defining moments in the recent resurgence of liberal theorizing occurred respectively in Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty and in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. These two texts defined the agenda for the new and theoretically sophisticated liberalism of the 1970s and 1980s. Berlin’s essay implied that only a particular concept of liberty (the negative conception) could secure a genuinely liberal account of freedom and pluralism. Rawls’s book argued that the liberal ideal of individual inviolability was incompatible with the incipient utilitarianism presup¬ posed in the political economy of his day. Although these arguments have influenced contemporary liberal think¬ ing in different ways, they both presupposed and effectively reiterated precisely the alliance between liberalism and individualism we have been 28 For a visual illustration of this idea of the political spectrum, see diagrams ‘A’ and ‘B’ in Richard Sylvan’s essay ‘Anarchism’ in R. E. Goodin and P. Pettit, eds., A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 232. 29 Consider, for example, the following excerpt from a review by Alan Wolfe of Michael J. Piore’s recent book, Beyond Individualism: ‘Germany, Italy and Japan serve as better models for the organization of capitalism, Piore writes, because the “national ethos” in all three countries “is much more consistent with an organic notion of society and community than our own”. In making such a claim, should one also note, as Piore does not, that the same “organic” theory also produced, within living memory, two experiments in Fascism and one in authoritarian militarism? Does it also matter that these countries, now cited for their economic efficiency, were all losers in the last world war; while this country, hopelessly committed to liberal individualism, won?’ Wolfe, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Gingrich’, The New Republic (1 May 1995), p. 38. This passage illustrates the way in which we are still tempted to organize our conceptions of the ideological spectrum according to the categories of cold war rhetoric.

16

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

discussing here. Berlin’s argument did so because for him the funda¬ mental defect of the concept of positive liberty was its tendency to degenerate into a perfectionist doctrine of collective self-realization. The concept of negative liberty is more authentically liberal because it is less amenable to such collectivization. His point was not that positive liberty was necessarily illiberal, but that - historically at least - the theory of positive liberty had promoted certain ideals that are necessarily illiberal underlying theoretical ideas about the priority of collective goals over individual ones.30 Similarly, Rawls’s arguments against utilitarianism evoke the familiar anti-collectivist arguments of the cold war liberals; that utilitarianism might permit infringements of individual rights in the name of the ‘public good’ or ‘general happiness’ made it seem an unlikely basis for cast-iron guarantees of individual liberty. For example, Rawls famously charac¬ terizes utilitarianism as a view which ‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’, for it adopts ‘for society as a whole the principle of choice for one man’. In order to make this extension work, persons must be ‘conflated’ or ‘fused’ into a single social whole, with the state acting as its agent; Rawls explicitly says that such a view conflicts with the individualism with which the utilitarian tradition is normally associated.31 Following Rawls, Scott Gordon writes that ‘utilitarianism begins with the view that happiness or utility is meaningful only for people as individuals, but it proceeds to adopt a rule - maximize aggregate utility - which does not apply to individuals and which even permits flirtation with the grossest forms of anti-individualistic social philosophy’.32 Later, Robert Nozick accused Rawls of succumbing to a related form of collectivism in his assumption that the distribution of natural talents is a collective asset which ‘society’ is entitled to adjust. And that accusation of course encouraged a whole generation of libertarian writers to urge that we pull the state (as far as possible) out of economic life, curtail redistributive policies, and abandon the welfare state, all in the name of‘individualism’. 30 Berlin, Four Essays, pp. xliv-xlv, 141-62. 31 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 26-7, 28-9, 141, 264; Nozick expresses almost identical sentiments in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 32-3. See also R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. ix-xii, 364, and the discussions in D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 330-2, and M. J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 166-7; for a rather different view of the ‘collectivist' implications of classical utilitarianism see R. Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society, pp. 22ff. 32 Scott Gordon, Welfare, Justice and Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 40. See also Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 73.

Introduction

17

These developments reveal an ongoing struggle on the part of selfdescribed liberals to purge from their theories any notions that could be described as collectivist. They presumably do so because they regard it as essential to establishing their credentials as genuinely liberal thinkers.33 In so doing, they reiterated the already well-entrenched idea that liberalism and individualism were firmly allied and opposed to any and all forms ot collectivism. This has only been reinforced further in the work ot recent critics of Rawlsian and Nozickean forms of liberalism. Almost without exception, they have assumed that any real alternative to liberalism must reject individualism.34 The communitarian challenge to liberal theory is a clear illustration of this. As one writer has put it, communitarians ‘reject the individualism that they see at the heart of the liberal tradition’.35 But viewed in the context of the supposed alliance between individu¬ alism and liberalism whose history I have just sketched, the main documents of the recent communitarian revival are apt to seem surpris¬ ingly unimaginative and even regressive. Consider, for example, Sandel’s central claim that Rawls’s Difference Principle can only be justified by abandoning the strictly individualistic social ontology to which he is supposedly committed in A Theory of Justice?6 Sandel here simply reiterates the familiar view that a defence of the welfare state requires an account of the common good or of social solidarity which the doctrines of liberal individualism strictly forbid.37 Without that essential sup¬ porting account, Sandel implies, we will have to settle for the night33 John Gray writes of Aristotle’s ethical theory that it ‘is a profoundly anti-individualistic, and so an anti-liberal conception of right’ (emphasis mine); John Gray, Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 256. 34 Fred Dallmayr has gone so far as to say that ‘contemporary political theory appears precariously lodged at the crossroads of liberal individualism and postindividualist communalism’: Dallmayr, ed., From Contract to Community: Political Theory at the Crossroads (New York: M. Dekker, 1978), p. 9. I note two other examples of this tendency, both of which seem to me to be confused and misplaced: (1) recent efforts by neo-Marxists such as Claus Offe to deploy Habermassian ideas of ‘dialogic’ reason to develop new accounts of collective rationality which challenge the forms of ‘individual rationality’ on which the institutions of liberal democracy allegedly depend. Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 170-221; (2) The feminist attack on ‘the individualism that lies at the root of classical market economics and classical liberal politics and ethics ... Feminists have argued convincingly that the individualist ontology has been suited to a masculine experience of life and world’: Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Moral Passages: Toward a Collectivist Moral Theory (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. xi; see also Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp.. 237, 247, 314. 35 C. F. Delaney, ed., The Liberalism -Communitarianism Debate (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), p. viii. 36 Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, pp. 148-9. 37 Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 137-8.

18

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

watchman, minimal state of classical liberalism or Nozickean libertar¬ ianism.38 In effect, then, Sandel’s argument simply reinstates a very familiar alternative: the nightwatchman state or the \yelfare state. This alternative has dominated domestic political argument in the Western countries for a century or more and the debates that swirl around it have long since reached the point of exhaustion. If the historical story I have been telling here is plausible, these tired debates may be inevitable as long as we take for granted the underlying dichotomy between individualism and collectivism. Those who criticize liberalism within the terms of that distinction forget that the notion of liberal individualism originated, in part, as an effort to discredit the sorts of views they are trying to defend. The cold war liberals were perceptive in recognizing the rhetorical power of their association of liberalism and individualism as represented by theses 2(a) and 2(b) above, p. 6. Embra¬ cing that construction forces opponents into defending their own alter¬ natives by reference to the common good of society as a whole, the general will, the value of community, etc. Once opponents of liberalism find themselves on this terrain they become vulnerable to a barrage of familiar criticisms: when they leave the specification of the common good vague (as they invariably do), the vagueness is attributed to theoretical sloppiness, a sloppiness that they could have avoided by sticking with the methodological individualism that their own holist methodology compels them to reject. When they are more specific about the common good, their proposals are ridiculed as oppressive, retrogressive and even protototalitarian.39 38 Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, pp. 16-17. 39 Allen Buchanan notes, for example, that ‘efforts to achieve all-inclusive political community in our era may run an unacceptable risk of degenerating into totalitarianism’: ‘Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism’, Ethics 99 (July 1989), p. 860. Will Kymlicka asserts that communitarians have ignored the 'liberal insistence on the importance of a distinction between society and state’, and have failed to ‘confront the liberal worry that the all-embracing authority and coercive means which characterize the state make it a particularly inappropriate forum for the sort of genuinely shared deliberation and commitment they desire’: ‘Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neu¬ trality’, Ethics 99 (July 1989), p. 899. See also R. Brown, 'The Contribution of Sociology', in P. Pettit and R. E. Goodin, eds., A Companion to Political Philosophy, p. 116; and Amy Gutmann points out that ‘a great deal of intolerance has come from societies of selves so confidently situated that they were sure repression would serve a higher cause’. Gutmann cites the Puritan witch-hunts of seventeenth-century Salem, and the intolerant attitude of the Moral Majority towards homosexuality as examples of what she has in mind: ‘Communitarian Critics of Liberalism’, in S. Avineri and A. DeShalit, eds., Communitarianism and Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 132-3. Gutmann’s claims recall the suggestion made by the cold war liberals that modern collectivism was a kind of ‘tribalism’ assuming a statist form. See Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, pp. 133-6; Popper, Open Society, vol. I, p. 174; Berlin, Four Essays, pp. 159-60.

Introduction

19

There have been some heroic efforts to present alternatives to the liberal orthodoxy within these assumptions. One thinks, for example, of the work of Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer. But it seems fair to say that their proposals have failed to capture the high ground, even among those who are sympathetic to their general approach. It is worth remembering that at a time when communitarian writings have been resurgent, the prestige of classical liberal and libertarian ideas has been higher than at any time since the end of the nineteenth century. More¬ over, it is libertarian, not communitarian, ideas that have had a more direct impact on the politics of the Western countries over the past twenty-five years. I believe that these facts are connected: the secret of libertarianism's recent success lies precisely in its appeal to an alliance between liberalism and individualism, an alliance that even the critics of liberalism have so far been unwilling to question. These last remarks must be treated as somewhat speculative, and no doubt the historical story I have told concerning the distinction between individualism and collectivism is open to dispute. The arguments of this study are not predicated upon the validity of these claims, however. Rather, I advance them as hypotheses about the role that individualism has played in the recent history of liberalism. I believe that my arguments offer independent support for this view about its role. ‘Immanent critique’ and contemporary political theory Political theory today is one of the few academic fields in which the use of ideological labels and categories such as ‘liberal individualism’ is consid¬ ered intellectually respectable. To be sure, we often hear the allegation that the theories of economists, political scientists, sociologists, psycholo¬ gists and historians are inevitably infected by ideological biases. Further, it is obviously the case that very often the arguments made by scholars in these other disciplines will affect the tenability of claims associated with particular ideological views. Nevertheless, it is widely considered to be good professional practice in these fields to avoid making explicitly ideological arguments: to do so is, on this kind of view, crucial for maintaining an appropriate stance of impartiality and objectivity. But no such scruples appear to restrain political theorists: they happily argue for and against ‘liberal individualism’, invent new ideologies (e.g. ‘communitarianism’), describe themselves as protagonists of ‘feminism’, seek to defend ‘socialism’ against the attacks of ‘libertarians’, and so on. Perhaps none of this is particularly surprising, given the ideologically charged topics that political theorists address. Still, it remains unclear exactly why we should feel obliged to mediate our discourse about

20

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

justice, or the good polity, through ideological terms and frameworks of this kind.40 Is there any compelling justification for placing the ideolo¬ gical category ‘liberal individualism’ at the centre pf our theoretical debates about justice? Certainly one will search recent and contemporary literature about liberal theories in vain for any explicit justification for the use of the term. However, it is possible to reconstruct from recent debates an implicit argument for the use of the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘liberal individualism’. I will call this argument the immanent critique argument. This argument proceeds from the observation that the terms liberalism and liberal individualism refer to a general ideological syndrome that is particularly salient to the historical conditions of life at the end of the twentieth century. That is, the ideology of liberal individualism comprises a body of principles, norms and ideals around which the public discourse of contemporary Western societies largely revolves. It represents, as it were, the political Spirit of the Age, and sets the terms of political debate characteristic of our own historical epoch. Given the centrality of this ideological framework to the conduct of contemporary public life, then, it is obviously extremely important that political theorists, vocationally committed to the project of social criticism, should seek to understand it. By making explicit the theoretical commitments that stand behind the practice of Western public life, political theorists articulate the justi¬ fication for (what used to be called) the ‘status quo’. Stripped down to its philosophic essentials, the ideology of ‘liberal individualism’ is then available for rigorous theoretical assessment and discussion.41 With this theorized notion of ‘liberal individualism’ on the table, theorists are free to perform a number of important intellectual tasks: (1) They can investigate what liberal individualist principles imply about a 40 Sometimes one detects in recent discussions the suggestion that since all arguments and analyses in the human sciences are ineradicably value-laden, the attempt to eschew ideological perspectives must always be disingenuous; on such a view we cannot say anything intelligible about human social and political organization outside some recognizably ideological standpoint, and intellectual honesty requires us to recognize and announce these inevitable affiliations. This suggestion is surely implausible, however. This need not be because value-freedom in the human sciences is possible or desirable, but rather because not all value-judgements must be ideologically motivated or uniquely assignable to a particular ideological position. Of course, much depends here on the definition of "ideology'. But unless we define all value-judgements as ideological (which merely begs the question), it is surely implausible to maintain that we cannot recognize injustice, or otherwise evaluate political institutions, unless we are ideologically committed. 41 Thus Michael Sandel credits Rawls and Nozick with bringing ‘philosophical clarity’ to a set of ‘political debates’ within the ‘procedural’ liberal paradigm. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, p. 292. It is important to stress that the version of ‘immanent critique’ I am sketching here departs in many respects from the more ambitious Hegelian notion of immanent critique. For the latter, see S. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 169-75.

Introduction

21

wide range ol public policy issues - the distribution of income, wealth and social advantages or the problem of ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, lor example.4- (2) They discover what is philosophically at stake in the disagreements and controversies that arise at the borders between ‘liberal individualism’ and the various other salient ideological views (socialism, communitarianism, conservatism) that continue to dispute its main claims in public discourse. In this way, they can assess where individualist principles seem particularly vulnerable to criticism, and assess how far they can be defended against, or modified to cope with, such criticisms.44 (3) They can assess how far the actual practice of public life lives up to the commitments that are presupposed in its underlying philosophical basis, and enunciate political criticism and proposals for reform.44 This immanent critique approach is, I believe, the model that is implicit in almost all of the mainstream debates in recent AngloAmerican political theory. Certainly, the intellectual tasks listed corre¬ spond well with the kinds of theoretical contributions that have been offered over the past three decades. On this view, political theory is a particular form of social criticism, one mediated through the philosophi¬ cal analysis of concepts and ideals distilled from the more inchoate ideological positions implicit in contemporary political life, institutions and discourse. If we accept this view of political theory, the justification for the use of the terms ‘liberal individualism’ and ‘liberalism’ becomes straightforward and obvious: these terms are simply shorthand for the basic subject-matter of political theory - the existing social and political order, whose basic principles we need to understand and assess.45 Note 42 The work of John Rawls is a case of the first example, the recent work of Will Kymlicka on cultural, ethnic and national diversity is an instance of the second example: see W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 43 This is the form that debates between liberal individualists and communitarians have assumed. See, for example, S. Avineri and A. De-Shalit, eds., Communitarianism and Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), S. Mulhall and A. Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), and Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics. For a parallel argument against liberal individualism from an explicitly conservative point of view, see John Kekes, Against Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 44 For example, the final section of W. Galston’s Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 241-304, Ronald Dworkin’s essays on censorship, public support for art, affirmative action and liberal individualist values in his A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), the essays in J. Reiman’s Critical Moral Realism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), and the notion of liberal social criticism that is presented in David Johnston’s The Idea of a Liberal Theory, pp. 12-13, 31-2, 39, 155-60. 45 Note that the immanent critique argument need not claim that ‘liberal individualism’ represents ideas that are either completely hegemonic, monolithic or uncontested. The

22

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

that this need not make the analysis ideological, only that ideologies (suitably purified) are the objects of the analysis, not part of the theorists’ perspectival apparatus. The immanent critique argument is certainly not the only possible approach to political theorizing, and it is open to many objections that political theorists today rarely acknowl¬ edge. Still, the immanent critique argument has undoubted attractions, particularly to an age that is generally sceptical of the effort to derive moral or political principles from ‘transcendental’ or ‘ahistorical’ sources. Viewed as part of a wider project of immanent critique, the intellectual tasks listed above can all be carried out without any strong commitment to ‘foundationalism’; all of them can be regarded as historically situated efforts to sift through our political language to make rigorous and informed arguments about the political problems we face, and about the adequacy (or inadequacy) of liberal principles in dealing with them. On the immanent critique view, then, to introduce a theory as ‘liberal’, or ‘liberal individualist’, for the purposes of attack, apology, reconstruc¬ tion or application, is to make a particular kind of statement. It is certainly not necessarily to commend it to an interlocutor, for both proponents and critics of liberal individualism will, on the immanent critique view, have a use for the label. Nor is it likely to be simply an act of theoretical stipulation (let norms {X, Y,Z) - ‘Liberal Individualism’), for the terms already carry with them a range of connotations drawn from the discursive history in which they arose. These generate expecta¬ tions on the part of the listener that will be anterior to the theoretical act of definition: the listener will expect the theorist’s definition of the theory to be faithful to what she, as a participant in this discourse, already recognizes liberal individualism - in broad outline - to be. If the definition fails to meet those expectations, she will be sceptical about whether the theory under discussion genuinely qualifies as an instance of liberal individualism. Rather, on the immanent critique view, to introduce a theory as ‘liberal individualist’ will be essentially an historically situated act of identification. To perform such an act of identification is to do two things simultaneously: (a) It is to claim that one can draw from the discourse and language of claim is only that it represents ideas that are relatively dominant in contemporary political society and discourse. The question then becomes whether their dominance over those of rival ideological traditions is warranted. And the best way to answer that question, the immanent critique argument claims, is to expose the underlying philosophical principles behind the dominant ideas and to hold them up to critical scrutiny.

Introduction

23

liberal politics a set of ‘liberal individualist’ values and principles with sufficient coherence and philosophical integrity to count as a theory. (b) It is to identity that theory as standing in a relation of opposition to or competition with philosophical principles associated with recog¬ nized non-liberal ideologies. That is, it is to place the theory of liberal individualism within an historically specific field of alternatives which, in one way or another, deny or reject the core principles of liberal individualism. (a) explains the sense in which the theorist is introducing a liberal individualist theory, (b) explains what is involved in labelling that theory as liberal rather than ‘communitarian’, conservative, socialist, and so on. The construction of liberal individualism that has been mediated to us by the influential contributions of the cold war liberals, I submit, conforms with this account of how ideological conceptions can be integrated into a programme of immanent critique. On the one hand, that construction maintains that individualist ideals differentiate liberal conceptions from non-liberal ones; on the other, it maintains that some underlying individualist methodology or ontology lends to liberal individualist ideals the sort of philosophical integrity that allows us to confer upon the whole package the status of‘theory’. The variant of ‘immanent critique’ that I have sketched is, however, susceptible to a particular weakness. When we canvassed the immanent critique argument, we did so not only to sketch a general account of the way in which social criticism might fruitfully proceed. We also introduced it as an effort to justify the specific use of the term ‘liberal individualism’ within contemporary debate. According to this argu¬ ment, the point of identifying a view as ‘liberal individualist’ is to appeal to a listener’s expectations about what liberal individualism is, what it stands for, and so on. The first task of ‘immanent critique’ in this context, then, will be to satisfy those expectations by presenting a credible and sophisticated representation of the core principles of ‘liberal individualism’. But what if the expectations of ‘liberal individualism’ that our dis¬ cursive history has encouraged us to accept are themselves mistaken? What if the theoretical integrity we expect to find in the package of values captured under the label ‘liberal individualism’ is a fiction, an ideological myth? On this supposition, efforts to theorize ‘liberal indivi¬ dualism’ and the wider field of ideological alternatives that partially define it will systematically build these erroneous expectations into the analysis. This will happen because a successful ‘theorization’ will model (and hence preserve) the anticipated unity and cohesion of ‘liberal

24

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

individualism’. But we have to remember here that such expectations about the ideological location, integrity and cohesion of the values of ‘liberal individualism’ are themselves part of the public culture and discourse of contemporary society. That is, they are part of what the immanent critique argument sets out to criticize. But under the current hypothesis, instead of exposing them as confused, an immanent critique argument centred on a theorization of ‘liberal individualism’ will tend to protect these expectations from critical scrutiny. Attention will be diverted in other directions, and in the meantime the theoretical integrity of ‘liberal individualism’ will be assumed as a datum. On this hypothesis, the apparatus of immanent critique will be cramped in its operation, its goal of social criticism incompletely realized. As should already be clear, this book suggests that the notion of ‘liberal individualism’ has limited the critical project in just the way suggested by this hypothesis. The argument of the book is thus a case study in the distortions and misrepresentations that have resulted from uncritically integrating certain ideological categories into that debate, though it is not necessarily an attack on the ‘immanent critique’ strategy more generally. If successful, the arguments of this book should lead us to revise our understanding of the ideological framework within which liberal values and ideals are located, and to question our received ideas about the identity and integrity of the category, ‘liberal individualism’. Looking ahead Let me map out in advance how my argument will proceed. Earlier, I drew a distinction between individualism as a political ideal and individualism as a set of second-order formal or methodological axioms about the theoretical priority of the individual over society as a whole. I suggested that the received idea of liberal individualism asserts a connection between these two kinds of individualism, a connection between theses 2(a) and 2(b) in the preliminary sketch of liberal individualism given above. In the first chapter, I try to specify the various values and norms that come together to form the individualist political ideal to which I mean 2(a) to refer. These norms centre on the value of individual liberty and include in particular a strong commit¬ ment to the value of privacy and to the inviolability of individuals and their rights. I claim that these norms combine into a compelling and powerful political ideal, one that partially defines the liberal project as it has come to be understood by theorists over the past twenty-five years. Chapter 1 therefore lays out in some detail the political ideals that I aim to liberate from the various assumptions about individualism and

Introduction

25

collectivism that have dominated political discourse in the twentieth century. Chapter 2 is an initial brush-clearing detour that tackles the claims associated with thesis 2(b) in my earlier overview of liberal individualism. I examine the influential suggestion that individualism as a political ideal depends on a recognizable and meaningful theoretical commitment to ‘the priority of the individual’ over society as a whole. I consider the most important and influential versions of this claim and argue that none of them successfully picks out essential or defining features of the theoretical substructure of liberal individualist political ideals. If the argument of chapter 2 works, we must reject the special link between 2(a) and 2(b) suggested by the cold war liberals and those they have influenced. But while this clears away a lot of the rhetoric associated with individualist political ideals, it does not conclusively show that those ideals lack the sort of theoretical unity and cohesion that has been widely imputed to them. Chapter 2 merely confirms what many readers will suspect anyway, that familiar claims about the ontological, methodo¬ logical or axiological ‘priority’ of ‘the individual’ in liberal theories reflect the confusions of cold war rhetoric. But this does not establish that there is no single conception of the collectivity peculiar to liberal individualism, nor that individualist ideals are internally unstable. The rest of the book is devoted to establishing these much more challenging claims. It is necessary to do so in order to reject the second, and more important, assumption about the idea of liberal individualism that I mentioned at the beginning: the assumption that the unity of liberal individualism consists in a unique and stable view of the relation between ‘the individual’, political society, and the state. Chapter 3 lays out the theoretical terms of this argument by distin¬ guishing between a number of different ways in which the relation between individuals, the collectivity, and the state might be construed. The distinctions I draw have hidden behind the dichotomy between individualism and collectivism and are used in later chapters to detect the different accounts of the collectivity on which different aspects of the individualist ideal in fact depend. The concluding trio of chapters (4-6), which together comprise the more important half of the book, form a single extended argument. That argument attempts to demonstrate that individualist ideals are com¬ mitted to two different accounts of the relations between individuals, society and the state, and that the differences between these two accounts give rise to hitherto unacknowledged internal difficulties within liberal individualism. Chapter 4 investigates the historical sources of these

26

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

conflicts. It shows that the liberal tradition has been influenced by two different theories of individual liberty and its importance, and suggests that these two theories presuppose two differing cpnceptions of the collectivity that oppose each other. Chapter 5 considers the contemporary libertarian theory in the light of the conflicts identified in chapter 4. Libertarian theories provide a key case for my argument because it is they, more than any other variants of contemporary liberalism, that claim to honour most comprehensively the individualistic ideal sketched in chapter 1. But chapter 5 suggests that this effort is doomed to failure, because contemporary libertarianism attempts to combine incompatible elements from the two traditions identified in chapter 4. In short, libertarian theories, as they are under¬ stood today, presuppose two incompatible conceptions of collectivity, and this reveals a conceptual hiatus within the individualist ideal laid out in the initial chapter. Chapter 6 draws together the main strands of the discussion and explains in what senses ‘liberal individualism’ lacks the theoretical integrity that it has been widely believed to possess. It then explores the wider implications of my arguments for the contemporary idea of ‘liberal theory’.

1

Individualism as a political ideal

In the introduction, I suggested that the network of ideas that constitutes the received view of ‘liberal individualism’ is organized around a dual conception of ‘individualism’. On the one hand that view claims that liberal values embody a recognizably individualist political ideal. On the other, it has been supposed that the philosophical integrity and unity of that ideal consists, in part, in a dependence on some individualist theory or method. I believe that it is only in the first sense that the term ‘liberal individualism’ has any determinate meaning, and the next chapter is devoted to refuting the idea that liberal values and ideals alike depend on some discrete theoretical doctrine about the ‘priority of the individual’ over society as a whole. With that familiar assumption out of the way, we will be in a position to make a fresh assessment of the individualist ideal. But before we do any of this, we need to give a preliminary account of what that political ideal involves, and of its significance and role in recent theoretical debate. This is the task to which this initial chapter is devoted. Below, I list several individualist values. These values combine to form a familiar and apparently coherent individualist ideal, one that is distinctive of the kind of philosophical liberalism that has flourished since the publication of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. It is important to stress that I do not equate liberalism (historical or contemporary) with this individualist ideal (though this is not meant to imply that I have a clear definition of ‘liberalism’). In fact, few self-described liberals claim that liberalism should be committed exclusively to the individualist ideal that I will set out, although a vociferous and growing group of libertarian theorists have indeed insisted on this. On the contrary, the majority of liberal theorists have been prepared to concede that a fully adequate liberal theory should recognize a variety of other less obviously indivi¬ dualistic values. They acknowledge that taking these other values ser¬ iously requires that the pure individualist ideal be qualified in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, whether or not particular theorists have urged local departures from it, I do maintain that the individualist ideal set out 27

28

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

below has been a distinctive feature of the liberal theories that have emerged in the past three decades among Anglo-American philosophers and political theorists. In this qualified and historically limited sense, I am prepared to say that the individualist ideal is at least partially definitive of what liberalism has come to mean among political theorists and philosophers writing today. My list of individualist values is thus intended to capture the variety of ‘liberal individualism’ that has been the object of vigorous criticism and apology during the last third of the twentieth century. In a book that displays an unerring instinct for the common-sense middle ground implied by contemporary liberal theories, David Johnston has proposed that all forms of philosophical liberalism alike depend on three individualistic principles. In order to introduce my own list of individualist values and ideals, I want to indicate why I believe John¬ ston’s proposal is inadequate. Johnston’s three principles are: (1) Only individuals count (2) Everyone counts as one, nobody as more than one (3) Everybody to count as an agent. Johnston invokes these three principles as part of an effort to define ‘distinctively liberal values’ (emphasis mine).1 In this passage Johnston seems to suggest that the adoption of his three principles is both necessary and sufficient for a theory to count as ‘liberal’. But then he slides into a different position, saying, more weakly, that ‘any liberal ... would consider political and social arrangements which fail to embody these values in some recognizable way unacceptable’. But showing this does not itself establish that these values are ‘distinctively’ liberal. Johnston must also show that only liberals will endorse them.2 Unfortunately, I do not think that Johnston provides us with any basis for believing this last claim. He comes close to conceding this implicitly

1 D. Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory, p. 18. 2 Perhaps Johnston intends his three principles as offering a purely stipulative definition, as he has suggested to me in conversation. But this response seems unpromising. For one thing, I do not see how such a view is compatible with his text. For example, Johnston’s claim that any liberal would find a regime which denies his three principles unacceptable (p. 18) would then become a tautology, since a ‘liberal’ will be defined as one who accepts his three principles; but the sentence cited above only really makes sense if the word ‘liberal’ refers to those we already know to be liberals. For another, claiming that the definition is a stipulation does not resolve the crucial ambiguity about whether his principles are merely necessary, or both necessary and sufficient, for a theory to count as liberal. Finally, if the definition is simply a stipulation which is to be entirely independent of the historical evocations of the term, one wonders why he chooses to use the label ‘liberal’ at all, since those inevitable historical evocations are bound to impinge on the reader’s perception of the idea he is trying to get across.

Individualism as a political ideal

29

when he acknowledges that, on his view, Marx comes out as a liberal.3 To my mind, it makes little sense to classify Marx as a liberal, even though I can agree both (a) that he could have endorsed Johnston’s three principles and (b) that strict Marxian doctrine and liberal values overlap at other points. If we assume (as we should) that Marx is not a liberal, then the fact that his theory satisfies Johnston’s three principles does not imply that Marx is, after all, a liberal. Rather, it suggests that there is something wrong with Johnston’s claim that his three principles uniquely identify liberal commitments. Nothing here turns on the correct inter¬ pretation of Marx, since we can readily imagine other instances of theories which satisfy Johnston’s three principles without being obviously liberal. For example, a principled advocacy of thoroughgoing anarchism, or of the complete abolition of private property, seems to me to be perfectly compatible with all three principles. But anarchism and the abolition of private property seem to be paradigmatically illiberal, not ‘distinctively liberal’. On Johnston’s view of the ‘distinctively liberal’, liberalism becomes so capacious a designation as to be almost meaningless.4 One crucial omission seems to me to deserve particular emphasis: Johnston’s proposal makes no reference to a particular theory of freedom as a distinctive feature of the liberal individualist project. It is of course understandable, given the complexity of the notion of freedom, why we might wish to avoid a discussion of the various conceptions of freedom which are specific to liberalism. But it seems to me that some such account is unavoidable if we are to do justice to the liberal project. Johnston suggests, of course, that his third condition - the agency stipulation - brings a notion of freedom along with it. He rightly points out that ‘minimally, the claim that we are free means that we possess the capacity to be agents’.5 But, as he tacitly admits, this is a very minimalist view about the nature of freedom, and I suspect that any authentically liberal theory needs rather more than this. Demanding that a theory acknowledge that individuals are more than just sentient beings does not, to my mind, guarantee a distinctively liberal interpretation of liberty, even taking account of Johnston’s other two stipulations. For example, a 3 Idea of a Liberal Theory, pp. 24, 140. 4 Though in this, Johnston is exemplifying a tendency that has become widespread in political theory. 5 Idea of a Liberal Theory, p. 22; though it is worth noting that on the rigidly ‘negative’ concept of liberty often associated with liberalism (see chapter 4 below), this claim seems to be false: if freedom is solely a function of the number of external obstacles to my action, then being free does not entail being an agent. One can be merely a sentient being and be free in this sense.

30

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

prominent theme in the liberal tradition has been a commitment to anti¬ paternalism, the view that individuals should be free to ‘pursue their own good in their own way’, as Mill put it. The idea is that individuals ought to have an area of moral space immune from the interference of others: within this space, they are free to do as they wish, whatever the consequences for their own well-being. But it is far from obvious that paternalism has to assume that individuals are merely sentient beings. Humans who have the capacity to pursue projects and be agents (in Johnston’s sense) also have the capacity to make gross miscalculations about what is in their own interests. These mistakes may cause them serious and lasting harm. It is a distinctive and arguably problematic claim of liberalism that freedom is of such value that we ought not (except perhaps in very serious cases) to interfere to prevent people from making these mistakes. But even highly interven¬ tionist forms of paternalism might be compatible with Johnston’s third stipulation. If Johnston’s three principles really represent the last word as to the nature of liberalism, then we seem bound to admit that even extensive paternalism might be compatible with liberalism. But this seems to me to miss something important about what liberalism has historically stood for. To my mind, then, any effort to capture the ideals and commitments of liberal individualism must start from a discussion of liberty and freedom. So my own list of fundamental individualist values takes liberty as its starting-point. For reasons that will become clear, I group these values and commitments under two headings: (1) liberty and individual inviolability; (2) liberty and the private sphere. Each of these categories is internally complex, and so I will deal with each in turn. Liberty and individual inviolability According to liberal individualists, freedom is a special kind of good. It should not, in general, be sacrificed for the sake of other kinds of goods. This implies a characteristic view about the priority of liberty. On this view ‘liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty itself’.6 The lexical priority that Rawls assigns to his first principle of justice is an endorsement of exactly this principle, for it forbids trade-offs between liberty and other primary goods such as income and wealth.7 6 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 244. 7 For Rawls's current views on this, and in particular his response to Hart’s claim that in A Theory of Justice Rawls failed to account adequately for the priority of liberty, see the discussion in J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press 1993) pp. 289-324.

Individualism as a political ideal

31

But individualists typically add a further, and crucial, distributive constraint to the priority of the liberty principle. This is the requirement of equal liberty. Thus Rawls’s first principle of justice, which he refers to as the equal liberty principle, states that 'each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all’. The suggestion here is that we ought not only to forbid trade-offs between liberty and other values, but also that there are strict limits on the extent to which the liberty of some can be traded off in order to provide liberty to others. On this view, to think of liberty as a good that can be traded off between persons in this way is to make a fundamental mistake about the kind of good that freedom is. Liberty and freedom are not to be thought of as goods like money or commodities, whose value we can redistribute and optimize. Rather, liberty needs to be understood as deeply entwined with indi¬ viduals' privileged moral status, and with a resulting entitlement to equal consideration and respect.8 In this view, the notion of liberty is insepar¬ ably connected with a claim about the special dignity and worth of individuals.9 On this sort of view, any public ethic that takes individuals’ moral status and equal entitlement to concern and respect seriously must ensure that each person obtains whatever liberties are necessary for them fully to develop the one and only life which they will ever have. Once we have supplemented the priority of liberty principle with these claims about the special entitlement to liberty as a constituent of the worth of individuals and their lives, we arrive at a new principle, which I will call the distribution of liberty principle (DLP): The only permissible restrictions of individual liberty are those necessary to secure the equal liberty of individual citizens.

As it stands, this principle is ambiguous, and liberals have differed about how to interpret the requirement of 'equal liberty’: much more will be said about this in chapter 4. Nonetheless, it is at least clear that this principle expresses the intuition behind the characteristic liberal idea that individuals are inviolable and possess certain basic rights that cannot be overridden, even to promote a valuable social goal. It also accounts for liberals’ suspicion of theories which seek to optimize goods according to an impersonal standard, or which seek to realize perfectionist goals.10 The risk that such theories run, according to individualists, is to permit

8 R. Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, pp. 190-2, 205. 9 ‘to respect persons is to ... affirm that the loss of freedom for some is not made right by a greater welfare enjoyed by others. The lexical priorities of justice represent the value of persons that Kant says is beyond all price’: J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 586. 10 R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, p. 172.

32

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

the unjust sacrifice of some individual(s) in order to promote the relevant value. It is this fear that motivates the strongly anti-utilitarian tenor of recent liberal individualist argument. Thus, in a famous passage, Nozick writes: there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. Talk of an overall social good covers this up. (intentionally?) To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.11

Liberty and the private sphere The second category of individualist values specifies the archetypical liberal concern to define a private sphere of conduct insulated from public interference, an area within which citizens of a liberal order are free to think and act as they wish. Without wanting to make too much of a topological metaphor, it is nevertheless worth emphasizing one aspect of the spatial imagery implicit in the idea of a ‘sphere’ of personal action. To describe the area within which an individual may rightfully act as a ‘sphere’ tends to imply that the only relevant boundaries on legitimate personal action are external. In this view, there are no internal bound¬ aries, no core elements within the sphere of private action towards which individuals are bound to act in particular ways, at least within the terms of a legitimate and politically enforceable public ethic. The internal structure of the private sphere is left to individuals to specify as they please. From a public point of view, the private sphere is, as it were, indivisibly blank. There are no publicly enforceable assumptions about what ought to go on within externally circumscribed private spaces. The idea of a centreless private sphere, bounded only by external limits imposed by nature, or by rights specifying similar liberties for others, has been a recurring theme in liberal individualist thought.12 It models the characteristic liberal individualist distinction between self- and otherregarding activity, and evokes the connected values of voluntarism, tolerance, anti-paternalism and neutrality.13

11 Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 32-3. 12 ‘privacy in its modem sense - that is a sphere of thought and action that should be free from “public” interference - does constitute what is perhaps the core idea of liberalism’, S. Lukes, Individualism, p. 62. 13 See A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, pp. 43-5.

Individualism as a political ideal

33

These views about the private sphere imply that an individualist ethic will try to be a merely regulative ideal that applies only to the relations between individuals and their activities. Thus Lomasky writes, to the extent that morality is conceived to be a decision procedure for adjudi¬ cating the disparate claims of contending individuals to secure what they want, moral theory is deemed to succeed if it identifies rules or principles for the adjudication ol interpersonal clashes of interest and desire to which all can rationally assent. The flip side of this conception is that it is not the business of moral philosophy to tell individuals where their good lies or what they ought to desire.14

This idea underlies the characteristic liberal distinction between the Right and the Good. Principles of the Right are those which regulate inter¬ personal activities and the conflicts which often arise between individuals. Principles of the Good are those which individuals choose to endorse as they formulate their personal ethical beliefs and by whose standards they live. Some prominent recent theories of liberalism have used this distinction to claim that liberal political morality is, or ought to be, neutral with respect to controversial conceptions of the good. Although this claim is not directly about freedom, it is easy to see how the underlying idea can be presented as critical for the notion of freedom implied in the idea of a private sphere. A public ethic which merely regulates interpersonal interaction will be one which leaves as much as possible to individual choice. Within a background framework of rules which proscribe certain forms of interpersonal interference, individuals are free to live their lives according to their own set of standards: it is not the job of the liberal state (or of the moral and political theories which claim to justify it) to evaluate or override the moral standards which individuals choose to endorse in the living of their personal lives. On this view, individual action and belief is only subject to correction by the state if it interferes in the lives and activities of others in certain ways. One way of expressing this commitment to an indivisible private sphere deserves special mention. Individualists often take basic rights and liberties to be essentially proprietary in character. The central metaphor here is the thesis of self-ownership. According to this thesis, individuals are to be regarded as the exclusive owners of their bodies, lives and personal assets and resources, and are free to make of them what they will.15 Thus Jeffrey Reiman has written, ‘Private ownership of 14 L. Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 228. 15 See ibid., pp. 114ff; J. Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 66-8, 175; R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 58-9, 171-2; for two non-libertarian liberals who see self-ownership as central to liberal theory, see

34

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

the body is the nerve of liberalism. It accounts for the characteristic antipaternalism of liberalism ... as well as its support for laws against physical aggression ... [and] ... for the value given privacy in liberal societies.’16 Sometimes the idea of self-ownership is regarded by liberals as a foundational claim which accounts for all forms of basic rights. Thus Jan Narveson writes that ‘it is plausible to construe all rights as property rights ... a right to our persons as our property is the sole fundamental right there is’.17 At other times, liberals use the language of property as a convenient way of expressing their understanding of liberty as freedom from the interference from others: ‘property rights demarcate moral space within which what one has is marked as immune from predation’.18 Either way, the self-ownership thesis condenses the indivi¬ dualist commitment to an indivisible private sphere into a compact and attractive formula, one that individualists of a libertarian stripe have been particularly keen to develop. An inviolable private sphere I believe that this list of claims and commitments plausibly summarizes the purely normative form of ‘individualism’ presupposed in the recent debate about liberalism. When combined, they yield a powerful and compelling social ideal, one centred on the defence of an ‘inviolable private sphere’. According to this ideal, individuals’ special dignity and value consists in the liberty and capacity to live their lives as they wish, within limits specified by the equal entitlement of all other citizens to a similar sphere of liberty. A particularly clear exposition of this individu¬ alist ideal is provided by the following remarks of Loren Lomasky: affirmations of basic rights spring from a commitment to the value of the individual ... the core of this notion is that each person possesses a kind of sovereignty over his own life and that such sovereignty entails that he be accorded a zone of protected activity within which he is to be free from encroachment by others ... I shall use the term ‘individualism’ to denote the conviction that great value attaches to the ability of persons to lead their own lives, and that within a wide and durable sphere of freedom from the interference by others they ought to be able to develop and pursue their own ideals of the good ... Liberalism accords to each individual a unique and irreplaceable value, and because individuals are D. Lloyd Thomas, In Defence of Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 8-10, 88-91; J. Reiman, Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 170-9, and Critical Moral Realism, pp. 163-4. 16 Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy, p. 171. 17 Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, p. 66; D. Boaz, Libertarianism: a Primer (New York: The Free Press, 1997), pp. 66, 68-70. 18 Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, p. 121.

Individualism as a political ideal

35

many, so too are values. Rights are consonant with individualism because rights provide the most morally stringent protection of the worth that each individual exemplifies. Rights erect side constraints that preclude the sacrifice of one individual for the sake of another in order to maximize impersonal value ... Rights are ... [an] entitlement to moral space within which [each] can indepen¬ dently attempt to realize a connected and coherent conception of the good life for him ... By establishing boundaries that others must not trangress they accord to each rights holder a measure of sovereignty over his own life. That is the sense in which individuals are said to be inviolable; even if one can act so as to deny another the status of project pursuer, one must not.19 These remarks reflect the two sets of values that jointly comprise the individualist political ideal that I have just sketched. For, according to Lomasky, respecting basic rights does two things simultaneously: it ‘accords to’ individuals a ‘unique and irreplaceable value’, and allows them to pursue their ‘many’ personal values within a protected ‘sphere’ of activity. So for Lomasky the two limbs of the idea I introduced above (respect for the inviolable value of the individual, and respect for a sphere of private activity) are united and assimilated in the institution of basic rights. For him and many others, that is the source of the enormous appeal of that institution, and of the ideal of liberal individualism that it expresses. According to this view, a society that acknowledges individuals’ rights to act as they wish within their personal spheres of conduct automatically acknowledges their dignity and special value by so doing. Thus Hayek defined ethical (rather than theoretical) individualism in just these terms, for it involves, he says, ‘the respect for the individual man qua man, that is the recognition of his own views and tastes as supreme in his own sphere’.20 In this passage, Hayek essentially equates the two sets of values given above: respect for the individual ‘qua man’, for his special dignity and worth, requires no more and no less than providing him with a protected sphere of private activity within which he may act entirely as he would wish. Of course, Hayek wrote these words long before the revival of a self-conscious philosophical liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s; but the idea seems wholly representative of that later movement.21 19 ibid., pp. 11,52, 54. 20 F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 11, see also R. Skidelsky, who simply defines individualism as the defence of an ‘inviolable private sphere’, The Road from Serfdom, p. 19. 21 The Rawlsian project obviously fits this .structure: for the whole enterprise is based on the claim that individuals ‘possess an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override’. But this inviolability eventually turns out to consist in the freedom to pursue one’s own plan of life, whatever it is; the only restrictions on individual plans of life are given by an evaluation of the likely effects on others of carrying them out, in particular, whether those effects compromise the

36

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

In what follows, when I use the terms ‘liberal individualism’ or ‘individualist political ideal’ I will mean them to refer to the compound of the two sets of ideas just sketched. This combination looks very much like a common core of values from which the most familiar variants of contemporary liberal individualism branch out. Moreover, the ease with which these values seem to coalesce into a single view suggests that they are not merely compatible, but intimately bound up with each other. Many would assume that it is obvious, even platitudinous, that they go hand in hand, or that they are simply two ways of expressing a single basic idea. While they have often disagreed about how strictly this ideal should be interpreted and applied, liberals have rarely, if ever, questioned its basic unity and coherence. Neither, much more surprisingly, have the main critics of liberal theory: instead of investigating the coherence of that combination, they have tended to attack it as a package, arguing that we do better to discard ‘liberal individualism’ altogether and to centre our public philosophy on notions of community and society. But this book suggests that these assumptions about the integrity of the individualist political ideal are incorrect. The combination of values that comprises that ideal does not yield an integrated, self-consistent theoreti¬ cal position; in fact, it conflates two separate conceptual structures that imply conflicting views about how basic rights, liberties and other liberal goods ought to be arranged. This raises the possibility that many of the protagonists in the recent debate about liberal ideals have been making the wrong kind of issue out of ‘liberal individualism’. More often than not that debate has invited us to choose between various forms of a recognized individualist social ideal and some as-yet-unspecified post-individualist community. But this way of framing the issue takes the individualist political ideal for granted. It encourages us to assume that the bundle of ideas comprising the notion of ‘liberal individualism’ is already sufficiently self-consistent to be treated as a coherent theoretical family to be defended, attacked and argued about as a whole. This book uncovers a number of important opportunities of others to pursue their own plans of life. But there is no suggestion that justice as fairness restricts plans of life on the grounds that some are intrinsically superior, independently of their effects on other individuals and their rights. And that naturally implies a commitment to the sort of distinction between self- and otherregarding morality I mentioned under (2) above. Similarly, Dworkin says that liberalism requires that sacrifices and constraints may be imposed on individuals only to the extent that they are compatible with individuals’ ‘equal worth’; but Dworkin then suggests that this automatically ‘justifies the traditional liberal principle that government should not enforce private morality’; A Matter of Principle, pp. 205-6; see also Reiman, Critical Moral Realism, pp. 1, 10-11, 12 and Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, pp 41-2 76-7 95,97.

Individualism as a political ideal

37

tensions within the individualist political ideal that call this assumption into question. It is important to clarify the nature and seriousness of the kinds of tensions I am claiming to detect within contemporary liberal individu¬ alist ideals. Clearly, the liberal tradition has never been without conflict and disagreement. Even today, liberalism is a broad church, and historically there have been as many vociferous and impassioned debates among liberals as between liberals and their rivals. But liberals can acknowledge certain kinds of internal disagreement without having to deny that the individualist values listed above offer, at least poten¬ tially, a unified ideological scheme. It is true, for example, that liberals have otten disagreed about whether a commitment to the importance of liberty and the other values I have mentioned above requires us to supplement more standard ‘negative’ rights against the interference of others with additional ‘positive’ rights to certain forms of welfare provision. This was the fundamental issue that lay behind the efforts of ‘New Liberals' like Hobson, Hobhouse and Green to enrich the classical ‘nightwatchman’ view of liberalism prevalent in Victorian Britain, and Rawls’s view arrives at similar conclusions by a different route. But this kind of disagreement can be read plausibly as one about how flexible we should be in interpreting and applying these various stipulations. It does not imply that there is no way of reconciling them; rather, it implies that once we know how to reconcile them, we might find overriding reasons for moderating them in certain ways and under certain conditions.22 Some liberals might refuse to countenance any departure from these principles and commitments; others would regard such a view as a kind of ideological fetishism, and urge liberals to acknowledge that such a hawkish view of the project blinds liberalism to other relevant considerations. For example, all liberals can accept the claim that, in principle, liberty carries a certain priority over other kinds of goods. But liberals can and do differ about how strictly this stipulation should be interpreted or applied in practice. Some welfare liberals might suggest that it is impossible to insulate the good of liberty completely from all other kinds of social goods. They might maintain that a certain level of material well¬ being is always necessary if an agent is to be in a position fully to enjoy 22 ‘Thus although in principle the commitment to the individual and his or her rights stands at the centre of liberal theory, in reality this commitment is constantly diluted by the liberal commitment to other apparently less central principles, or simply by liberal “realism”’: see Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, pp. 90, 88; see also Thomas A. Spragens, ‘Communitarian Liberalism’ in A. Etzioni, ed., New Communitarian Thinking (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), pp. 44ff.

38

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

the liberty to which he or she is entitled. Other, more libertarian, liberals might maintain that it is not only possible, but morally necessary (as a way of safeguarding liberty) to separate institutional protections of liberty from the provision of material welfare. Two liberals who dis¬ agreed in this way might interpret each of the stipulations on the above list in a correspondingly different way. For example, the welfare liberal might argue that the package of rights and entitlements which secure the equal worth of each individual’s life should include certain positive rights to welfare. Only in this way, he might argue, can the value of liberty be properly realized. The classical liberal will likely maintain that we should settle for strictly ‘negative’ rights against interference. He might maintain that the effort to coercively redistribute holdings in order to pay for the provision of welfare rights itself threatens individual liberty in an unacceptable way, by impermissibly limiting the freedom of those whose wealth is coercively exacted. Famously, Robert Nozick has argued that such redistributive arrange¬ ments are unacceptable because they would ‘institute (partial) ownership by others of people and their actions and labor ... [and] ... involve a shift from the classical liberal’s notion of self-ownership to a notion of property rights in other people’.23 The disagreement between classical and welfare liberalism thus seems naturally to spill over into a disagree¬ ment about whether or not we should be willing to relax the absolute requirement of self-ownership under certain conditions. Thus the welfare liberal might agree that, strictly speaking, his own redistributive proposal will entail marginal erosions of the right to self-ownership, but in a way that remains fundamentally friendly to the anti-paternalist and volun¬ tarist intentions of that requirement.24 The important point is that the presence of disagreements like that between the classical and the welfare liberal, though they may be serious, need not imply that there is any fundamental conflict among the commitments I have listed above. It merely shows that we can adopt different attitudes to the liberal individualist package and remain within the orbit of liberal ideology. Not all proponents of a particular ideology such as liberalism have to adhere to strict interpretations of its funda¬ mental commitments. Indeed, ideologies, religions and political move¬ ments are characteristically marked by divisions between moderate and 23 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 172. 24 This is the way that the redistributive views of Rawls and Dworkin are usually taken: in regarding the distribution of talents as a common asset, they are prepared to relax the libertarian thesis of self-ownership, though not in a way that undermines the idea that individuals are nevertheless entitled to a private sphere of action within which they are free to act and think as they wish.

Individualism as a political ideal

39

extreme wings in just this way. Moreover, I have suggested that changes in the interpretation of one or other of these claims and commitments tend to require corresponding changes in the others, and arguably this supports the suggestion that these claims are fundamentally related. The kind of theoretical contradiction which this book claims to reveal is more serious. I want to suggest that the items on the above list pull in very different directions and that, appearances to the contrary, they do not entail each other. Indeed, I will try to establish that a commitment to the inviolability of the individual conflicts in important ways with the commitment to an indivisible private sphere. So the suggestion is not merely that liberal individualism is marked by disagreements among those proposing strict rather than qualified applications of its funda¬ mental principles. Rather, the claim is that there is no way of making these commitments completely compatible with each other. This casts doubt on the unity of the liberal individualist ideal in a way that the presence of disagreement between (say) classical and welfare liberalism does not. The individualist political ideal captures a distinctive element of recent developments in the philosophy of liberalism. One of the ways in which this comes out, I believe, is in the revival of libertarian ideas in the recent development of liberal theory. I believe that this revival is peculiarly characteristic of the form that contemporary liberalism has often assumed, a fact that has not been lost on communitarian critics of liberal individualism. As I noted in the introduction, classical liberal ideas about the nightwatchman state currently enjoy a new prestige among liberal intellectuals. While an earlier generation of liberals regarded figures like Hayek as the last representative of an obsolete form of laissez-faire liberalism, liberals today take Hayek’s ideas very seriously indeed.25 Moreover, libertarian ideas have had a direct impact at the level of public policy. When I say that the libertarian revival is peculiarly characteristic of liberal theory today, I am emphatically not claiming that most of those who describe themselves as liberals, or who have been criticized as ‘liberal individualists’, are libertarians. I think it remains true that relatively few liberals, even today, regard classical or libertarian liber¬ alism as representing the mainstream of liberalism. Nevertheless, I think 25 See, for example, the recent plethora of books on Hayek: N. Barry, Hayek’s Social and Economic Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1979); A. Gamble, Hayek: the Iron Cage of Liberty (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996); J. Gray, Hayek on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); R. Kley, Hayek’s Social and Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); C. Kukathas, Hayek and Modern Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

40

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

the renewed interest in libertarianism among those who describe them¬ selves as liberals tells us something very important about the contempo¬ rary meaning of that liberal idea. The crucial point here is that the defenders of libertarian ideas today have argued that it is they, and not the welfare liberals, who are strictly adhering to the fundamental principles of liberalism. And in making that argument, they have appealed to just the combination of individualist values I have listed above. Consider, for example, Nozick’s arguments against Rawlsian redistri¬ bution in Anarchy, State and Utopia, a book that is arguably the paradigmatic and historically critical document of recent libertarianism. Nozick’s argument against redistributive taxation is that it infringes a norm of self-ownership: that norm, he implies, requires the state to be ‘scrupulously neutral’ between the personal projects of individuals. That accounts for the second set of commitments in the above list of individualistic values. But he also thinks that because redistributive taxation violates self-ownership rights it simultaneously violates a funda¬ mental and inviolable side-constraint against exploiting individuals as means towards others’ ends. And such side-constraints, as he says, ‘express the inviolability of others’. Clearly, this claim appeals to the first set of individualist norms given above. The clear implication of this kind of argument is that if we are serious about safeguarding individuals’ inviolable rights to lead their lives entirely by their own standards and lights, we must reject forms of welfare liberalism such as Rawls’s, for they must compromise individuals’ inviolable rights of self-ownership. On this view, welfare liberalism inevitably departs from the strict idea of liberal individualism and so compromises the individualistic core of liberal theory. Only classical, libertarian forms of liberalism can, on this view, successfully honour self-ownership and individual inviolability without compromise. Thus libertarians represent themselves as the puritans of liberal individualism. As I have conceded, the arguments of Nozick and his followers have not yet persuaded most liberals to become libertarians. However, it is not clear that those liberals who continue to reject libertarianism would disagree with the claim that libertarians are the puritans of liberal individualism.26 I suspect, rather, that they would concede that libertar¬ ianism is indeed the purest form of liberal individualism on offer, but deny that theoretical purity necessarily makes good political or moral sense in our world. They might say, then, that strict individualism needs 26 For example, C. Gould, Rethinking Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 11-12.

Individualism as a political ideal

41

to be moderated because it is impractical, too simplistic, or simply too callous in its policy implications; but these complaints do not question the coherence of libertarianism as the purest form of liberal individu¬ alism. In my view, it is the failure to question this which explains why libertarian views have come to seem plausible to an increasingly vocal portion of the political and intellectual community. If I am right, that the individualist political ideal is in conflict with itself, the conflict should appear most clearly in the libertarian theories that claim to honour its component values most comprehensively. It is for this reason that in chapter 5 I focus on the libertarian theory to bring out the conflict. However, I acknowledge that I need also to show that my criticisms touch the arguments of those liberals who have adopted a less puritanical approach to the values of liberal individualism but who have also assumed their compatibility. This I attempt in my concluding chapter. The argument of this book is thus a corrective to the pervasive tendency to take for granted the idea that circumscribing an exclusive and indivisible private sphere of individual activity is equivalent to, or compatible with, expressing the inviolable value and dignity of ‘the individual’. The assumption that these two sets of norms and commit¬ ments combine to form a single individualist political ideal is the major critical target of this book. What is at stake, then, is the identity of the category ‘liberal individu¬ alism’. Several historical factors have encouraged us to exaggerate the theoretical unity of this ideological artifact. By far the most important, I believe, was the cold war suggestion that the difference between liberal and non-liberal political ideals is reflected in an underlying dispute in social theory about the theoretical standing of ‘the individual’ vis a vis ‘society’ or ‘the collectivity’. According to this view, the theoretical integrity of ‘liberal individualism’ consists in an underlying individualist theoretical framework within which ‘the individual’ is methodologically, metaphysically, ontologically or axiologically ‘prior’ to the collectivity. Some readers will not need to be convinced that this suggestion is a red herring. To them it will seem obvious that this relic of cold war social philosophy has little or nothing to contribute to the contemporary discussion of liberal principles, a view that I share. But many readers will not be so ready to discard these categories. They may think that in order to account for the integrity of the individualist ideal set out in this chapter we need look no further than these familiar claims about ‘methodological individualism’ or atomist ‘social ontologies’. The next chapter is for them (those already convinced may skip it). It reveals how difficult it is to isolate a clear theoretical methodology of ‘individualism’

42

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

or ‘atomism’ which is obviously at stake in the ongoing debate between liberals and their opponents about the responsibilities of the modern state. It therefore clears the way for a fresh look ah the individualist political ideal, and for the more important critical arguments that I make in later chapters.

2

Individualism as a theory

In every generation freedom is threatened by those who regard the individual person as inferior to some supposed collective whole ... the intellectual battle between the individualist and the collectivist is never won, but it remains important to fight it. In the course of ingenious pieces of reasoning thinkers of collectivist temperament from Plato to Hegel onwards have attempted to dissolve the individual into some collective whole. I am sure that this cannot be done by a priori reasoning. Collectivities do not think, feel, exult, triumph, or despair, and to plan for their benefit is the wrong sort of high-mindedness.!

If there is any single thought that sums up Samuel Brittan’s remarks here, it is the slogan that ‘the individual is prior to society or the collectivity’. Brittan’s comments illustrate two important features of this familiar assertion. For one thing, Brittan takes this issue as a perennial one (that, I take it, is why the battle is fought in ‘every generation’ and ‘never won’). For another, he regards the issue as fundamentally philosophical and theoretical (that is why the battle is an ‘intellectual’ one, with figures like Plato, Hegel and Derek Parfit, rather than Chairman Mao or Benito Mussolini, as key protagonists). Moreover, Brittan thinks that political individualism is connected to these underlying philosophical issues, an implication drawn even more explicitly by Murray Rothbard: The true science of man bases itself on the existence of individual human beings, upon individual life and consciousness. The scientific brethren (dominant in modern times) range themselves always against the meaningful existence of individuals ... what they affirm is the existence and primacy of social wholes: ‘society’, the ‘collective’, the ‘group’, the ‘nation’ ... The true science of man concentrates on the individual as of central, epistemological, and ethical import¬ ance; the adherents of scientism, in contrast, lose no opportunity to denigrate the individual and submerge him in the importance of the collective. With such radically contrasting epistemologies, it’s hardly sheer coincidence that the poli1 Samuel Brittan, A Restatement of Economic Liberalism (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988), pp. 216-17.

43

44

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

tical views of the two opposing camps tend to be individualist and collectivist respectively.2

Claims of the kind advanced here by Brittan and Rothbard would have seemed less natural but for the influence of Popper, Hayek and the other cold war liberals. As I suggested in the introduction, these cold war figures presided over an important transformation in the meaning of the word ‘individualism’. As a result of their contributions, ‘individualism’ ceased to be merely a word used to describe a certain kind of political order in which the state withdraws from private life in the name of individual and economic freedom. The term became also a predicate of philosophical theories that were supposed to underpin a commitment to an individualist society. Thus individualism came to be associated not only with a commitment to laissez-faire and individual liberty (a con¬ notation which of course it retains), but also with the theoretical, conceptual, methodological or (sometimes) ontological claim that ‘the individual is prior to society’. The term ‘collectivism’ underwent a parallel shift: those who sought to defend a more activist or interven¬ tionist state, or who cared less about individual liberty, were likely to be encouraged in such views by a theoretical commitment to the idea that the ‘social whole’, or the ‘collective good’ lies ‘prior’ to ‘the individual’. These ‘theorized’ shadows of individualism and collectivism (often referred to as ‘atomism’ and ‘holism’) were thus implicated in the ongoing political argument between liberals and their opponents about the powers and responsibilities of the modern state. This theorization of the opposition between individualism and collecti¬ vism was, I believe, greatly facilitated by the positivist intellectual climate into which the contributions of the cold war liberals were initially absorbed. If positivism was true, direct arguments for or against liberal democracy or totalitarianism were ultimately fruitless, since this issue hinged on a series of normative issues which rational argument could never settle. But if direct attempts to vindicate liberal principles rationally were hopeless, a certain kind of indirect argument was still available. One could seek to understand, historically and psychologically, why appar¬ ently intelligent people could have succumbed to the dubious attractions of totalitarian politics. Moreover, one could identify logical or concep¬ tual confusions characteristic of the intellectual traditions from which they drew their inspiration, confusions from which the liberal intellectual tradition was comparatively immune. Obviously such arguments would not dislodge the entrenched prejudices of a committed totalitarian, but M. Rothbard, Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (San Francisco, Calif.: Cato Institute, 1979), p. 27.

Individualism as a theory

45

they might enable the liberal to redescribe those prejudices as symptoms of a certain intellectual naivete. If nothing else, these claims could at least massage the philosophical vanity of the liberal intelligentsia, and shame those attracted to communism and other forms of non-liberal radicalism. In advancing their characteristic claims about methodological individu¬ alism and the ‘unreality’ of collectivities considered apart from the individuals that compose them, the cold war liberals supplied exactly this kind of argument. Happily, we have now moved on from the positivism of the middle of the century. The package of individualist values I outlined in the previous chapter is drawn mainly from, and is more pertinent to, the much more recent, post-Rawlsian debate about liberalism. Participants in that debate have been far more comfortable about making direct normative arguments for and against ‘liberal principles’. Yet, as Brittan and Rothbard illustrate, and as I suggested in the introduction, we still feel tempted to classify the theories that are on the table today in the terms of the categories we have inherited from earlier debates. This is clear in the writings of both liberals and their critics (arguably more so in the latter), many of whom continue to make an issue out of the ‘atomist’ ontologies or individualistic axiologies that supposedly underlie different political ideals.3 This raises the question of whether these traditional categories are any longer relevant to the contemporary individualist ideal outlined in the last chapter. This chapter argues that they are not. Its main target is the claim that there is some clear and politically relevant account of the theoretical ‘priority’ of the individual standing behind that individualist ideal. As we have seen, a copse of assumptions about liberal principles and their relation to other political principles has grown up around this claim. But it turns out to be extremely difficult to cash these assumptions 3 ‘The social ontology underlying many contemporary theories of justice ... is methodolo¬ gically individualist or atomist. It presumes that the individual is ontologically prior to the social’: Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 45; C. Gould, Rethinking Democracy, pp. 92—7ff.; A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, pp. 15, 38, 54; C. Taylor, ‘Atomism’, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 189; C. Taylor, ‘Irreducibly Social Goods’ and ‘CrossPurposes: the Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, both in Philosophical Arguments (Cam¬ bridge, Mass:. Harvard University Press, 1995); Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, pp. 31, 184; M. Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), p. 215; P. Pettit, The Common Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): Pettit is something of a special case in that he wants to offer a more sophisiticated account of the various social ontologies that he thinks are at stake in liberal (and, in his case, republican, political ideals). Still, the assumptions that these ontological issues matter, and that somehow they shape the political ideals that repose upon them, remain central to his analysis.

46

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

out in a compelling, clear, meaningful and relevant way. This chapter tries to expose these difficulties, and thus to clear the way for a fresh approach to the individualist political ideal I sketched in the previous chapter. Liberating ourselves from these cold war assumptions about the priority of the individual over the collectivity allows us to look at recent debates in a new light.4 The model of liberal individualism I offered in the previous chapter depicted a normative aspiration, a political ideal, one that assigns special importance to liberty, inviolable rights and the idea of a private sphere. Those who believe that there is a deep theoretical issue about whether the individual or the collectivity is, or should be, ‘prior’ are making claims about a philosophical or methodological framework that they think stands behind this ideal. They suggest that liberal individualists believe the state ought to be primarily responsible for defending an inviolable private sphere because they are theoretically committed to the ‘priority of the individual over the collectivity’. By contrast, on this sort of view, communitarian and collectivist critics of liberal individualism favour their alternative political ideals because they believe that the collectivity, or the community, is somehow theoretically ‘prior’ to the individual. This kind of vocabulary has thus been used to summarize the differences of philosophical approach that allegedly distinguish arguments for liberal individualism from those against it. My aim in this chapter is to show that this vocabulary is simply not up to this task. The issue here is not whether there is a problem about regarding the first-order normative commitments of liberalism (the dignity of the individual, the overriding value of basic rights, the importance of privacy, etc.) as ‘individualistic’. This is simply a matter of using a convenient and suggestive label to characterize certain moral values and ideals. It is difficult to imagine an argument against using the term ‘individualism’ in this straightforward way, and this chapter does not attempt to offer one. The sorts of claims about the metaphysical, ontological or methodo¬ logical priority of the individual that this chapter addresses are not firstorder values and ideals in this straightforward sense. Methodological 4 It must be emphasized that in questioning these categories I am not necessarily impugning the motives of those who have used them. These ways of speaking have often originated from perfectly legitimate moral qualms about certain kinds of political regime. This point deserves particular stress, because my argument is in no way intended as an apology for those regimes that have inflicted horrifying injustices on individuals in the name of a certain view of the common good. When this happens, it may indeed be pertinent to say that the victims have been sacrificed to a misguided notion of the common good. But this is not to advance a claim of social ontology, it is merely to issue an appropriate condemnation of oppression, injustice and cruelty. No large-scale philosophical issue about the priority of the individual over that of the collectivity need be at stake here.

Individualism as a theory

47

individualism, lor example, is not a direct ethical principle about how individuals ought to be treated, or about how states ought to behave. Rather, it purports to be a second-order theoretical precept about the appropriate theoretical Iramework that political philosophers should assume as part of their intellectual approach. It is this notion of an individualist theoretical framework or method to which the arguments of this chapter are directed. If it is true that the unity and identity of liberal individualism consists in some theoretical framework that gives ‘ontolo¬ gical’, ‘methodological’ or ‘axiological’ priority to ‘the individual’, we ought to be able to isolate that doctrine, or doctrines. But I argue that it is extremely difficult to do this, and that given these difficulties we should drop the idea that liberal individualism is what it is in virtue of some well-defined atomist or individualist philosophical methodology. To make this argument, we will not only need to focus on salient features of the liberal individualist ideal I set out in chapter 1. We will also need to keep in mind the sort of ‘collectivist’, ‘holist’ or commu¬ nitarian ideals that are presumed to compete with it. This is necessary because, as I suggested earlier, part of the point of speaking of a theoretical priority of the individual over the collectivity was to evoke the idea of an underlying dimension of theoretical possibilities along which individualist and collectivist ideals are ranged. As one moves away from political individualism and towards collectivism, the theoretical balance of power (as it were) somehow shifts from ‘the individual’ to ‘society as a whole’. The cold war liberals, and those who fell under their influence, used this theoretical grid to characterize and criticize totalitarianism. The more zealous of them used it to depict economic planning and the welfare state as steps on the road to totalitarianism. Contemporary communitarians appeal to essentially the same framework to attack liberal individualism or atomism, though of course they do so in the name of an avowedly non-totalitarian conception of the good of society as a whole.5 The claim that ‘the individual is prior to society’, then, aims to do more than simply capture a basic metaphysical commitment of liberal ideology. It also purports to describe the structure of relations between liberal and non-liberal views. An adequate account of the claim that the ‘individual is prior to society’ would have to explain how it performs these dual roles. Only if we keep both in mind will we be in a position to assess fully the relevance of the claims like those advanced by Rothbard and Brittan. The strategy I pursue is necessarily somewhat inelegant. Ideally, we 5 D. Bell, Communitarianism and'Its Critics, pp. 30, 143-4.

48

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

would want to isolate a core premiss to which all versions of the claim about the priority of the individual over society are committed. We could then proceed to burst this particular philosophical balloon with a single well-directed shot. But this is only possible when the target is well defined. The history of claims about the alleged priority of the individual in the liberal tradition and its supposed rejection in rival traditions offers up no such target. Instead, we confront a messy array of semi-articulated, often almost anecdotal, assertions, insinuations and slogans. In one sense, the proliferating imprecision of these claims can only lend plausi¬ bility to my argument, but it also makes my target harder to attack. Perhaps this partly explains its persistence. The only viable approach is to take the most obvious and important versions of the claim one by one and to assess their relevance and possible relation to the liberal individu¬ alist ideal and its competitors. Below I list six claims in which the ‘priority of the individual’ has been alleged to consist. I then show how, in a variety of ways and for different reasons, each fails to do the appropriate work in identifying the individualist political ideal and its relation to rival political ideals. Although this is a somewhat piecemeal approach, I believe that the cumulative effect of these arguments amply demonstrates how hard it is to pin down a clear issue about the priority of the individual. And that is enough, I maintain, to convince us simply to discard this whole way of speaking as either too obscure or too irrelevant (or both) to the issues that concern political theorists today. One might think that the priority of the individual consists in: (1) the fact that individualists only deploy justifications that refer to the quality of human life (2) the fact that individualists recognize no collective aspirations or goals that take priority over individual interests or values (3) the fact that individualists deny that the state is a self-conscious agent of ‘society as a whole’ (4) the dependence of political individualism on ‘methodological indivi¬ dualism’ (5) the fact that individualists deny that collectivities have any ontolo¬ gical standing beyond the existence and actions of its individual members (6) the fact that individualists only recognize those social goods that are ‘decomposable’ or ‘reducible’ to individual goods. To bring some order to the conceptual chaos, the above list is presented roughly in order of plausibility. Many readers will not need to be convinced that (1)—(3) make little sense: they may want to skip ahead to (4), where I start to consider the more serious proposals. Some readers will recognize immediately that (6) is the only proposal with any genuine

Individualism as a theory

49

merit in this context, and they can omit the discussion of the other five proposals and start there. I have included the other (less plausible) proposals for two reasons. First, given the piecemeal character of my overall strategy, comprehensiveness is important. Second, there are some important lessons to be drawn from their rejection, both for the overall argument of this chapter, and for arguments pursued later in the book. (1) The priority of the individual consists in the fact that individualists only deploy justifications that refer to the quality of human life The difficulty with this first proposal is that it is simply a statement of humanism. Humanism is the doctrine that only aspects of human (earthly) life and existence are relevant in the assessment of social and political institutions. Humanism is a very broadly defined commitment, because the phrase ‘aspects of human (earthly) life and existence’ is open to a wide variety of interpretations. Still, it is clear what sorts of view humanism rules out. A political theory that evaluates social and political institutions by reference to a notion of a ‘divine plan’, or in terms of higher, non-human, metaphysical aspirations is incompatible with humanism. Historically (though perhaps not necessarily), the individualist ideal set out in the last chapter is clearly humanistic. But it is impossible to regard humanism as a distinctive theoretical commit¬ ment of individualist political ideals. While there have been nonindividualist ideals which have not been humanistic, most of the politically significant ones which liberal individualists have resisted in the current century (Marxism, communitarianism, socialism) have been resolutely so. The humanist rider that all that matters are ‘aspects of human (earthly) life and existence’, is broad enough to allow one to repudiate individualist ideals completely. For example, one might agree with Marx that human life under individualist principles falls far short of what it could be. Humanism, then, is not unique to liberal individu¬ alism. The most important and influential arguments for and against liberal individualism have occurred within the frame of humanism. Since the idea of ‘the priority of the individual’ purports to be a distinctive and defining characteristic of individualist ideals, it is obvious that humanism fails to capture this supposedly definitive theoretical commitment.6 6 Thus Raz distinguishes between individualism and humanism: see The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 194, 198.

50

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

(2) The priority of the individual consists in the fact that individualists recognize no collective aspirations or goals that take priority over individual interests or values On a strict construal, this proposal would require that there never be any conflicts between individual interests or values and the goals pursued by the state. But clearly there is no way for an individualist state, or any kind of state, to satisfy this requirement. In asserting that the Right is prior to the Good, for example, the individualist is implicitly acknowledging that personal ‘conceptions of the Good’ and the public ‘principles of Right’ can conflict, and that where they do, the latter should take precedence. The only way an individualist could deny that this asserts the priority of a collective aspiration over individual interests and values is by denying that the political goals implicit in the Right (protection of rights, equal consideration of individual claims, impartial and uniform administration of justice, etc.) are pursued by the state as ‘collective’ goals or aspirations. This move is hopeless, however, for I take it that the individualist justifies the ‘priority of the Right’ on precisely the grounds that principles of the Right are in the best interests of the public as a whole, considered from an appropriately impartial vantage-point. In this sense, principles of the Right may be said to serve the public as a whole rather than the interests of some partisan subset of society. Only disingenuous individualists can disavow an appeal to this minimal idea of a ‘public’ or ‘community’ interest. In declaring the Right to be prior to the Good, the individualist is asserting that some appropriately impartial account of the interest of the public as a whole takes precedence over some relatively partial individual values and interests (principles of the Good).7 But there is a more sophisticated interpretation of this proposal. On this view, the issue is not whether the individualist denies the possibility of conflicts between individual interests and legitimate political goals. The issue is rather the kind of information that is allowed to count in defining the ‘public interest’ or ‘the interest of the community as a whole’. Individualists in this sense agree with Bentham that ‘individual interests are the only real interests’. According to this view, ‘the public interest’ must always be fully reducible to some individual interests or values; the individualist refuses to define the public interest by reference to any forms of social value that are irreducible to individual interests or values. This is compatible with the presence of conflicts between the public interest and particular individual interests. However, it rules out 7 Thus Rawls writes, ‘There is ... one collective aim supported by state power for the whole well-ordered society, a just society wherein the common conception of justice is publicly recognized’: ‘Fairness to Goodness’, Philosophical Review 84 (1975), p. 550.

Individualism as a theory

51

the possibility that the public interest could be even partially independent of individual interests or values; the ‘public interest’ is then nothing over and above the sum of individual interests. On this view, the state refuses to pursue any goals or values that are independently or irreducibly collective: it pursues only those goals whose value is fully reducible to individual interests and values.8 This interpretation of the second pro¬ posal is extremely important, but we can postpone discussion of it until we deal with proposal (6), since it effectively restates that proposal. (3) The priority of the individual consists in the fact that individualists deny that the state is a self-conscious agent of ‘society as a whole’ It is already roughly clear from the discussion in the previous section why this proposal is inadequate. There is no obvious way for the individualist to avoid the idea that the state acts on behalf of society as a whole. It is true that liberals have sometimes suggested that the wellordered liberal society would somehow arise automatically in the absence of distortions caused by illegitimate (unnatural?) interventions in the activities of private agents. This suggestion seems implicit in ‘invisible hand’ accounts of political organization,9 or in Hayek’s idea that a humane society will exhibit ‘spontaneous order’. But these assertions cannot be taken too literally. It is one thing to say, for example, that individualist institutions might arise automatically via an ‘invisible hand’ process; but this does not mean that conscious agency is not involved in maintaining and administering the rules and institutions which so emerge. As for the idea of ‘spontaneous order’, Hayek expressly denied that his objection to collectivist planning was an objection to conscious social organization tout court; The dispute between the modern planners and their opponents is, therefore, not a dispute on whether we ought to choose intelligently between the various possible organizations of society; it is not a dispute on whether we ought to employ foresight and systematic thinking in planning our common affairs. It is a dispute about what is the best way of so doing.10

But this obviously presupposes the idea of a public agency capable of systematic thought about our ‘common affairs’.11 8 See W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 47. 9 See R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 18-22 and ff.; L. Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, pp. 62-76. 10 F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 26. Similarly, Popper characterized his own view as ‘rational institutional planning for freedom’, The Open Society, vol. I, p. 258. 11 The difficulty facing the individualist position here is nicely illustrated by Robert

52

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

Some individualists have suggested that there is something metaphysi¬ cally odd about ascribing self-conscious agency to a political institution like a state. Thus Carlos Nino reasons that ‘it is as impossible to imagine what it is like to be a state as to imagine the same with regard to a stone. For that reason, collective entities are not irreducible subjects of moral discourse.’12 This seems to me quite misguided. Liberal individualists cannot (and have not) assume(d) that the state is an inanimate being in the way that a stone is. The problem is not just that individualists, along with everyone else, take the state to be the kind of thing which acts, issues judgements and declares intentions. It is, more fundamentally, that liberals take the state to be the kind of thing which can be justified in acting in some ways rather than others. It is no good protesting here along methodological individualist lines - that it is not strictly the state which is so acting, but its individual officers who are ultimately justified or unjustified in acting in particular ways. This is of course true in a trivial sense: but what matters in specifying some conception of agency (as Nino himself points out) is the point of view which the relevant kind of agent is supposed to adopt. But there is surely nothing metaphysically suspect in saying that an individual assumes a distinctive point of view when he acts as an agent of the state rather than as a private citizen. It seems obvious that, on the liberal view, judges, or jurors (for example) assume a distinctive normative point of view when they make their decisions in the appropriate way. Viewed in this light, the traditional liberal-individualist concern to circumscribe the legitimate activities of the state becomes little more than the specification of the points of view that agents of the state are permitted to adopt in evaluating issues of public concern. For instance, many liberals object to the idea that agents of the state should act to promote particular religious ideals. For such liberals, the normative point of view of a zealous evangelical is not an appropriate perspective for agents of the state to adopt. Arguments of this kind do not assume Skidelsky in an important recent book. Skidelsky writes, in an unguarded moment, that ‘the recognition that there is a border between the state and the market, and that if the state crosses this border ... society as a whole suffers a loss of welfare, is the start of anti¬ collectivist wisdom : The Road from Serfdom, p. 117. This claim implies that a good state will be a self-restraining state: it will not try to do too much to direct economic life, because if it does ‘society as a whole’ will be worse off. But this principle of self-restraint is nonetheless addressed to an institution (the state) that Skidelsky assumes (in this passage at least) to be responsible for the ‘welfare’ of ‘society as a whole’. On this assumption, collectivists and individualists do not differ on the formal question of whether or not the state can in principle be regarded as a rational agency that acts on behalf of society as a whole; rather, they disagree about whether state intervention is rational or irrational in this context. 12 Carlos Nino, The Ethics of Human Rights, p. 157.

Individualism as a theory

53

that there is no distinctive point of view which can be ascribed to the state and its agents; rather, they assume precisely that there is such a point of view, but that it will turn out to be different from most of the points of view adopted by individuals in the conduct of their private lives. In what follows, 1 will use the term (liberal) individualist public agent to denote an agency - the state - that assumes the normative point of view from which individualists believe we should assess what it means to act on behalf of the public as a whole. These points about the idea of liberal individualist public agency have perhaps been obscured by the long-running cold war polemic against ‘organic’ conceptions of the state, or ‘anthropomorphic’ analogies between society and the individual. Isaiah Berlin provides a classic statement of the liberal objection to this sort of view: the real self may be conceived as something wider than the individual (as the term is usually understood), as a social ‘whole’ of which the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a church, a race, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being the true self which, by imposing its collective, or organic, single will upon its recalcitrant ‘members’, achieves its own, and therefore their, ‘higher freedom’. The perils of using organic metaphors to justify the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to a ‘higher’ level of freedom have often been pointed out.13

Many have thought that it is because liberal individualists avoid this sort of claim that they take the individual to be prior to the collectivity. But it is important to note that these familiar claims about the fallacy of treating states or collectivities as organisms or as anthropomorphic entities are quite incidental to the issues we are considering here. The issue of whether or not a collectivity is like a human being, or is an organic entity, stands at an angle to the question of the relations of priority that pertain between individuals and collectivities. I can believe that the state really is an organism and yet deny that it has any moral 13 I. Berlin, Four Essays, p. 132; see also von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, pp. 82-3; I. Berlin, Four Essays, pp. 45-8, 62-3, 132, 158-9; K. Popper, Open Society, vol. I, p. 174: ‘Since there is nothing in the organism to correspond to one of the most important characteristics of the open society, competition for status among its members, the so-called organic theory of the state is based on a false analogy.’ See also R. B. Perry (who is quoted approvingly by Rawls in his discussion of utilitarianism, Theory of Justice, p. 141), General Theory of Value (New York: Longmans Green and Co., 1926), p. 461 and his Puritanism and Democracy (New York: Vanguard Press, 1944). p. 442: ‘The corporate or collective individual, on the other hand, is conceived to be of a higher order, composed of individuals of a lower order, and superseding them as regards being and value. The human individual in the ordinary sense is then degraded to the status of part or member, similar to the status of the cells and organs of the body. Similarly, the interest, will, purpose, or judgement of the whole absorbs those of its members; and the claims of the whole take precedence over the claims of its members’; see also T. D. Weldon, States and Morals, p. 29.

54

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

significance whatsoever. The mere fact that a jellyfish is ‘organic’ does not elevate it to a moral status equivalent or beyond that attributed to human beings. Similarly, I can deny that collectivities or states are in any sense organic or anthropomorphic and yet claim that they have a greater claim on our moral attention than mere human individuals. Perhaps the use of organic and anthropomorphic metaphors has - as a matter of historical causation - seduced some intellectuals and statesmen into ‘subordinating’ individual rights to wider collective designs, but it is not clear that there is any necessary affiliation of ideas here. In any case, an appeal to these hoary claims about organic or anthropomorphic theories of the state is of no help in elucidating the sense in which ‘the individual’ might lie prior to the collectivity in the individualist ideal I set out earlier. Before moving on, however, it is worth drawing attention to an important ambiguity implicit in the claim that organic or anthropo¬ morphic theories of the state or collectivity are fallacious. This objection could mean at least three different things. First, the objection could be directed at the suggestion that the political community is an organism of which individual humans are parts, as limbs and organs are parts of the human organism.14 Second, the objection might be aimed at the broader claim that the political community is a kind of person. The latter possibility is distinct from the former, and rejecting the first argument need not require us to drop the second claim about personality as well. The second argument is broader because the concept of a ‘person’ need not be organic. Many aspects of personality which have been thought to be morally, legally or politically salient are not organic in any obvious sense. For example, possessing the capacity to be free, or bearing rights of one sort or another, or even being capable of willing, do not appear to be organic properties, despite the fact that they might well be taken as the defining features of moral or legal ‘personality’. Third, the objection might target the suggestion (implicit in, but separate from, both the first two claims) that there is a similarity, or analogy between the way in which an individual acts on his or her own behalf, and the way in which a collectivity might be said to act on its own behalf. This suggestion that individual and collective willing are somehow isomorphic will turn out to have great significance for the arguments I pursue later in this book. For 14 It should be mentioned, furthermore, that the classical anthropomorphic analogy between bodies natural and ‘bodies politic’ did not only view individual humans as organic components of the state; rather, a set of institutional functions and offices were so treated. See, for example, T. Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 3; J. Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 19; J.-J. Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987)' p. 114. The connection between this claim about institutional functions and that about the ‘organic’ relation between individuals and states is unclear.

Individualism as a theory

55

I hope to show that at least some of the values contained in the individualist ideal laid out in the last chapter involve assuming just such an isomorphism. (4) The priority of the individual consists in the dependence of political individualism on 'methodological individualism’ Despite the fact that methodological individualism is very frequently cited as a theoretical commitment basic to liberal ideology, we can demonstrate its irrelevance fairly briskly. This is because, strictly speaking, methodological individualism is a specific claim about social explanation which stands in an ambiguous relation, not just to liberalism, but to any political ideal. Popper defines methodological individualism as the demand that ‘all social phenomena, and especially the functioning of all social institutions, should always be understood as resulting from the decisions, actions, attitudes, etc., of human individuals, and ... we should never be satisfied by an explanation in terms of so called “collectives'”. Methodological individualism thus says we ought to demand that our explanations of social phenomena and events be expressed in terms of facts about individuals. It is therefore a doctrine which is relevant in the first instance to those seeking to describe or explain social events and phenomena. But the individualist ideal we are trying to account for is a prescriptive doctrine about how political society ought to be structured, and about how political decisions should be justified. It is unclear how methodological individualism in the strict Popperian sense is supposed to impinge on a claim like ‘the state ought to respect individuals’ inviolable rights to a private sphere of personal activity’. In raising this question, I am not suggesting that methodological individualism is a value-neutral idea. Someone who endorses methodo¬ logical individualism is committed to valuing certain kinds of explana¬ tions over others. Methodological individualism directs us to reject explanations of social phenomena which do not appeal to facts about individuals. So it is a normative claim, of sorts. But it is a normative claim about what makes for a good explanation, not one about what makes a good society. The question at issue, then, is not how to move from a value-neutral methodological claim to an evaluative claim about the good society. Rather it is a question of whether we are compelled to accept particular claims about good and bad societies by endorsing claims about good and bad social explanations. The gap between these two sets of issues is wider than is often supposed. In fact, methodological individualism registers minimally, if at

56

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

all, against the normative concerns that are at stake in the individualist ideal sketched above. That ideal assumes that individual liberty and the idea of an inviolable private sphere are the most important values that the state exists to secure. Consider now a rival political ideal that specifies a communitarian, rather than individualistic, political ideal. Such an ideal (say) accords no special significance to the value of individual liberty and instead directs the state to protect and advance those social conditions under which a particular set of cultural traditions may be expected to flourish. Imagine that these two ideals are instantiated in two actual political societies, one individualist and the other communitarian. Suppose now that both of these states have reasons to be concerned about the effects of widespread drug use among their youth. Both states commission major social scientific research projects designed to chart the socio-economic consequences of the problem, and to investigate and assess possible solutions. Clearly, these two states will approach this issue with different political agendas: perhaps the individualist state, for example, is less enthusiastic about regulating drug use because of its implications for individual freedom. But will the differences between these agendas be discernible in, or reducible to, preferences for or against methodologically individualist social scientific research into the problem? It is difficult to see why. An individualist state would not be betraying its fundamental political mission by hiring a research group which dis¬ avowed methodological individualism. Nor is the communitarian state bound by its political commitments to ignore the findings of research derived via methodologically individualist explanations of the social phenomena in question. Curiously, the cold war liberals sometimes showed a keen awareness of the independence of methodological and political individualism. Here, for example, is von Mises: The meaning of philosophical individualism has been lamentably misinterpreted by the harbingers of collectivism. As they see it, the dilemma is whether the concerns - interests - of the individuals should rank before those of one of the arbitrarily selected - collectives. However, the epistemological controversy between individualism and collectivism has no direct reference to this purely political issue. Individualism as a principle of the philosophical, praxeological, and historical analysis of human action means the establishment of the facts that all actions can be traced back to individuals and that no scientific method can succeed in determining how definite external events, liable to a description by the methods of the natural sciences, produce within the human mind definite ideas, value-judgements, and volitions.15 15 yon Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, p. 82; a careful reading of Popper suggests that he did not believe that there was a necessary connection between methodological and normative forms of individualism and collectivism. For example,

Individualism as a theory

57

To this one can only add that the meaning of philosophical individualism has also been ‘lamentably misinterpreted’ by such harbingers of political individualism as Murray Rothbard in the passage cited above, and (in some moods) von Mises’s own student F. A. Hayek.16 If methodological individualism is so obviously irrelevant to the individualist ideal given above, why is a connection so often suggested?17 Two reasons are worth mentioning. The first is the tendency to discern methodological individualism in the apparatus of social contract theory olten associated with the liberal tradition. Methodological individualism might seem to be involved here because social contract theory character¬ istically accounts for political organizations in terms of the individual acts of consent which purportedly bring them into being. Social contract justifications for political arrangements are thus consistent with metho¬ dologically individualist explanations of their origins. But this does not show that methodological individualism plays any role in justifying liberal individualist ideals to social contractees. It is one thing to say that methodological individualism is a characteristic of social contract theory, but another to say that it plays some determinate role in recommending one set of political institutions to the parties to a social contract. And this simply reinstates the original problem - why should a principle about the explanation of social phenomena tell us what sort of polity is justifiable?18 A second, and more important, reason why many are tempted to assert a connection between political individualism and methodological individualism is a tendency to confuse the latter with two separate doctrines, to which the final two sections of the chapter are devoted, and which I will call ontological individualism and value-individualism. Popper says that Marx was a methodological collectivist {Open Society, vol. II, pp. 323-4), but he also denies that Marx was a political collectivist (ibid., p. 200). 16 See for example Hayek’s comment that ‘without methodological collectivism political collectivism would be deprived of its intellectual basis’: The Counter-Revolution of Science (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1979), pp. 161-2; James Buchanan’s views on the relation between individualist methods and individualist values contradict them¬ selves: in his The Limits of Liberty he writes that ‘the dominant role of individual liberty is imposed by an acceptance of the methodology of individualism’ (p. 2); but he seems to have forgotten his earlier remarks in The Calculus of Consent, p. 315: ‘The individualistic method of analyzing political and social action is contrasted with the organic method, and these methodological differences need not, indeed should not, necessarily carry particular implications concerning the normative rules for organizing society.’ 17 For example, Amy Gutmann, Liberal Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 3; D. Boaz, Libertarianism: a Primer, pp. 96-7. 18 A further point is that it is unclear that the contractarian method is necessarily liberal. After all, Hobbes deployed contractarian methods to derive highly illiberal recommenda¬ tions, and Rawls suggests at one point that the apparatus of the Original Position is in principle available for use by any theory of justice, no matter what its moral content. See J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 121-2.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

Ontological individualism is not a claim about social explanation. It is a claim about the existence of collective entities. It asserts that collectivities do not exist ‘over and above’ their constituent individuals. In the introduction I claimed that defenders of liberal individualism sometimes support their position by suggesting that methodological individualism implies that there exist no collective entities with goals distinct from those of individuals. This implication is explicitly drawn by Andrew Gamble. He claims that apart from its role as a precept of sound social explanation, methodological individualism also entails that A social collective has no existence and no reality beyond the actions of its individual members; therefore it is incorrect to argue as though collectives could have their own will and purposes. Collectives such as the government, the company, the union, the nation are all abstractions and have no reality beyond the individuals that compose them.19

But this confuses methodological individualism with ontological indivi¬ dualism.20 The truth, or plausibility, of ontological individualism might well be a possible argument in favour of methodological individualism, but they remain distinct doctrines and the reverse inference (from methodological to ontological individualism) is almost certainly a nonsequitur. This of course raises the possibility that there might be a direct connection between individualist political ideals and ontological individualism. This possibility is considered, and rejected, in the next section. The other view with which methodological individualism is often confused is value-individualism. As we shall see when we discuss it in the final section (6) of the chapter, value-individualism is the claim that, for the purposes of political justification, value resides ultimately only in states of individuals, and never in states of the collectivity as such. This is the strongest and most plausible of the six proposals considered in this chapter. But as Robert Dahl correctly notes, the claim that there are no collective goods that cannot be decomposed into individual goods does not presuppose methodological individualism.21 It is a discrete and independent doctrine.

19 A. Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty, p. 53; see also the introduction to A. Hamlin and P. Pettit eds.. The Good Polity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 5. Popper comes very close to making this confusion when he writes, ‘as opposed to [Hegelian collectivism], the position presented here does not assume the existence of collectives; if I say, for example, that we owe our reason to “society”, then I always mean that we owe it to certain concrete individuals': Open Society, vol. II, p. 226. 21 R. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 72-3.

Individualism as a theory

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(5) The priority of the individual consists in the fact that individualists deny that collectivities have any ontological standing beyond the existence and actions of its individual members Margaret Gilbert defines ontological individualism as the doctrine that social groups and collectivities are ‘nothing over and above the indi¬ viduals who are their members’. In the following passage, Gilbert puts her finger on the main reason why some have thought that this issue about the ontological priority of the individual is implicated in individu¬ alist political ideals: if things are to proceed in their proper order, a clear understanding of what there is must precede evaluations. It may indeed be hard to see how, if [ontological] individualism is correct, one can value a society as opposed to the particular individuals in it. In particular it may be hard to see how societies and individuals could have conflicting claims on our care and concern.22

This claim should be associated particularly with von Mises, who some¬ times tried to derail all collectivist ideals with this purportedly metaphy¬ sical argument. He suggested that if collectivities have no independent ontological standing, then the idea that they could in principle assert claims that compete with those of their constituent individuals is logically absurd.23 This inference implies something like the following account of the relation between liberal individualism and the ‘ontological priority’ of the individual. Because they accept ontological individualism, liberals systematically refuse to acknowledge the existence of discrete collectiv¬ ities with interests and claims in their own right. Individual rights and claims are then automatically ‘prior’ in liberal theories because such theories simply do not recognize any collective claims in competition with individual ones. Ontological collectivists do recognize such com¬ peting claims, and so must forever be balancing individual and social claims against each other, often in ways which cause individual rights to be violated. Liberal individualists by contrast sidestep this whole issue by regarding all claims made on behalf of collectivities as such a kind of metaphysical delusion. Ontological individualism thus marks out a fundamental philosophical difference between individualist and collecti-

22 M. Gilbert, On Social Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 429; V. Descombes, ‘Is There an Objective Spirit?’, in J. Tully, ed., Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 103; A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, p. 45: ‘Society is composed of individuals, and has no existence, and therefore no claims, beyond or above those individuals.’ 23 von Mises, Human Action, pp. 145, 151; von Mises, Socialism, pp. 51—7.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

vist political ideals, one which helps to explain the absolute supremacy of individual rights and claims characteristic of liberal theories.24 Does this proposal demonstrate that ontological individualism is an essential theoretical component of the individualist political ideal sketched in the last chapter? Certainly, it seems consistent with the sorts of rights that are asserted in that ideal, and its defenders are likely to be attracted to the von Mises argument. But that does not show that it captures an essential component of the theoretical superstructure behind the individualist ideal. In fact, those who defend the individualist ideal presented earlier need not deny the independent existence of collectivities or the reality of collective goals and claims. Dropping the von Mises argument might change the way political individualists present their views, but it would not change the substance of their position, or deprive them of an essential justificatory resource. An individualist can admit the independent existence of collectivities and then simply deny that their claims ever trump the rights of individuals.25 There is then no sense in which von Mises’s ontological argument is essential to the justification of political individualism. Moreover, important strands of liberal individualist thinking are impossible to square with the strict sense of von Mises’s proposal. For example, a number of liberal individualists, notably Spencer and Hayek, have conceded that, under emergency circumstances, the interests and rights of individuals may be sacrificed to more pressing collective goals. In defending this view, liberals have often used exactly the sort of language which ontological individualism is supposed to disallow. Spencer says that ‘so long as the existence of the community is endan¬ gered by the actions of communities around’, the ‘subordination of 24 I here ignore the alleged ‘ “ontological debate” between those ... who would give primacy to the choosing agent, and “communitarians”, who point to the social embedding of selves’: D. Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, p. 184. There are two reasons why this supposed debate is irrelevant in the present context. First, this debate is to my mind normative, not ontological: that is, the debate is about whether we should celebrate social independence or social connectedness. It is not, at least in any obvious sense, a debate about ‘what there is’. Second, if there is an ontological issue here, it would seem to concern the choice between two alternative ontologies of the individual self (the individual-as-socially-independent versus the-individual-as-socially-embedded). The issue here is presumably the extent to which the identity of the individual is culturally constituted or is somehow independent of social culture. But the issue that is relevant in the present context concerns whether individuals are ‘ontologically prior’ to the collectivities to which they belong. This has little or nothing to do with culture or individual identity. It is a question about whether collectivities have any ‘reality’ over and above the individuals that constitute them. One can be an ontological individualist in this sense and accept either of the two ‘ontologies of the self’just outlined. 25 For example, R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, pp. xi, 90-2, 364-5 and A Matter of Principle, pp. 359-60.

Individualism as a theory

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personal to social welfare' is required; such a point of view, ‘forbids us to put in the foreground the welfares of citizens individually considered, and requires us to put in the foreground the welfare of society as a whole. The life of the social organism must, as an end, rank above the lives of its units.’26 Hayek makes a similar claim: individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole society must be ... subordinated. The only exception to the rule that a free society must not be subjected to a single purpose is war and other temporary disasters when the subordination of almost everything to the immediate and pressing need is the price at which we preserve our freedom in the long run.27

These provisos cannot be reconciled with von Mises's ontological argument. For that argument suggests that any attempt to set up an antagonism between social and individual goals commits an ontological error; but this must apply equally to the claims of Hayek and Spencer. Given this, it is hard to see why one should regard ontological individu¬ alism as an essential part of the theoretical backup for liberal individu¬ alist politics. Some may not be satisfied by this rebuttal. They may think that these are rather slender debating points by which to repudiate an argument with so venerable a history. There is, however, a deeper problem with the von Mises argument. As we have seen, the alleged relevance of ontolo¬ gical individualism hinges on a crucial inference. This is the move from the claim that ‘a social collective has no existence and no reality beyond the actions of its individual members’ to the claims that it is ‘incorrect to argue as though collectives could have their own will and purposes’ or that they are the locus of discrete claims in their own right. But I hope to show that this inference turns out to be a non sequitur. an ontological individualist can regard collectivities as loci of discrete claims in their own right. If this is so, the relevance of ontological individualism is cast into doubt, for it is no longer clear that insistence on the ontological priority of the individual does any of the work that von Mises and others have assigned to it. The premiss of this inference is a claim about the relative ontological 26 H. Spencer, The Data of Ethics (New York: J. Fitzgerald, 1880), pp. 517-18. 27 F. A. Flayek, The Road to Serfdom, pp. 152-3; R. Skidelsky, The Road from Serfdom, p. 47. It is instructive to compare these (and Spencer’s) views with those of G. W. F. Hegel, whom both Skidelsky and Hayek regard as an arch collectivist. Hegel says that in times of peace the ‘particular spheres and functions’ that comprise political society ‘pursue the path of satisfying their particular aims and minding their own business’. It is only in a ‘situation of exigency’ that ‘the organism of which these particular spheres are members fuses into the single concept of sovereignty’. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 180-1.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

standing of collectivities. It asserts that collectivities are entirely ontologically dependent on the existence of individuals. On this view, all correct statements about collectivities are in principle reducible without re¬ mainder to statements about the individuals that comprise them. But why should that make it unintelligible to speak of collectivities having purposes, claims and goals ‘in their own right’? Here, it is vitally important to differentiate these claims about the ontological status of collectivities from arguments about their distinctive properties. Often, theorists have illegitimately used certain claims of the second kind to make von Mises’s inference seem more plausible than it is. They have usually done so by advancing the compelling but in fact wholly irrelevant claim that collectivities do not think, feel, plan, reason, experience suffering or prosperity. This sort of claim, exemplified by Samuel Brittan’s comments cited at the start of this chapter (and many others in the liberal tradition), is a claim about the characteristic proper¬ ties of collectivities, not one about the relative ontological standing of collectivities.28 And it is irrelevant to the latter issue because it is not necessary for something to be able to think, feel, plan, etc. in order for it to exist ‘in its own right’. Moreover, the fact that something cannot think, feel or plan does not make it irrational or absurd to claim to be acting for its sake, or to suppose that any claims it makes on us could compete with those of individuals. The starving artist who risks his livelihood ‘for the sake of his art’ will (rightly) be unmoved by the argument that he is irrational to sacrifice his own happiness because ‘his art’ does not feel, think, etc. (note that the same could be said about ‘the sum of individual interests’: arithmetical products do not think, feel or suffer any more than does ‘art’). The important issue here then is not whether collectivities are the kinds of things that can suffer. The important issue is whether saying that collectivities are nothing over and above the individuals who comprise them renders the idea of a conflict between individual and collective claims meaningless. Only if this is so does von Mises’s inference make sense. But ontological individualism need not have this effect. To see this, it is critical to note first that ontological individualism is not a claim that denies existence to collectivities, but rather a claim which specifies the conditions under which they do exist. Otherwise one will think, with Margaret Thatcher, that ontological individualism implies that ‘there is no such thing as society’. But this is as ridiculous as inferring the obviously false conclusion that ‘there is no such thing as 28 For example, R. B. Perry, General Theory of Value, p. 461; D. Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory, pp. 20-1; J. Reiman, Critical Moral Realism, p. 49; D. Boaz, Libertarianism: a Primer, p. 95.

Individualism as a theory

63

traffic from the obviously true premiss that ‘there is no traffic without individual vehicles’. So even if ontological individualism is true, collectivities exist. The question is whether the truth of ontological individualism prevents them trom being the locus of discrete claims which potentially compete with individual claims. But why should it? Would an ontological individualist employee be unable to see any difference or conflict between his personal claims and goals and the claims which the corporation makes upon him? This view is difficult defend, for an important reason. What this case illustrates is that many collectivities, including corporations and states, would not be what they are unless their constituent individuals recognize and operate according to a distinction between their own interests and claims and those of the relevant collectivity. This need not contradict ontological individualism, because at no point need we claim that the corporation (say) is anything other than a concatenation of individual action and behaviour. It is just that the relevant individual action and behaviour includes attributing claims and goals to the corporation as such, and then operating under assumptions that flow from that attribu¬ tion.29 Hobbes’s political theory makes use of just this intuition. Hobbes combines two claims that the von Mises proposal suggests are irreconcil¬ able. On the one hand, Hobbes endorsed ontological individualism. For him, individuals are the ‘matter’ of which the Commonwealth, or Leviathan, is composed. The Commonwealth, then, has no existence or ‘reality’ apart from the behaviour and actions of its constituent indi¬ viduals.30 But, on the other hand, Hobbes notoriously maintained that a Leviathan is a collective person in its own right, endowed with its own ‘will’ and asserting discrete claims that potentially conflict with the interests and claims of individuals.31 The key to understanding how these two claims can both be true lies in Hobbes’s denial that commonwealths occur naturally. Unlike individuals, whose existence is a natural given, commonwealths are always artificial contrivances. But since common¬ wealths are nothing over and above the individuals that compose them, it is only through the concerted action of those individuals that a common¬ wealth can be contrived. Individuals are not merely the passive ‘matter’ of which the Leviathan is made, they are also its active ‘artificers’. The genesis and reproduction of the Leviathan are thus an exercise in collective self-organization. But there is no reason to suppose that, in its capacity as ‘artificer’, the ‘matter’ of Leviathan is prevented by the truth 29 For a more detailed argument along similar lines, see M. Gilbert, On Social Facts, pp. 428-31. 30 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 4. 31 Ibid., p. 109.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

of ontological individualism from configuring itself into a collectivity asserting claims in its own right.32 For in setting up a Leviathan, individuals set in motion a shared convention, backed up by force, under which the claims of the Leviathan are taken as authoritative over (and hence potentially conflicting with) their own interests and claims. This is entirely consistent with ontological individualism, because the existence of a Leviathan consists precisely in individuals’ invention of, and subsequent adherence to, this convention. A Leviathan is then ‘nothing over and above’ individuals who recognize and operate accord¬ ing to a distinction between their own values, projects and goals, and the goals, purposes and ‘will’ of a corporate entity to which they belong. Once we realize this, we see that ontological individualism does not rule out forms of collective interaction under which such a distinction makes sense. And if that is true, von Mises’s inference does not hold, and ontological individualism proves itself to be irrelevant to individualist political ideals. One might object here that the point of constructing a Leviathan remains individual. Hobbes does not take the Leviathan to be an end in itself, but rather as an institutional means to individually valued ends (peace, security). But whatever plausibility this objection has, it is not as a claim about the relative ontological status of individuals and collectiv¬ ities. Rather, it raises a new and independent issue about the reducibility or ‘decomposability’ of social or collective values to individual values. Such claims about irreducibly social values are sometimes touted as propositions of ‘social ontology’.33 But the relation between these claims about value and the claims about existence that we have been considering is not at all clear. There are (no doubt) important questions about both the ontological standing of collectivities and the reducibility of social to individual value. But (as we have seen) the former are not obviously implicated in theoretical justifications for political individu¬ alism, and the latter are best regarded as independent of ontological questions. It seems to me that we should simply discard the suggestion that liberal individualism is what it is in virtue of an ontological commitment.34 The outstanding issue, to which this last objection 32 ibid., p. 104. 33 For example, C. Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes: the Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, in his Philosophical Arguments, p. 188. 34 In the chapter cited in the previous note, Charles Taylor defends a view that looks superficially similar to mine, but which is in fact importantly different. Taylor distinguishes between questions of ‘advocacy’ and ‘ontology’ and identifies the political debate between individualists and collectivists with the former and that between atomists and holists with the latter. With some reservations (why can one not ‘advocate’ an “ontology’?), this is essentially the same distinction as mine between individualism as a

Individualism as a theory

65

alludes, concerns whether individualist ideals are committed alike to a distinctively individualist account of value. It is this final proposal which we consider next. (6) The priority of the individual consists in the fact that individualists only recognize those social goods that are ‘decomposable’ or ‘reducible’ to individual goods This claim about the reducibility of social value to individual values is by far the most plausible and familiar basis for explicating the sense in which the ‘individual* might be theoretically ‘prior’ to ‘the collectivity’ in individualist political philosophies. Still, this proposal needs to be care¬ fully understood. In particular, this proposal does not necessarily assert that collective goods, institutional arrangements or states of society as such, are valueless. Nor (unlike (2)) does it deny that there are valuable and overriding collective goals which states ought to pursue. Rather, this proposal holds that liberal individualists are committed to a distinctive theory about how and why collective goods are valuable. This theory, which (following Joseph Raz35) I will call value-individualism, asserts something like the following: there are no irreducible social goods, interests or values. Collective arrangements, structures, states-of-affairs only count as ‘goods’ to the extent that they have a positive effect on individuals or their lives. There are no values or interests assignable to society as such; there are only the interests and values of individuals who stand to gain or lose under different collective arrangements. Without an appraisal of these individual gains and losses, there is no politically relevant sense in which collective arrangements, or states of society as political ideal and individualism as a theoretical commitment. But Taylor equivocates about the relation between these two forms of individualism, or (in his vocabulary) between individualism and atomism. Taylor denies that taking a position on the ontological questions ‘forces your hand’ on the political issues (p. 182). But instead of concluding, with me, that this simply indicates that the truly ontological issues are of negligible political significance, Taylor insists that our political choices are somehow ‘defined’ by our ontological commitments. So he later suggests that atomist ‘ontologies’ will not permit a strong commitment to republicanism, or to a notion of a ‘common good’ (p. 188) and he appears to accept Michael Sandel’s argument (in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice that this might undermine redistributive arguments of a Rawlsian kind (p. 184). But if it is true that these kinds of political commitments are ruled out by atomist ‘ontology’, in what sense is our choice for or against (say) republicanism merely ‘defined’ rather than ‘forced’ by atomism? I cannot see how Taylor can have it both ways. In my view, Taylor’s mistake is to take too seriously the idea (derived from the cold war discussion that he is explicitly seeking to supersede) that political choices register at an ontological or metaphysical level. Unlike him, I would regard the ‘eclipse of ontological thinking in social theory’ to be celebrated rather than regretted (p. 185). 35 Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 141.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

such, may be said to be good or bad. They have no independent value taken by themselves.36 Those who reject value-individualism, by contrast,'are willing to take seriously the possibility that certain collective entities, arrangements and states-of-affairs are valuable by themselves, independently of their impact or effects on individuals. Charles Taylor is a contemporary philosopher who has argued vigorously for this alternative view, insisting that ‘there are, indeed, irreducibly social goods’ and that we must ‘scrap’ the view that ‘all social goods are decomposable’ into individual goods.37 Accordingly, Taylor attacks the value-individualist (in his terms ‘atomist’) view of politics, according to which common institutional structures have to be understood as in the nature of collective instruments. Political societies in the understanding of Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, or the twentieth century common sense they have helped to shape are established by collections of individuals to obtain benefits through common action they could not secure individually. The action is collective, but the point of it remains individual. The common good is constituted out of individual goods, without remainder.38

As Taylor’s comments illustrate, the suggestion that valueindividualism is a core theoretical commitment basic to liberal individu¬ alist ideals has considerable contemporary resonance. It is easy to persuade oneself, for example, that this is indeed the fundamental issue around which the liberal-communitarian debate pivots. On such an interpretation, liberals take ‘the individual' to be ‘prior’ in an axiological sense - states of society as such have no value sui generis. They are valuable only as means to individual ends. The state, and its operative principles of adjudication, exists for the sake of the individual values it serves. In that sense, individual values are prior to the collectivity in the order of justification. Communitarians maintain by contrast that this kind of value-individualism is blind to forms of social value which any adequate political theory must take seriously. Of course, communitarians today reject the totalitarian idea that individuals are simply means towards 36 It is vital not to confuse value-individualism with the individualistic values of liberalism that I outlined in chapter 1. Value-individualism is a theoretical claim about the sorts of value that political theories ought to recognize: a theory that displays value-individualism thus deems purportedly irreducible social values ineligible. In denying that individualist political ideals can be read off a value-individualist axiology, I am not denying that it makes sense to characterize claims about the ‘dignity of the individual’ or about basic rights as ‘individualistic’. Such claims about individual rights and individuals’ dignity are not theoretical claims about the eligibility of certain sorts of value; they are direct expressions of certain first-order moral commitments. Value-individualism refers to a possible second-order theoretical commitment, not to the first-order moral commitments that characterize the individualist political ideal. 37 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, pp. 145, 143 . 38 ibid., p. 188.

Individualism as a theory

67

social ends, mere puppets in the service of some wider collective project. Nevertheless, they characteristically insist, with Taylor, that the value of certain social goods, such as the cultural understandings that render human action meaningful, cannot be fully accounted for simply as means to individual ends.39 Rather, they are independently valuable goods whose ‘locus is a society’.40 The suspicion that even this more moderate stance must lead to totalitarianism has not been lost on individualist counter¬ critics. It is here, more than anywhere else, that the liberal-communitarian debate bears the imprint of its unacknowledged cold war ancestry. In any case, it is clear that many have assumed (with Taylor) that there is indeed such an axiological view as value-individualism and that it is a distinctive theoretical commitment of individualist political philosophy. Do these assumptions make sense? If so, two things would have to be true. (1) We would have to be able to provide a clear account of valueindividualism, one that made clear exactly what it means to say that individuals rather than ‘collectivities as such’ are the appropriate loci of value. (2) We would have to be able to show that value-individualism, so defined, is indeed a core axiological assumption of liberal individualist political theory. I will argue, however, that the only definitions of valueindividualism that successfully satisfy this first condition must fail to meet the second. On my view, then, if there is such a thing as a clear value-individualist axiology, it could not possibly be endorsed by proponents of the liberal individualist ideal. If this is the case, valueindividualism simply recedes into irrelevance, at least in the context of debate about liberal individualism. In order to make this argument, then, we must first try to clarify the relevant sense in which ‘value’ or goods may be said to be ‘individual’ or ‘social’. This is necessary because value-individualism only makes sense as a view that opposes theories that locate ‘irreducible’ value at the social level. But such claims about the social locus of value are not immediately transparent. What does it mean to say that a value or good is ‘social’ rather than ‘individual’ in the relevant sense? One thing that it does not mean in the context of value-individualism is that the relevant good is available only within a society, or that the good will not be supplied unless individuals cooperate in certain ways. This is the sense in which Philip Pettit distinguishes between social and 39 ibid., p. 137. 40 ibid., 136. Taylor makes the argument by claiming that individual acts are what they are only against the ‘background of practices and understandings’ (ibid., p. 135) that gives them meaning. This claim then provides the bridge to the characteristic communitarian claim that self-understanding cannot be thought of in atomistic, voluntarist, terms, as if the self were somehow separable from the cultural background which (claims Taylor) is constitutive of human communication and understanding generally.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

non-social values. Thus, according to Pettit, friendship is a ‘social value’ because it can, by definition, only be enjoyed in relations with others. By contrast, a good such as ‘tranquillity of mind’ is for''Pettit a ‘non-social value’ because one can enjoy it in complete isolation.41 This distinction is largely irrelevant here, for value-individualism is not a claim about the circumstances under which goods may become available. It is a deeper claim about why we classify them as ‘goods’ in the first instance. Thus the value-individualist will happily agree with Pettit that goods like friendship are available only in society; she will insist, however, that friendship (say) only counts as a good at all because of its impact and effects on individuals who benefit from it. Value-individualists, then, do not claim that such goods are worthless, nor do they deny that they are social in the sense that it is impossible to enjoy them outside of social relations. Rather, they oppose the more radical view that such goods might be valuable in themselves, or at any rate independently of some relation to individual interests or values. In this more radical view, justifications for socio-political arrangements can (so to speak) stop at the collective level: there is no need to take the justification down to the individual level by trying to reduce the value of the relevant collective arrangements to that of the individual interests and values they might be thought to serve. A good way to formulate these issues about the social location of value is in terms of a distinction between the value of states of individuals and that of states of collectivities as such. Joseph Raz provides a particularly helpful definition of value-individualism along these lines. Raz defines it as ‘the doctrine that only states of individual human beings, or aspects of their lives, can be intrinsically valuable’.42 The value-individualist thus takes ultimate value to inhere only in states of individuals. Collective states of affairs (forms of collective inter¬ action, institutional arrangements etc.) only have value to the extent that they bring about valuable individual states-of-affairs. The value of collective states is thus always reducible to the prior value of the individual states they bring about. By contrast, a value-collectivist is prepared to admit that certain states of a collectivity are valuable sui generis. This might mean either that ultimate values inhere in a collective state-of-affairs as such, or that the value of a given collective state reduces to that of some other non-individual good. An example of the latter would be a theory which claimed that society ought to be ordered in a certain way so as to be aesthetically appealing, to flatter 41 P. Pettit, The Common Mind, pp. 304-5. 42 J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, p. 18.

Individualism as a theory

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the gods or in order to promote national destiny. Either way, the valuecollectivist recognizes forms of ultimate value that do not inhere in discrete individual states, and is prepared to invoke them in justifica¬ tions for the social and political institutions they propose. Raz's definition of value-individualism is undoubtedly a helpful starting-point. However, it does not by itself provide a sufficient account of value-individualism, for it equivocates on a critical issue. To see this, consider the apparently value-individualist claim that what matters in the evaluation of a collective state-of-affairs or institution is its ‘impact’ on individuals and their lives. If value-individualism is to provide a viable interpretation of this claim, we need to be able to distinguish clearly the impact of the relevant collective state-of-affairs on individuals from the collective state-of-affairs itself. Unless we can do this, the crucial contrast between the value of individual and collective states-of-affairs on which Raz’s definition of value-individualism hinges will be irremediably blurred. Now in some cases there is no difficulty about making this sort of contrast clear. For example, suppose we claim that ‘the free market is a good institution because it enables individuals to satisfy their desires’, or that ‘authoritarian political structures are bad because they cause individuals to suffer unnecessarily’. These sorts of claim allow a clear distinction between collective states-of-affairs and their impacts, positive and negative, on individuals and their lives. There is a clear sense, for example, that the satisfaction of a desire is a possible state of an individual, but not of the collective institution (a free market) that enables an individual to enjoy it. Similarly, authoritarian political structures as such do not suffer, but the individuals that must endure them do. In these instances it is easy to see how a value-individualist might deny that collective entities and states-of-affairs could be good or bad in themselves. But other cases are less straightforward. Consider, for example, the claim that ‘the liberal rule of law is good because under it individuals are treated fairly’. Superficially, it looks here as if the value of a collective institution (the rule of law) is being accounted for in terms of its ‘impact’ on individuals (the fact that it causes individuals to be treated fairly). But unlike the examples we considered before, it is not so easy to claim that ‘being treated fairly’ is an individual as opposed to a collective state-ofaffairs. After all, it would seem that ‘being treated equally’ refers to a relation between an individual and the agents and institutions with which she is transacting.43 In other words, it refers to a collective state-of-affairs. 43 Notice, moreover, that the fact that an individual is ‘treated fairly’ obviously does not

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

Once we grasp this, we realize that the notion of a ‘state of an individual’ that is central to Raz’s definition of value-individualism is importantly ambiguous. This ambiguity greatly complicates the attempt to draw the kind of clear contrast between the value of individual and collective states on which value-individualism hinges. To highlight the ambiguity, I will distinguish between internal and external states of individuals. Internal states are states of individuals that subsist without any relation to anything outside the individual. ‘Being exhausted’, ‘being miserable’, ‘being upset’, ‘being satisfied’ or ‘being content’ are internal states in this sense. They may be caused by something outside the individual, but the state itself occurs within the individual, and is a selfcontained disposition of that individual. External states are possible individual states relative to something outside: ‘being a victim’, ‘being in danger’, ‘being a friend’, ‘being famous’, ‘being a citizen’, ‘being treated equally’ are examples of individual states of this external kind. In order for individuals to enter such states, they must stand in a particular relation to something outside of themselves (aggressors, threats, friends, ‘the public eye’, the state, the acts of others). As the above remarks suggest, value-individualism becomes unintelli¬ gible if external states of individuals are included within the category of ultimately valuable states. The reason for this is that the inclusion of external states obliterates any meaningful distinction between the value of states of individuals and the value of states of the collectivity sui generis. For example, suppose we say that ‘being treated fairly’ is an intrinsically valuable state of an individual. It follows that a collective pattern of interaction that instantiates fair treatment among the members of a collectivity is an intrinsically valuable state. And that is a state of the collectivity considered sui generis, whose value stands by itself, without reference to the value of any internal states of individuals. It would be different if we restricted the category of ultimately or intrinsically valuable states to the internal states of individuals. For example, suppose we assign intrinsic value to the internal state of having our desires satisfied. If it turns out that being treated fairly enables individuals to satisfy certain important desires, it follows that a collec¬ tivity in which individuals treat each other fairly will have value. But this collective pattern of interaction will not be independently or irreducibly valuable, on such a view. It will inherit its value from that of the individual desires that are serviced by it. In this situation a collective mean that she will necessarily experience satisfaction as a result: if, for example, ‘fair treatment’ requires that she be punished or that her intransigent personal preferences be weighed and compromised against the preferences of others, fair treatment will run counter to the satisfaction of her desires.

Individualism as a theory

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pattern of interaction is instrumental in bringing about an internal state of individuals; and it is that value of the latter which determines the value ot the former. This is clearly different from the account of the value of fair treatment given in the previous paragraph. In that instance, the pattern of interaction carried value by itself; the question of its value was settled without having to refer to any internal states of the individual. In that sense, the value of the collective pattern of interaction was irredu¬ cible to that of any internal states. This shows that if value-individualism is actually to oppose the view that ultimate value inheres in states of the collectivity as such, it must exclude external states of individuals from the category of ultimately valuable states-of-affairs.44 Properly stated, then, value-individualism is the view that, for the purposes of political justification, ultimate value only resides in internal states of individuals 45 On this view, the value of all relevant states of the collectivity and that of external states of individuals would always be reducible to that of certain internal states of individuals. That Raz assumes value-individualists to be committed to this view is shown by the fact that he takes certain crude forms of utilitarianism to be definitive of value-individualism. Such utilitarianisms assign instrumental rather than intrinsic value to collective states to the extent that ‘they cause valuable sensations or emotions in an individual. The classical utilitarians interpret these sensations or emotions as being capable of being caused in some other way and therefore ... as merely instrumentally valuable.’46 Since the relevant sensations or emotions are clearly possible internal states of individuals, such theories are paradig¬ matic versions of value-individualism. It is worth noting in passing the importance of value-individualism in 44 Actually, a qualification is in order. Some external states of individuals (e.g. being in danger) are not necessarily states of collectivities, since the source of the danger may not be another person. Only if the relevant external state requires that one individual stand in a certain relation to another individual is it true that an external state is also a state of the collectivity sui generis. But the external states in virtue of which I believe liberal individualism must be committed to value-collectivism are all of this latter kind, so the exception just noted does not affect my argument. 45 ‘In the context of liberal political economy [welfare] is the private, incommunicable experiences of each individual taken separately, and indeed “isolated” from his community, that are the relevant criteria of well-being. Even though the doctrine does not preclude collective provision of (carefully specified) goods and services, the rationale for it lies in the claim that only in such a form can certain individual satisfaction be achieved. It is no accident, then, that the word “efficiency” is often used as a synonym for welfare in liberal individualism, for this is defined precisely as the satisfaction of necessarily subjective desires’: Norman Barry, Welfare (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 50-1, quoted in M. Root, Philosophy of Social Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 120-1. 46 J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, p. 201.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

this sense to the characteristic liberal argument (encountered several times in this chapter) that the ‘individual’ is prior to the collectivity because collectivities do not feel, think, experience and so on.47 As we have already seen, this is sometimes treated as a claim of ‘social ontology’, but it is now clear that it should be regarded as an expression of value-individualism. For feeling, thinking and experiencing success are internal states of individuals. In saying that they are not possible predicates of collectivities, the liberal individualist is trying to demon¬ strate that the collectivity as such cannot be a locus of irreducible value. This argument does not establish its conclusion because something need not have these properties to be a legitimate locus of value in its own right. Instead, that conclusion is presupposed in its most important premiss: the claim that, ultimately, value can only inhere in states like feeling, thinking and experiencing success. And that premiss is, of course, simply a statement of the doctrine of value-individualism that we have settled upon. Now that we have clarified the meaning of value-individualism, we are in a position to address the pivotal question: could it be that valueindividualism is a basic theoretical claim that stands behind the individu¬ alist political ideal we are trying to account for? If so, it would be possible to envisage an account of this ideal that avoids ascribing ultimate value to any external states of individuals. As I have already mentioned, I believe that this cannot be done. The general reason is that any recogniz¬ able liberal theory, including the individualist ideal we are trying to account for here, will be committed to some conception of the equality of individuals and their rights, claims and interests. This injunction that a liberal state give equal consideration to individuals and their rights and claims is a fundamental and characteristic liberal commitment.48 It is built into the individualist ideal given in the last chapter in the form of the demand that individuals are equally entitled to an inviolable private sphere; no one individual’s claim to this benefit is entitled to special priority over anyone else’s. It is a basic requirement of liberal politics that the state and its agents be scrupulously impartial in granting individuals equal consideration. But a situation in which an individual receives equal consideration refers to an external state of that individual. To enjoy equal consideration is to stand in particular relation to other members of the political community to which one belongs. For example, because we are accorded equal consideration, my fellow citizens (and their lives), the state (and its 47 See Samuel Brittan's comments cited at the beginning of this chapter, and also note 28 above. 48 W. Galston, Liberal Purposes, pp. 182-3.

Individualism as a theory

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officers) and me (and my life) stand in a distinctive relation to each other. If we were treated unequally, we would stand in a different relationship, and the collectivity to which we belong would be ordered differently. To refer to individuals’ external states in this way, then, is to refer to a state of the collectivity sui generis: it is a state of a collectivity in which relations of equality pertain between the individuals that constitute it. These relations are not detectable in any internal states of individuals; they are properties of a collective structure of interaction in which individuals participate. In demanding a collective order that gives fair and equal consideration to individuals and their claims and rights, then, the liberal individualist is taking ultimate value to inhere in states of the collectivity as such. But this is just what value-individualism forbids. It may seem that we have reached this conclusion too hastily, and that this line of argument is vulnerable to the following obvious objection. It is indeed true that in calling for equal consideration, the individualist is according value to a collective state of affairs. But we conceded above that value-individualism need not entail that collective states are devoid of value, only that their value can be fully accounted for in terms of the value of individual internal states. So the individualist’s commitment to the value of equal consideration need be no more puzzling than her commitment to the value of other collective arrangements (e.g. a system of legal enforcement and adjudication) which contribute to the realiza¬ tion of ultimately valuable internal states of individuals (e.g. peace of mind, a sense of personal security). It remains open to the liberal individualist to maintain that she values equal consideration only as a means to the realization of certain valuable internal states. Equal consideration, and any collective states of affairs in which it is instan¬ tiated, need not be independently valuable in the relevant sense. But this reply stretches credulity to its limit, and reduces the valueindividualists’ proposal to the level of philosophical casuistry. Can we really suppose that a liberal individualist would never allow herself to claim that unequal treatment is independently wrong, an evil just by itself? Consider in this regard liberal attitudes to slavery. Would not liberal individualists be prepared to condemn slavery just because it is incompatible with equal consideration, and leave it at that? Could it be that the individualist would be willing to reserve judgement on the question until we provide some further assessment of the effects of slavery on individuals’ internal states? This seems unlikely. The reason is that the commitment to equal consideration is simply too deeply rooted in the individualist ideal for it to be plausibly represented as a ‘merely instrumental’ or ‘decomposable’ value in the context of that ideal. The problem here is not merely that this reply is impossible to square

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

with what liberal individualists characteristically say about slavery and other paradigmatic instances of unequal treatment. It is also, more fundamentally, that to regard the commitment to equal consideration as itself reducible to more ‘ultimate’ claims about the value of certain internal individual states commits the individualist to providing some account of how this reduction is supposed to proceed. Not only is it unclear that such a reduction is necessary, it is not obvious how it could be done in a way that preserves intact a strong, principled opposition to slavery and similarly flagrant instances of unequal treatment. Indeed, contemporary proponents of the individualist ideal sketched earlier have offered some cogent arguments to the effect that such a reduction is impossible. Rawls’s criticism of utilitarianism provides the obvious example. Utilitarianism is relevant here because (at least in its crudest forms) it remains the most complete attempt to satisfy the conditions imposed by value-individualism. It does so by seeking to reduce the value of collective arrangements and institutions to that of one putatively valuable internal state of individuals (satisfying their utility functions). But Rawls argues that the unqualified pursuit of utility maximization cannot satisfy the individualist standard of justice. This is because it would allow individuals’ entitlements to liberty to be sacrificed to ‘the calculus of social interests’. Rawls and his followers are concerned here that by trying to reduce the badness of slavery (say) to the badness of the internal states which might result from it one leaves room in principle for a justification of slavery and other rank injustices: if it turns out that more and better internal individual states can be secured by permitting slavery, then the utilitarian is bound to do so. It needs to be emphasized that the disagreement between Rawls and the utilitarian on this issue is, at root, a dispute between two different interpretations of social equality. No less than the Rawlsian, the utili¬ tarian is committed to a certain principle of equal consideration (‘each individual to count as one, no one as more than one’). That account of the relative weighting of individual utilities in the social calculus is intrinsic to the utilitarian view of the public interest. In rejecting utilitarian theories of social justice, Rawls is claiming that a utilitarian society is unjust because this interpretation of equal consideration is inadequate. It is inadequate because it would permit external states of the individual to be instantiated (being sacrificed for the general welfare) which an individualist ought categorically to reject as incompatible with equal consideration of the appropriate liberal kind.49 This argument expresses a basic, ungrounded, preference for certain external states of 49 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 182-3.

Individualism as a theory

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individuals, and hence for a certain collective state of affairs in which those states are instantiated. The argument is thus anchored in a basic preference for a certain kind of collective state, not in claims about individuals’ internal states. Again, it may seem that there is a straightforward reply to this point: the grounds for Rawls’s preference for his two principles over utilitarian alternatives are that they would be chosen in the original position. And individuals in the original position select these principles because they believe that they will likely fare better under Rawls’s arrangement than under any of the relevant alternatives. But when they make their assessments of how they are likely to fare under these or those principles, they do so by reference to their internal states. On this view, they reject the utility principle because they do not want to risk the unpleasant internal states associated with sacrifice to the calculus of social interests. According to this reply, then, the ultimate value of equal consideration is not simply taken for granted by Rawls. Rather, the justification for equal consideration of the appropriate kind hinges on an assessment of individuals’ internal states. So it is not true to say that an ungrounded preference for a collective state of affairs in which equal consideration is instantiated is the basis for rejecting utilitarian principles. Rather, such a collective state of affairs is valued because of its benefits measured in terms of valuable internal states of individuals. The Rawlsian argument, then, is anchored in claims about individuals’ internal states. Years of sustained attack on the allegedly ‘individualistic’ method¬ ology of the original position device has made this interpretation of Rawls seem more plausible than it really is. The decisions of individuals in the original position as to which principles of justice should be enforced are taken to be valid and authoritative in the actual world because they would be reached under appropriate deliberative condi¬ tions. Those conditions are imposed and ratified by ‘our considered convictions’ in ‘reflective equilibrium’, and they include a commitment to the equality of the parties in the original position, and to their equal voice in the deliberations.50 This is one of the crucial features in virtue of which the original position is supposed to be the basis for valid, authoritative conclusions about how a well-ordered society ought to be structured. In Political Liberalism Rawls suggests that the original position is intended to ‘model’ the fundamental equality of persons, and that it is in virtue of this feature that we can regard it, and the resulting principles, as ‘fair’.51 What is important here is that, for Rawls, the mere 50 ibid. p. 19. 51 J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 79. The fact that Rawls says here that the relevant notion of equality is salient just because it is ‘found in the public political culture of

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

fact that a particular conception of justice could only be generated by an original position in which the parties were somehow unequally repre¬ sented would by itself provide sufficient grounds for rejecting that conception of justice. Such a rejection would not have to refer to any information about individuals’ internal states. It would rather express a commitment to the idea that relations of equality between individuals, whether instantiated in a society, or in a hypothetically defined choice situation designed to allow critical perspective on societies, are sufficient by themselves to serve as a benchmark for social and political institu¬ tions. Instructive here is Rawls’s rebuttal of the following utilitarian argu¬ ment for slavery: ‘a slaveholder ... attempts to justify his position ... by claiming that, first of all, given the circumstances of their society, the institution of slavery is in fact necessary to produce the greatest average happiness; and secondly, that in the initial contractual situation he would choose the average principle [of utility] even at the risk of its subsequently happening that he is justifiably held a slave’.52 What is crucial here is that Rawls does not take this argument to be prima facie implausible: the slaveholder is arguing in the appropriate Rawlsian way. For Rawls, the only way to defeat this argument is to ‘exploit the various aspects of the [original position] ... to establish’ that Rawls’s principles would be chosen over the principle of average utility. Rawls’s rejection of the slaveholder’s argument is thus parasitic upon his rejection of utilitarian principles tout court. And as we have already seen, Rawls rejects the latter because its interpretation of equality allows that individuals ‘be treated as means by allowing higher life prospects for some to counter¬ balance lower life prospects for others who are already less favourably situated’. The remedy is to design the original position so that its ‘favoured interpretation’ mirrors the kind of equality between individuals that would preclude them from being sacrificed to the calculus of social interests. The original position device shows that such sacrifice is incompatible with the ‘favoured interpretation’ of equal relations between individuals, but it does not show that that interpretation of equality is the correct one only because there will be more and better valuable internal individual states if it is realized. It could not do so because the correct original position expresses, but does not by itself establish the validity of the appropriate interpretation of equal considera¬ tion. That norm is simply taken as a basic and ungrounded commitment, democratic society’ is a sure sign that he takes this commitment to be a basic, ungrounded element of his theory, one which requires no further justification in terms of individuals’ internal states, or indeed of any other sort. 52 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 167-8.

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a requirement mandated by the effort to take fairness and justice seriously.53 These last points vividly illustrate the extent to which a commitment to equal consideration is basic to the individualist political ideal we are trying to account lor here. In our earlier discussion of (3), we described the individualist ideal as a conception of public agency. A conception of public agency specifies a normative point of view from within which a public agent - the state - justifiably acts. The state is a 'public agent’ in this sense because it claims to act (and to be justified in acting) on behalf of the public as a whole. Roughly speaking, the state acts correctly, according to the individualist ideal, when it respects individuals’ equal and inviolable rights to a private sphere of activity, and intervenes to defend these equal individual entitlements. These guiding political prin¬ ciples constitute the individualist’s understanding of what it means to act impartially on behalf of the public as a whole. In this sense, it specifies the individualist interpretation of the 'common good’.54 But, as we have now seen, it is surely implausible to regard the commitment to equal consideration as somehow instrumental to the realization of this concep¬ tion of the public good.55 It is, rather, intrinsic to it, such that equal 53 Of course, in Rawls’s theory this norm is itself subject to assessment in ‘reflective equilibrium’. But the key point here is that the demand that a set of convictions be in reflective equilibrium does not disallow the use of norms which appeal to the ultimate value of things other than individuals’ internal states. 54 On the notion of a liberal ‘common good’, see W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 76-7. 55 Michael Root writes: ‘Economics shares with liberal political theories the view that the only measure of the virtue of a social institution or practice is how the members fare within it. According to the liberal view, only individuals have any moral status, rights, obligations, or well-being that can be respected, protected, perfected, enforced, or improved. On the liberal view, there is no politics of the common good, but only a politics of many different individuals each with her own good or conception of the good’: Philosophy of Social Science, p. 121. This argument may work for the last category on Root’s hst, that of ‘well-being’, but it makes a hash of the liberal view of ‘status, rights’, and ‘obligations’. For liberals, the state has obligations to treat individuals with equal consideration, and these duties are enshrined in the institution of enforceable rights that protects individuals’ status as equals. The ‘measure of the virtue of’ this institution is not simply ‘how individuals fare’, if that refers to what individuals feel, experience, suffer, or subjectively enjoy. For the liberal, the virtue of a system of enforceable basic rights partially but indispensably consists in its tendency to instantiate and reproduce equal relations among the members of a liberal political community. That is an ineradicable, basic feature of the liberal interpretation of the common good. On this point, see F. T. Hobhouse: in the manner of rights and duties which is cardinal for Fiberal theory, the relation of the individual to the community is everything. His rights and duties are alike defined by the common good. What, for example, is my right? On the face of it, it is something that I claim. But a mere claim is nothing. I might claim anything and everything. If my claim is of right it is because it is sound, well grounded, in the judgment of an impartial observer. But an impartial observer will not consider me alone. He will equally weigh the opposed

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

consideration can be, from an individualist point of view, sufficient by itself to motivate a principled rejection of certain kinds of political and social institutions (such as slavery). When we trace individualist ideals to their roots we always come up against this basic and irreducible commit¬ ment to the value of equal consideration and to that of collective statesof-affairs which instantiate it. This may not be the unique theoretical commitment that makes the individualist ideal what it is. But as long as it is basic to it, value-individualism cannot be a core commitment of the individualist ideal. One who takes equal consideration to be an ultimate value for the purposes of political justification must abandon valueindividualism. Oddly, this is implicitly recognized by Charles Taylor, who is prepared to regard a situation in which individuals are on an ‘equal footing with each other’ as an irreducibly social good: ‘The footing does not exist unless there is some common sense that we are equal, that we command equal treatment, that this is the appropriate way to deal with each other. Essential to this set of relations as a good is something that is undecomposable.’56 I agree wholeheartedly, but the puzzle is that Taylor and other critics of liberal individualism seem often to assume that liberalism is deficient because it has no room for such ‘irreducibly social goods’. If my argument is right, this cannot be the issue that divides liberals from their communitarian or collectivist critics. For my argument suggests that liberals are just as committed to such a notion of an irreducibly social good as anyone else. Whatever is at issue between communitarians like Taylor and liberal individualists, then, it is not the question of whether or not it is theoretically permissible to acknowledge ‘irreducibly social goods’. The real issue is rather a disagreement between two different interpretations of ‘the social’. Communitarians and other critics object to the individu¬ alist commitment to abstract relations of equality among the members of the political community. They think this implies an overly arid and bloodless understanding of social relationships. For them, the liberal vision of an ‘abstract society’ of equals is the philosophical counterpart claims of others. He will take us in relation to one another, that is to say, as individuals involved in a social relationship. Further, if his decision is in any sense a rational one, it must rest on a principle of some kind; and. again, as a rational man, any principle which he asserts he must found on some good result which it serves or embodies, and as an impartial man he must take the good of everyone affected into account. That is to say, he must found his judgement on the common good. An individual right, then, cannot conflict with the common good, nor could any right exist apart from the common good. Liberalism and Other Writings, ed. James Meadowcroft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 60-1. 56 C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, p. 139.

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of a Le Corbusier cityscape, with social relations etched out in the stark and alienating lines of constructs like inviolable rights, abstract rules and general laws. Such critics prefer a richer and thicker conception of ‘the social’, one in which ‘the hidden hand of the community’ is given free rein to paint a more colourful, less rigidly modernist, social landscape of customs, shared histories, cultural understandings and moral tradi¬ tions.''7 There are important issues here, and I will return to some of them in the last chapter. The key point for present purposes is that this issue about the appropriate sense of ‘the social’ is not helpfully rendered as an issue about the relations of priority between individual and social values. As we have seen, if the individualist is committed to a conception of the abstract equality of individuals, she is, by that token, committed to a conception of the abstract society, and there is little point in trying to claim that one of these conceptions ‘lies prior’ to the other. They are co¬ dependent features of the individualist social ideal, just as the celebration of the socially embedded individual is part and parcel of the commu¬ nitarian conception of a flourishing society. This is an issue about alternative social orders, but it is fruitless and distorting to project it on to a factitious contrast between the priority of the individual and that of society.58 It is true that one consequence of adopting the individualist conception of an ‘abstract’ social order is that it will often be the case that this collective order will seem to have instrumental value relative to indi¬ viduals’ private goals. This seems to be the thought behind Hayek’s claim that the ‘abstract order of the whole ... is preserved as a means for assisting in the pursuit of a great variety of individual purposes’.59 This feature of the individualist ideal stems from the attempt to meet the demands of social integration in a way that is maximally permissive towards the pluralistic values that free individuals may be expected to endorse and live by. But even Hayek was prepared to concede that political authority properly conceived takes the ‘abstract rules’ associated with the ‘rule of law’ as ‘ultimate values’, despite what he says about those rules having instrumental value from the perspective of private individuals who pursue their private goals.60 Thus an individualist public 57 D. Bell, Communitarianism and its Critics, p. 32. 58 The arguments given here thus agree with Will Kymlicka’s conclusions in Liberalism, Community and Culture, p. 253. 59 F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2:The Mirage of Social Justice, p. 5. 60 ibid., p. 15. Note that there is no reason to suppose that the policy of equal consideration will necessarily be valued as a means towards individual purposes and ends. To take the possibility that Nietzsche - almost alone - has seriously acknowledged, if an individual takes as his end the subjugation of the political community to his own megalitarian designs, the policy of equal consideration will definitely not have instrumental value

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

agent aims ‘ultimately’ for the ‘preservation of a kind of order’ at the collective level.61 The real point behind Hayek’s remarks is not that liberal individualism refuses to assign intrinsic value to states of the collectivity as such. Rather, it is that the rules and principles that specify this collective order should not be construed as analogous to the rules and principles individuals use to order their own lives: public agency is not analogous to individual agency.62 As I suggested earlier, the thought that principles under which collective and individual integration occur were disanalogous was often part of the cold war attack on collectivism. This is the idea that collective plans are not (and should not be) like individual plans. Clearly, though, this does not entail that there are no discrete plans for the collectivity sui generis, or that they ought not to be accorded priority over individuals’ values and interests.63 relative to that personal goal. Moreover, it is a basic fact about human life that individuals characteristically prefer that their goals and ends be given greater than equal consideration. This is merely to make the obvious point that the range of individual ends for which any given ordering of the collectivity can serve as a means will be set, not by the pre-existing field of individual goals, but by the account of the collective interest which rules some of those ends in and some of them out ex ante. There is then no usable vantage point from within the domain of individual goals from which to make these assessments, prior to the construction of a generalized account of the proper weighting relations that should pertain among them. And that can be done only by defining a perspective for a public agent: and, in turn, that perspective is constituted by specifying the appropriate relations between individuals and the public agency, and that necessarily involves assigning intrinsic value to external states of individuals. 61 ibid., p. 14. 62 Hayek formulates the point as a distinction between commands and rules: commands refer to activity which ‘aims at a particular result’; obviously the way in which individuals pursue their own ends and goals falls under this head. A rule, by contrast, ‘refers to an unknown number of future instances and to the acts of an unknown number of persons, and merely states certain attributes which any such action ought to possess’. Borrowing Oakeshott’s terminology, Hayek characterizes societies which are ordered by such general rules as ‘nomocratic’; these he contrasts with those that are ‘teleocratic’. The latter are to be rejected because they inadvisedly treat public agency, or the ordering of the collectivity, as purposeful and goal-oriented in the way that individual agency is. ibid., pp. 14-15. 63 Consider, in this regard, the following striking passage from The Road to Serfdom (p. 123); ‘only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the super-individual forces which guide the growth of reason. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process.’ Clearly, Hayek thinks that it is a fundamental error to suppose that these ‘super-individual’ forces are consciously directed. Rather they are the unplanned outcomes of social interaction. But as Hayek seems to acknowledge in this passage, at least tacitly, the fact that these forces are impersonal and unconscious is compatible with asserting their priority over the conscious plans of specific individuals. That is presumably why Hayek says that an ‘attitude of humility’ on the part of individuals is appropriate. There is a difference between submitting to the will of a supposedly omniscient, self-conscious, totalitarian planner and humbly accepting the direction of the ‘invisible hand’, but it is not clear that it is the difference between ‘subordinating’ and ‘liberating’ the individual. To my mind, these are merely two different ways in which individuals may be subordinated to social or

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It is worth noting in passing that the idea that personal and social integration are distinct plays a role in Rawls’s conception of contractar¬ ianism. His objection to utilitarianism is, to my mind, a descendant of Hayek’s claim about the error of assimilating individual and collective planning. Hence Rawls finds problematic the utilitarian effort to gener¬ alize the principle of choice for one man to the whole of society.64 One might think, then, that one could resurrect a distinction between theoreti¬ cal forms of individualism and collectivism along these lines. On such a view collectivists assume an analogy between individual and collective planning, while liberal individualists - like Rawls and Hayek - do not. One of the points that I shall make later, however, is that the tradition of liberal individualism splits over this issue. Some liberal commitments including ones held by Rawlsians - require just these kinds of analogies between individual and social integration. I have now given the main argument for why value-individualism fails as an attempt to account for the sense in which ‘the individual’ might be prior to the collectivity. An ancillary point about the claim that somehow value is centred on the individual turns out to have great significance for the arguments that follow. The special importance which individualists assign to equal consideration has loomed large in the discussion in this chapter. This norm expresses a view about the value of individuals, about their status vis-a-vis each other. But individualists are also characteristi¬ cally concerned with individuals’ preferences, their personal values and tastes. This concern with what has value to individuals partly explains the apparent affinity between liberal individualism and value-individualism, for states of affairs in which individuals experience the realization or satisfaction of their values or desires are internal states. It seems obvious to me that the twin ideas that individuals have special value and moral significance, and that their values must be taken especially seriously, have both been absolutely central to the individualist ideal, historically and today. Both offer interpretations of the sense in which value might be held to inhere in individuals, but they are clearly not identical. In what follows, I will emphasize the difference between these two ideas to expose some underplayed conflicts within the individualist ideal presented in the previous chapter. Along with the point made immediately above about the role of analogies between individual and public agency, this provides the key to the arguments of later chapters.

collective forces. See also P. Dasgupta, ‘Utilitarianism, Information and Rights’, in B. A. O. Williams and A. K. Sen, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 215-16. 64 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 141.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

In this chapter, I have tried to deny that liberal individualism is what it is in virtue of a theoretical claim about the priority of the individual over the collectivity. In so doing, I have sought to prise apah the individualist political ideal sketched in chapter 1 and the various ontological, axiolo¬ gical or methodological forms of individualism that have been so frequently discerned in the theoretical underpinnings of the liberal tradition. None of this demonstrates by itself that the individualist ideal is internally unstable. But the arguments of this chapter do suggest that if that ideal is coherent and theoretically integrated, it is not because it depends on some clear and well-understood theory about the priority of the individual. In rejecting the idea that there is such a unifying individualist or atomist theory standing behind political individualism, this chapter has stripped away an important individualist resource. This resource has served liberals well in the struggle to define their ideals over the course of a century often hostile to liberalism. It has also profoundly shaped the structure of anti-liberal thought, which, far from questioning the idea that liberalism is committed, theoretically and metaphysically, to the ‘priority of the individual over society’, has relied heavily upon it. But if the arguments of this chapter are correct, such assumptions about the identity of liberal individualism are mistaken. It remains to be seen whether the vision of liberal individualism as a theoretically integrated, mutually self-supporting federation of values and ideals can be sustained in the absence of these assumptions.

3

Public agency and conceptions of collectivity

The last chapter introduced the figure of a public agent. I suggested that a conception of public agency specifies a normative point of view from which a state justifiably acts. The state is a public agent because it claims to act (and to be justified in acting) on behalf of the public as a whole. A traditional political theory, I take it, is nothing other than a codified and self-consistent set of principles that define the goals, powers and limits of a public agent. These principles specify the relevant theory’s account of what it means to act justifiably on behalf of the public as a whole. They define a deliberative point of view from within which particular political issues may be addressed and justifiably adjudicated. We have seen already that liberal individualists cannot object to this notion of public agency on the grounds that there is no such thing as ‘society or the collectivity as a whole’, or no conception of the ‘public’ independent of the individuals who make it up. When they argue (for example) that the public interest is a function of individual interests, or that there is no real conflict between the public interest and the ‘sum of individual interests’, they appeal to just such a notion, explicitly or implicitly. These sorts of arguments may place restrictions on what is allowed to count as action on behalf of ‘society as a whole’; but that is clearly not the same thing as rejecting the very notion of acting on behalf of ‘society as a whole’. As we saw, any liberal theory must presuppose some specific account of the appropriate normative perspective from which public agency is justifiably exercised; trying to pretend that this need not involve an account of what it means to act on behalf of society as a whole (rather than on behalf of some non-inclusive interest) is bound to seem forced and ultimately unconvincing. The argument of the last chapter denied that the various theoretical forms of individualism currently on offer (methodological individualism, value-individualism) amount to a second-order theory of the collectivity that underpins the individualist political ideal. There is no helpful sense in which liberal accounts of public agency are ‘theoretically’ or ‘methodo¬ logically’ individualistic rather than ‘collectivist’. But it is vital to notice 83

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

that this conclusion does not cast doubt on the idea that, in principle, different political ideals will tend to make different assumptions about how individuals relate to the political community of which they are members. This is the grain of truth in the received idea of liberal individualism: a political theory will clearly be importantly shaped by the implicit understanding of how individuals constitute the distinctive sort of collectivity that is designated under the term ‘public’. But, under the influence of the cold war liberals and their successors, this entirely sound intuition was developed in crude and unhelpful ways. Contingent histor¬ ical rivalries were elevated into a virtually exhaustive philosophical divide between individualist and collectivist theories of politics. Citizens were thus invited to choose between two very primitive and indiscrimi¬ nate views about the relation between individuals and the political community. With the cold war behind us, we ought to be able to recognize a richer and more nuanced palate of alternative views about how individuals can relate to the collectivities to which they belong. This chapter is a modest effort in this direction. It distinguishes between two possible conceptions of collectivity, an aggregative conception and an associative conception, and discusses a possible property of a conception of public agency that I call ‘symmetry’. This framework will then be used in later chapters to re-examine the conceptions of collectivity and of public agency that are implicit in the individualist political ideal. The purpose of this chapter is simply to elucidate the conceptual categories through which these later arguments will be made. I begin by explaining what is meant by the notion of a ‘conception of collectivity’.

Conceptions of collectivity One way of understanding the idea of a conception of collectivity is to relate it to a prior notion which I shall here call the ‘basic assumption’. The basic assumption states simply that the collectivities that are primarily relevant in the context of political theory (i.e. publics) are made up of individual human beings. The reasons for calling this assumption ‘basic’ are, I hope, obvious. It seems reasonable to say, then, that the basic assumption is a starting-point on which theorists of all persuasions can agree. But as it stands the basic assumption leaves one critical issue unaddressed. While the basic assumption presupposes that in some way collectives are composed of human individuals, it is open-ended about how exactly the relation of composition is to be construed. It may seem pedantic to make heavy weather of this, but in fact the relation of composition is, by itself, underspecified. For example, the way in which players constitute a team seems very different from the way in which

Public agency and conceptions of collectivity

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Congress is composed of individual representatives and senators; the way in which a family is composed of individual family members seems different from the way in which an army is composed of individual officers and soldiers. A ‘conception of collectivity’, then, serves, in part, to specify the relation between individuals and the collectivities to which, by the basic assumption, they belong. Different conceptions of collec¬ tivity will specify that relation in different ways. For example, on a mereological conception of collectivity, the relation of composition that pertains between individuals and the collectivity is construed as a ‘partwhole’ relation, of the sort discussed (and rejected) by David-Hillel Ruben.1 Alternatively, we might claim that the relation of composition is a ‘membership’ relation of some kind. In what follows I will distinguish between aggregative and associative conceptions of collectivity; the claim, then, is that these two conceptions of collectivity pick out two different ways of depicting the relation of composition between indi¬ viduals and the collectivities to which they belong. Clearly, any political theory will appeal, explicitly or implicitly, to a particular conception of collectivity and it will do so, largely, through its conception of public agency. This is because a conception of public agency proposes an interpretation of what it means to act on behalf of the whole public; but then the question of how the state conceives the ‘whole public’ to be constituted becomes a matter of some importance. The point of view adopted by a public agent will thus include an account of how individuals constitute the public on whose behalf it is to act; that is, it will include a conception of collectivity. While a conception of public agency will include other stipulations about (say) the purposes of civic association and the interests and values that the state should serve, the overall character of a political theory and its distinctive principles will inevitably be partly shaped by the interpretation of the basic assumption it contains. Taken together, conceptions of collectivity and of public agency generate an abstract image of a political society, a summary picture of the skeletal relations between individuals, society and the state presup¬ posed in a given political theory. The question of the metaphysical or ontological status of these depictions is one that we ought to set aside. We should not think of them as hypotheses for assessment by experts in a sub-discipline called ‘social ontology’. The relevant issues are practical, not theoretical: what is at stake is the structure of alternative social forms, not the truth of propositions that compete for validation before a 1 D.-H. Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 45, 46-82.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

tribunal of social metaphysicians.2 Moreover, it is surely implausible to suppose that the question of the preferability of these alternative social forms turns on the verdict of any such tribunal. There' are many reasons for the implausibility of this suggestion, but an important one is that conceptions of collectivity and of public agency need not have founda¬ tional standing in a political theory: that is, they may simply be constructions that are built upon foundations that lie elsewhere in the theoretical fabric of which they are a part. Understanding the properties of these constructions can tell us something about the distinctive characteristics of a given political theory; but they need not tell us anything about what reasons or grounds one might have for endorsing the relevant social or political ideal. In any case, a full consideration of these questions lies outside of the scope of this book. This study is concerned to chart the various entailments which obtain among certain accounts of public agency and certain conceptions of collectivity: clearly one can identify the entailments among these conceptions without necessarily recommending one rather than another. By making explicit the conceptions of collectivity and of public agency around which a given political theory revolves we can isolate the mode in which the theory handles two crucial sets of relations: first, the relation between individual citizens and the public that they collectively consti¬ tute; and, second, the relation between the public and the state that claims to act on its behalf. Exposing this theoretical scaffolding clarifies the internal grammar of a political theory, and allows us to understand the connections between that internal grammar and the substantive recommendations made by a political theory about (for example) the distribution of rights, liberties and social advantages. The next three chapters of this book apply this procedure to the individualist political ideal that I set out in chapter 1. I turn now to the twin ideas that I will deploy in that subsequent argument: the distinctions between aggregative and associative conceptions of collectivity and between symmetrical and asymmetrical conceptions of public agency. Aggregative conceptions of collectivity

An aggregative conception of collectivity interprets the basic assumption in its most obvious mode. It claims that the collective should simply be construed as an aggregate of individuals. According to this conception, each individual is a unit which contributes arithmetically to the collective. 2 M. Gilbert, On Social Facts, pp. 436-7.

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An example of a collective entity we normally construe aggregatively is our notion of an ‘electorate’. That is, each voter counts as a unit, and the ‘decision ol the electorate as a whole is supposed to be determined by some arithmetical procedure which takes the decisions of each individual voter into account. It is important to stress that endorsing an aggregative conception of collectivity does not necessarily imply that all units in an aggregate have to carry equal weight. Mill’s conception of the electorate, which permits those holding university degrees to have two votes instead of one, remains aggregative despite the fact that it is inegalitarian. The relative influence of the educated within the electorate is expressed by a numerical ratio which presupposes that there are as many units in the aggregate as there are individuals.3 In this context, Bentham’s stipulation that ‘each individual is to count for one and for no more than one’ places a ban on analogous inequalities in the (different) context of a theory of general welfare. Bentham believed, as all utilitarians do, that collective happiness is arithmetically related to the happiness of each individual member of the collective. He thus endorsed an aggregative conception of collectivity, at least for the purposes of moral deliberation. But his decision to assign equal weight to each individual’s utility is not itself mandated by his adoption of an aggregative conception; rather, Bentham’s notion of political equality is expressed numerically because he chooses to depict the collective as an aggregate for the purposes of ethical thinking. Associative conceptions of collectivity An associative conception of collectivity offers a more complex and perhaps less intuitive interpretation of the basic assumption. It claims that the collective is constituted, not as an aggregate of units, but by a pattern of irreducible interpersonal relationships. On this conception, the collective is treated as an association of individuals structured by certain key relationships among its individual members. Our everyday under¬ standing of the family involves an associative conception of collectivity in my sense. A family is a group of individuals which is structured by specific relations between them - marital, maternal, paternal, fraternal and so on. Moreover, these relationships are not a matter of how much numerical weight each member of the family is assigned vis-a-vis the others. They cannot be reduced to some prior numerical relationship. 3 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1972), pp. 308-10.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

The notion of an association structured by a certain set of irreducible relationships may evoke the idea of strongly sociological accounts of the collective. Benn and Peters define a sociological conception of association as one which looks first to the rules regulating interpersonal behaviour rather than to the properties of individuals themselves: The association now appears as a pattern of rules and procedures, abstracted from the individuals who may happen at any given moment to be operating within it. The system, we have said, constitutes roles - that is to say, there are within it foci of rights and duties to which labels attach, like father, landlord, judge, and we can talk of these without reference to any particular persons who may at any time fill them, just as we can discuss the role of Hamlet without considering whether the actor is Olivier, Gielgud, or Garrick.4

I do not want to restrict the category of associative conceptions to sociological accounts of this kind. The interpersonal relationships, and the rules they imply, may be sociological, cultural, traditional and so on. But they do not have to be ‘concrete’ in this sociological sense. Associations can also be structured by purely abstract relationships. For example, Plato’s notion of the just city plainly involves an associative rather than aggregative conception of collectivity. That is, it is to be structured according to a fundamental hierarchical relationship among individuals who are classed in different ways. But these relationships are not supposed to be based on some set of cultural norms or conventions, even if, in Plato’s view, they are eventually legitimated in this way. Rather, they derive from a highly abstract (and mysterious) philosophic claim about the proper relations of authority between individuals who tend to be predominantly rational, spirited or appetitive. It might also be objected that associative conceptions of collectivity do not genuinely offer interpretations of the basic assumption, since the relationships defining an association seem to exist apart from individuals. This seems to be the burden of Benn’s and Peters’s claim that because ‘[t]he association now appears as a pattern of rules and procedures, abstracted from the individuals who may happen at any given moment to be operating within it[,] ... individuals disappear’ from the picture.5 But while it may be true that the relationships which define some specific association are conceived apart from particular individuals, this does not mean that it is incompatible with the basic assumption. Rather, like aggregative accounts, associative conceptions of collectivity make claims about how individuals comprise a particular collective. Consider a heap

4 S. I. Benn and R. S. Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959), pp. 236-7. 5 ibid.

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of Lego bricks which have been dropped on the floor from a box. Suppose all of those Lego bricks could be assembled into a model of the Empire State building. Both the model and the heap are comprised of the same individual bricks. But the model is composed of the same bricks in a different way: each brick now has a specific role to play in replicating certain features of the Empire State building. It is no longer the case that the bricks compose the model just by being there; they compose the model by being there in a certain spatial relationship with each other. If that model is to replicate the Empire State building, those spatial relationships must be present: without them, it will fail to be a model of the building. But this does not deny that the model is comprised of individual bricks. Rather, it says that the relation of composition is distinctive. Similarly, on an aggregative conception individuals comprise the relevant collective as units in an aggregate. By contrast, on an associative conception, individuals comprise a collective by participating in and reproducing the interpersonal relationships which define their associ¬ ation. This does not mean that the relevant relationships are separable (or exist apart) from the individuals who participate in them. For example, it is impossible to conceive of the interpersonal relationships which define a family without simultaneously thinking of individuals playing the various roles these relationships imply. Relationships which structure associations are interpersonal relationships, and so presuppose that there are individual persons to operate and reproduce them, whatever they may be. Of course, individuals may be unwilling to participate in the relevant relationships - as when parents disown their children and so destroy a family; but this in no way denies that the family is composed of individual members. It only claims that the family is composed of individuals in a distinctive way, through the medium of certain structural relationships which structure their association and interaction within it. It should be clear in general how these two conceptions of collectivity will affect accounts of public agency. If a political theory adopts an aggregative conception of collectivity, the normative point of view adopted by the public agent in such a theory will take the collectivity to be an aggregate of separate individuals. For example, the fact that utilitarianism depicts the political community as an aggregate of indi¬ viduals importantly shapes the utilitarian account of public agency. Of course, that is not the only consideration which shapes the utilitarian vision of the state, but it is clearly a very important one. It explains, for example, why a utilitarian state will not regard interpersonal relation¬ ships (apart from those that specify the egalitarian relationship of each to

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

the state itself) as having intrinsic value. Similarly, if we depict the political community to be structured by certain irreducible interpersonal relationships, the public agent will assume a normative point of view in which the instantiation and reproduction of those relations will be a primary consideration. Symmetry I now want to discuss the second idea through which I aim to shed light on the conceptions of collectivity which underlie the principles of liberal individualism. This notion specifies a possible property of the account of public agency which, I have argued, any political conception of collec¬ tivity will contain. An account of public agency may be symmetrical or asymmetrical. The notion of symmetry I am invoking here is not the familiar idea of mirror-symmetry, but the more general idea of invariance under change; in this case, invariance across scales. An account of public agency will be said to be symmetrical to the extent that the normative point of view under which the public agency acts on behalf of the collectivity is analogous to the normative point of view under which individual agents act on their own behalf. The idea of symmetry, then, attempts to capture the idea that the collective will is analogous to the individual will, or the idea that individual and collective self-government are isomorphic. On a symmetrical view, then, the relation between individual and collective self-government is like that between paragraphs and chapters. Chapters are made up of paragraphs, but in constructing both an author will refer to similar principles of composition - basic conventions and rules under which a logical narra¬ tive of ideas and claims is presented to the reader. The classic instance of this kind of symmetry in the context of politics is arguably the theory of justice presented by Plato in The Republic. In the Platonic conception, both individuals and states are to be ordered in accordance with the same set of principles. Individual agency is appro¬ priately exercised, and justice honoured, when an individual’s rational faculties discipline and control his spirited and appetitive faculties. Similarly, when public agency is appropriately exercised, the most rational elements of the social order regulate those elements dominated by Spirit and Appetite.6 Hobbes was another theorist who (in a very different way) embraced a symmetrical conception. For him, the same basic principle of self-preservation applied both to states and to indi6 Plato, Republic, trans. and revised G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), pp. 103-23.

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viduals in the state of nature; both individuals and the Leviathan possess the same right to preserve themselves through the exercise of their arbitrary power of judgement. Arguably, any traditional social contract theory will be based on some such claim of symmetry for, in most versions of the theory, collective authority (government) results from a transfer ot some (set of) powers originally possessed by individuals. It should be said, of course, that the social contract approach will also tend to imply temporal asymmetries between the individual and the collective. This is because, whatever rights are transferred from individuals to the collective, the exchange happens at some point in time. Up to that moment, no public with an agent of its own capable of possessing Tights’ actually exists, and beyond that point the rights of the sovereign will be asymetrical with those of the citizens who live under it. However, these temporal asymmetries are beside the point: for the analytical relationship of symmetry is independent of time, and of any theoretical chronology in which it is instantiated. On an asymmetrical view, on the other hand, there is a disjunction between the rules by which individuals and collective are held to act. In this case, the relation between public agency and individual is like that between principles of library organization and principles of language composition. The principles according to which librarians organize libraries - the classification of books by subject or author, and the spatial distribution of books within a building containing a certain amount of shelf space and so on - are not like those applied by authors in the composition of the books themselves (although it might be said that some books - encyclopedias and dictionaries, for example - will be composed according to principles more like those used to arrange libraries). In an asymmetrical view of politics, then, the principles by which governments determine the appropriate action for the collectivity as a whole will bear no particular resemblance to those invoked by private agents as they lead and pursue their own lives and projects. Individual and collective selfgovernment will proceed by entirely unrelated and dissimilar principles of integration. As we saw in chapter 1, the idea that there is, or ought to be, a disanalogy between private and public agency has been a familiar theme within the liberal individualist tradition: I earlier associated it with Hayek and Rawls. But because it will become significant later in the argument, I want to emphasize a particular, prototypically liberal, aspect of the claim that private and public agency are disanalogous. This feature of liberal ideas is intimately bound up with the second set of individualist values that in chapter 1 I placed under the heading of liberty and the private sphere’. At least since Mill, liberals have characteristically

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

distinguished between self- and other-regarding actions.7 They have claimed that the state ought to regulate only other-regarding actions. It is easy to see why this tends to imply an asymmetrical account of public agency. It suggests that the public agent assumes a normative point of view under which the only justifiable political interferences are those which regulate interpersonal interaction. The intrapersonal, self-regarding arena is to be left to individuals’ own discretion. Public morality (i.e. principles of public agency) must therefore impinge as little as possible upon a defined self-regarding sphere. Within that sphere individuals will then be free to act according to the widest possible range of normative, religious, cultural standpoints and perspectives. The most extreme manifestation of this view is the current liberal fetish with the idea of political neutrality. Critics often suggest that neutralist liberalism advocates or encourages a kind of value-scepticism on the part of individuals. On this argument, liberal neutrality permits diversity and pluralism, but at the cost of diluting individual commitment to cultural, ethical, religious views which define their identity: somehow the norm of neutrality inappropriately insinuates itself into individual self-reflection in a way which ‘tames’ individuals’ commitments and convictions, or attenuates their particularity, difference and identity.8 It may well be true that (as a matter of fact) the practical effect of liberal politics is to turn individuals into restless and identity-less valuesceptics.9 Whether or not this is true, though, it is important to stress that this result would be more or less the reverse of what protagonists of liberal neutrality intend. When they claim the state ought to be neutral as to the good, liberals are not saying that individuals should remain so neutral, nor that the ideal of neutrality is relevant to private self¬ reflection and self-understanding. This would be implied only if defenders of liberal neutrality assumed a symmetrical view of public agency under which individuals’ pursuit of their own good is isomorphic to the state’s pursuit of the public good. But the liberal notion of neutrality actually implies a strongly asymmetrical conception of public agency, according to which justified action on behalf of the public as a whole bears no particular resemblance to the ways in which different individuals delib¬ erate and act on their own behalfs. While a neutral state pursues goals 7 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, pp. 146ff.; it is worth noting, though, that Mill does not actually use the term ‘otherregarding’ in his discussion in On Liberty, as David Lyons has pointed out: Rights, Welfare, and Mill’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 91. See, for example, Ira Katznelson, Liberalism’s Crooked Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 25, 154-9. 9 As A. Macintyre maintains in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 31-2, 220-1.

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that it understands to be morally justified and politically authoritative, those goals are formulated on behalf of an irreducibly plural and diversified entity (the public) that does not, and could not, deliberate about its own good in the same manner as do individual agents. For individuals have a moral unity and integrity that allows them to identify with a discrete and closed set of values, and to pursue those values zealously and wholeheartedly. But on the liberal view ‘the public’ on whose behalf the state is to act cannot be identified with a single or closed set of values in this way, because of its inherently differentiated and plural character. As a result, public agency is best when it is as uncommitted, as unzealous as possible, because this makes maximal room for individual commitment and zeal. The neutral state, then, should think of itself as merely policing a range of conceptions of the good,10 leaving wholehearted devotion and zealous conviction to indi¬ vidual agents themselves.11

The significance of these conceptions The two distinctions I have just drawn - between aggregative and associative conceptions of collectivity, and between symmetrical and asymmetrical accounts of public agency - are not the only conceivable way in which this conceptual territory might be carved up. I have chosen to develop these specific distinctions for two reasons. First, as I will try to show in subsequent chapters, I believe that they help us to identify some important points of difference between different species of liberalism. Whether they succeed in this or not depends on the arguments of later chapters, and I will not discuss this directly now. Second, and more immediately, these two distinctions isolate two different sets of issues which the more coarse-grained distinction between individualism and collectivism has encouraged us to confuse. Filtering out these elements enables us to see that theories can display some supposed features of collectivism (or individualism) without others.

10 Note that, for reasons set out above, this does not mean that a neutral state can somehow avoid self-consciously pursuing goals on behalf of the public as a whole, only that liberal neutrality has a distinctive and constrained view of what those goals are. 11 Obviously, if critics like Macintyre and Katznelson could make the case that philosophically (rather than practically) liberal neutrality must infect individual self¬ reflection in the problematic ways they describe, they would have a powerful objection to the liberal enterprise, at least as it has recently been conceived. But I do not believe that that case has yet been made adequately, mainly because the possible costs of non-liberal negotiations of the terms of pluralism and difference have not been sufficiently addressed.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

Moreover, theories which are in some respects collectivistic may turn out to be individualistic in other respects, and vice versa. For example, the aggregative conception of collectivity seems to give a certain kind of primacy to the individual as a self-contained entity: features and properties of individuals viewed as if from outside are placed at the centre of the analysis. For example, an aggregative account of the collective interest will, like Bentham’s, relate it in some arithme¬ tical way to the interests of individuals. For the purposes of aggregation, the interests of each individual are packaged as separate, self-contained units of utility which the ideal, impartial utilitarian legislator will, as far as possible, try to satisfy. Although individuals may have an interest in co-operative activities or intersubjective relationships, this is unnecessary and peripheral to the basic account of the collective interest proposed by such a view. This contrasts with the associative conception, which privileges specific interpersonal relationships over the interests of indi¬ viduals considered in isolation. Expressed in these terms, the contrast between these two conceptions picks out a prominent theme of the debate between liberals and communitarians, a debate which (as I have suggested above) owes much to, and hinges upon, an idea of individu¬ alism. One of the claims I want to establish in later chapters is that some prominent forms of liberalism (in fact precisely the ‘deontological’ forms of liberalism which communitarians have most vociferously challenged) depend on a special version of the associative rather than the aggregative view. If this is right, then much of that debate may turn out to have depended on a fundamental misperception of at least some individualist values and commitments. The distinction between conceptions of collectivity which are symme¬ trical rather than asymmetrical similarly reminds us of some aspects of the ‘debate’ over individualism and collectivism. As we saw above, the cold war liberals sometimes claimed that efforts to draw analogies between individuals and collectivities were symptomatic of collectivism. For example, the Platonic analogy between justice in the state and the individual was viewed by Popper as an influential source of malign collectivist claims about the ‘personality’ or ‘organic unity’ of the state.12 Similarly, liberal critics of collectivist economic planning have protested that ‘plans for the whole of society are not at all like individual plans’.13 As Jon Elster points out, ‘the notion of the body politic, suggesting that political action is individual action writ large is very old. Among its modern guises are the notions of social engineering and economic 12 See Popper, Open Society 7, pp. 79-80; also Berlin, Four Essays, p. 132. 13 T. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989), pp. 159-61.

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planning.’14 As I noted in the previous chapter, however, the notion of symmetry picks out one aspect of the claim that individuals and collectivities are analogous. A symmetrical conception of collectivity implies simply that there are analogies between justified individual agency and justified collective or public agency. Symmetrical conceptions of collectivity do not necessarily claim that collectivities or states are organisms, or that it makes sense to regard collectivities (rather than the agencies which claim to act on their behalf) as persons in a literal sense. Moreover, the two distinctions I have drawn - aggregative/associative and symmetry/asymmetry - are logically independent. Plato’s conception of justice, for example, combines an associative conception with sym¬ metry. That is, in his view, the political community is to be viewed as an association stuctured by certain irreducible hierarchical relationships between persons. The same hierarchical relationship finds its analogue in the Platonic account of the just soul, and as a result his theory displays symmetry: individual agents order themselves in exactly the way that public agents order the collectivity. However, we can imagine other associative conceptions of collectivity which do not display symmetry. Consider, for example, the other example of an associative conception we used before: the family. In this case, the family group is construed as a structure of irreducible mtersubjective relationships. But we do not have to say that the normative standpoint by which families decide what is good for them (that is, the parents deliberating about how best to raise their children, and then subsequently children deliberating about how to take care of their parents in their old age) is analogous to the normative standpoint adopted by individual family members when they act on their own account (e.g. deliberating about career choice or about whether to buy a car or a caravan). It is the same with aggregative conceptions. Rawls’s criticisms of utilitarianism presuppose that it is an aggregative and symmetrical theory. He assumes that the utilitarian tends to conceive of collective moral deliberation as a macroscopic analogue of individual deliberation. Just as individuals balance and trade-off systems of desires in order to maximize their utility, so the ideal utilitarian legislator seeks to maximize the utility of society as a whole by trading off the utilities of each individual. As we noted above, it is precisely this analogy between individual and collective choice which Rawls regards as the fatal defect of utilitarianism. To him, it suggests that just as individuals can reason¬ ably sacrifice some desires in order to increase their overall utility, so 14 J. Elster, Solomonic Judgements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 175ff.

1989),

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

society may legitimately sacrifice the satisfaction of some individuals for the sake of a greater utility overall.15 But aggregative theories do not have to be symmetrical. There seems no reason why, for example, the procedure by which we aggregate individuals’ unit utilities has to bear any determinate resemblance to the procedure whereby individuals determine their own preferences. Indeed, as I will be suggesting in chapter 6, this is in fact the way in which the utilitarian theory has historically developed. A notorious and historically important difficulty with utilitarianism has been the problem of inter¬ personal comparisons of utility. This problem has forced neoclassical economists (the inheritors of the utilitarian tradition of thought) to adopt a criterion of efficiency (the Pareto Principle) which allows us to rank economic distributions without having to make interpersonal comparisons. But there is no suggestion in neoclassical theory that individuals do, or ought to, determine their own preference rankings by deploying an intrapersonal version of the Pareto Principle. Rather, the suggestion is that the Pareto rule, and the expectations it places on economic distributions which are to count as ‘efficient’, applies only to rankings of social states. To the extent that this is the case, such a theory will display asymmetry. The two distinctions I have been discussing, then, contain and pick out features which remind us of the broader, vaguer distinction between individualism and collectivism. On the one hand, aggregative conceptions of collectivity and the property of asymmetry have affinities with the vague notion of ‘individualism’. Similarly, associative conceptions of collectivity and the property of symmetry have affinities with what is known as ‘collectivism’. But because they are logically independent, there is no presumption that they have to align against each other according to the older format. In fact, I want to show that some liberal positions require a commitment to both associative and symmetrical conceptions. As I will argue in the coming chapters, understanding why this is so enables us to see that liberal individualism may not be the unified edifice whose structural coherence political philosophers recently have taken for granted. 15 Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (pp. 318-20, 330-2) explicitly defends a symmetrical utilitarian theory, though of an unexpected and non-standard kind: on his view, it is not that collectivities are analogous to persons (on the traditional view of personhood); rather, it is that individual persons are analogous to collectivities like nations (on the traditional view of nationhood).

4

Individualist distributions of liberty

The cornerstone of the model of liberal individualism I offered in chapter 1 is the Distribution of Liberty Principle (DLP). This principle combines a commitment to the priority of individual liberty with the view that individuals ought to receive equal consideration. This compound of ideas makes respect for, and protection of, individuals’ equal entitlements to liberty the primary responsibility of the state. The DLP summarizes this commitment in the following form: the only permissible restrictions of individual liberty are those necessary to secure the equal liberty of individual citizens

This intuitively compelling principle has been one of the few constants in the many and varied restatements and reinterpretations of the liberal ideal proposed by theorists in the modern period. The principle inherits much of its intuitive appeal from the Golden Rule, of which it seems to be a political application.1 Only the insensitive or wilfully provocative can seriously deny that its promise of a reciprocal and co-equal balance of liberty among individuals carries palpable moral weight. Nevertheless, as I have stated it, the principle is open to a variety of interpretations. Most obviously, the central concept of ‘liberty’ is left undefined, and the role of the characteristic liberal individualist notion of ‘basic rights’ in the principle remains unclear. Much more will be said below about how different liberals have interpreted these ideas. Leaving these details aside, it is easy to see how the DLP can unite liberals against certain characteristic forms of illiberalism or collectivism. Consider, for example, aristocratic societies in which opportunities are distributed according to social status rather than on the basis of equality, monopolistic cartels which deny to smaller producers the freedom to trade their goods on equal terms, slave-owning societies in which liberty is systematically denied to whole classes of individuals, Fascist states in 1 In the sense that, in enforcing the DLP, the state acts as a guarantor of something like the principle that ‘y°u should be willing to leave others free to do whatever they want as long as they extend the same freedom to you’.

97

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

which individuals are involuntarily enrolled into collective projects from which they are not free to withdraw and so on. In all of these cases, individual liberty is restricted for reasons other than the preservation of an equal balance of liberty itself. Individuals, and their liberty, are thereby subordinated to interests, values or social ideals which the DLP deems ineligible. The DLP sets up a standard under which such infringe¬ ments of individual liberty cannot be justified. But these are the easy cases: I assume that the arguments of aristocrats, Fascists, monopolists and advocates of slavery today present no credible threat either to the DLP or to the liberal tradition in general. But, as liberal individualists are well aware, the DLP confronts a number of more serious challenges. Two of these have been particularly important in shaping the contemporary ideal of liberal individualism that I laid out in chapter 1. First, some liberal individualists have been keen to fortify the DLP against certain kinds of paternalism. They argue that in order for individuals to be free and liberated, it is enough that they be protected against outside interference. On this view, claims that individuals and their liberties need additional protection against themselves are not required by the DLP and indeed represent a threat to the individual liberty it is designed to secure.2 Second, liberal individualists have wanted to deploy the DLP as a barrier against social optimization. Interpreted in this fashion, the DLP acts as a ‘trump’ against claims that a particular infringement of individual liberty might optimize an overall social good. On this view, the DLP expresses the idea that utilitarian reasoning or cost-benefit analysis are misplaced in the context of individuals’ entitlements to basic liberty. The goals of a liberal individualist state, then, are not to be construed in terms of the optimization or maximization of a (set of ) good(s). Rather, 2 For example, Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, p. 211: paternalistic intervention to confer an unwanted benefit is ... an impermissible violation of moral space , and C. Murray, What It Means To Be a Libertarian (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), pp. 102-3: The question of whether people should be allowed to harm themselves is [relatively simple]. They must. To think it is right to use force to override another person’s preferences “for his own good” is the essence of the totalitarian personality. It you have the right to do that to someone else, then someone else has the right to do it to you. That way lies the rationalization for every conceivable kind of coercion.’ See also Jan Narveson's fable about the ‘Knock at the Door’ that opens his Libertarian Idea, p. 3; D. Boaz, Libertarianism: a Primer, p. 211; D. Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory, p. 95; I. Berlin, Four Essays, pp. 30, 34-5, 38, 157. To my mind, the recent liberal interest in the idea of political neutrality expresses an essentially anti¬ paternalist commitment: by remaining neutral on questions of ‘the Good’, the liberal state refrains from claiming that it knows better than individuals how they ought to organize their own lives.

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the DLP, which specifies the primary responsibility of such a state, acts as a constraint on that kind of enterprise.3 These twin themes ot anti-paternalism and anti-optimization have been characteristic features of the resurgent liberal individualism of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I believe that this special concern with anti¬ paternalism and anti-optimization in recent liberal thought can be traced in the seminal contributions of Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls respectively, whose work arguably set the agenda for a whole generation of liberal theorists. The implications of paternalism and optimization for the DLP are of central importance for the argument of this book. Berlin and Rawls therefore provide an ideal starting-point for our discussion. In his classic essay Two Concepts of Liberty Isaiah Berlin is (unchar¬ acteristically) explicit about his own sympathy for the political ideal embodied in the DLP. In reviewing the complex and dynamic history of the concept of liberty, Berlin sides with those who believe, with good reason, that if individual liberty is an ultimate end for human beings, none should be deprived of it by others; least of all that some should enjoy it at the expense of others. Equality of liberty; not to treat others as I should not wish them to treat me; repayment of my debt to those who alone have made possible my liberty or prosperity or enlightenment; justice, in its simplest and most universal sense - these are the foundations of liberal morality.4

Berlin believed that - historically at least - such views were associated with a ‘negative’ concept of liberty, according to which liberty was construed simply as freedom from obstacles, interference and coercion. The alternative concept of liberty which Berlin considered was the notion of ‘positive liberty’. In a positive libertarian theory, liberty is construed as the freedom to perform a privileged category of actions. Berlin’s most obvious theme in Two Concepts is to chart the influence of the positive concept of liberty on the development of totalitarian social doctrines. It needs to be stressed that Berlin never claimed that the notion of positive liberty was necessarily totalitarian, and he even conceded that, under different historical circumstances, negative liberty could have been used to justify totalitarian ideals.5 Nevertheless, Berlin suggested that a distinctive feature of the concept of positive liberty was crucially signifi¬ cant in the actual historical development of totalitarian and protototalitarian ideas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is this concern which connects Berlin’s discussion of totalitarianism with the wider theme of anti-paternalism. The special feature on which Berlin focused was the close link between 3 R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice; R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia; and many others. 4 Berlin, Four Essays, pp. 124, 165. 5 ibid., pp. xliv-xlvi, 134.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

the positive concept of liberty and a commitment to a certain conception of ‘rational self-direction’. This commitment, which Berlin associated above all with Kant, ‘opened the door’ to the ‘rule of experts’ and forms of paternalism which were incompatible with the liberal ideal.6 This occurred because the Kantian notion of rational self-direction (positive liberty) and its derivatives was fundamentally a doctrine of self-discipline, and it was underwritten by a certain model of the person in which the self was split into two components: the ‘transcendent, dominant controller, and the empirical bundle of desires and passions to be disciplined and brought to heel’.7 But once we embrace the ‘positive’ libertarian concept of rational self-direction, it is a short step to the paternalist suggestion that outside agencies may legitimately force individuals to conform their behaviour to this model of rational self-direction. Outsiders can disci¬ pline individuals in this way and yet, by invoking the positive concept of liberty, claim to be preserving (rather than compromising) their freedom.8 There is then a tendency for positive liberty to become identified with discipline and obedience. Berlin suggested that it was just this tendency to conflate liberty with authority and obedience which the negative concept of liberty had historically discouraged. The natural (though never fully explicit) implication of this famous argument was that only the negative concept of liberty was authentically liberal.9 A suitably negative libertarian account of the distribution of liberty would recognize no difference between paternalistic and aggressive interference in indi¬ vidual liberty. Whether or not Berlin himself intended to suggest this, there is little doubt that liberals and their critics often interpret him in this way, and have assumed that his argument establishes the link between liberal individualism and negative liberty. Like Berlin’s argument about negative liberty, the Rawlsian argument against optimization has been tremendously influential within the liberal tradition. This argument is so well known that it hardly bears repeating, but for the sake of completeness, the following brief summary should serve. In two books and a string of articles, Rawls has developed a theory of justice in which the DLP plays a critical role: it is indeed the more important of the two fundamental principles of justice which Rawls recommends. Rawls claims that all optimizing theories of justice (such as utilitarianism) are inferior to his own theory. This is because maximizing the good of society as a whole only makes sense on the assumption that ‘society’ forms a uniform subject of value. But for this assumption to be plausible we must ‘conflate’ individuals, and their values and interests, 6 ibid., p. 152. 7 ibid., p. 134. 9 But see ibid., pp. 160-2, 163-6, 171.

ibid., pp. 133, 158.

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into a morally homogeneous social unit. Rawls says that this fails to ‘take seriously the distinction between persons’,10 and exposes individuals to the risk of violation for the sake of the good of society as a whole. Optimizing theories are therefore unable to recognize the fundamental intuition that ‘each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override’.11 Thus Rawls writes that, utilitarianism is not individualistic, at least when arrived at by the more natural course of reflection, in that, by conflating all systems of desires, it applies to society the principle of choice for one man ... this conflation, and the principle based upon it ... subjects the rights secured by justice to the calculus of social interests.12

Rawls’s and Berlin's respective attacks on paternalism and optimization were both made in the name of the DLP and (for that reason) seem to share a clear family resemblance. More than anything else, this resem¬ blance consists in that fact that both want to ensure that the individual and her liberty are not compromised in the pursuit of illiberal collective projects. In so doing, both of these arguments raise the spectres of collectivism and totalitarianism. Berlin associated paternalism with tota¬ litarianism because for him the Kantian idea of rational self-direction is readily socialized into the doctrine that a beneficent state may ‘force individuals to be free’ by interfering in their private lives to help them to liberate their true selves and to realize their true ends. In this way, Kant’s ‘severe individualism’ can be transformed into ‘something close to a pure totalitarian doctrine’.13 Rawls’s argument also invokes the demon of collectivism by intimating that optimizing arguments involve something like the anti-individualistic idea that ‘society is an organic whole with a life of its own distinct from and superior to that of all its members’.14 At the hands of Rawls and Berlin, then, paternalism and optimization are both anti-individualistic because they threaten to compromise the indi¬ vidual in the name of some wider collective purpose. For Berlin, this happens when the collectivity and its agents claim to know better than the untutored individual. According to Rawls, optimization threatens the individual when the collectivity will do better if individual liberty is abridged. It is important to stress that the attempt to compare paternalism and optimization to crass forms of illiberalism (such as totalitarian collecti¬ vism) can never be fully persuasive. One important reason for this is that, 10 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 27. 11 ibid., p. 3. 12 ibid., pp. 29-30. 13 Berlin, Four Essays, p. 152. 14 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 264.

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unlike Fascism, totalitarianism, slavery et al., for which little can be said, paternalism and optimization genuinely command our moral attention, and pose a legitimate threat to liberal individualist views about the primacy of individual liberty. This is best shown by the fact, noted by a number of moral philosophers, that efforts to deny either of them have paradoxical consequences. Dan Brock makes the point with respect to paternalism: To resist [paternalistic] interference would seem inconsistent with the assumptions of rational agency. And the same can obviously be said about the appeal to moral rights to block others from interfering in our action in ways that would better promote our good than would their not interfering; it seems perversely incon¬ sistent with [the] conception of purposive, autonomous, and free action. Whether put in terms of rights or not, we have on the one hand a conception of human action as seeking the agent’s good, and on the other a deliberate refusal to permit the promotion of one’s own good when it will be achieved by the paternalistic interference of another.15

The similarly paradoxical consequences of rejecting optimization have been comprehensively exposed by Samuel Scheffler in his classic work The Rejection of Consequentialism. That book makes the point that it seems obviously peculiar to demand not merely that ‘one is not always required to produce the best available states of affairs overall, but also that it is positively impermissible to do so’.16 But, paradoxical as it is, this is a clear implication of the demand, made by Rawls, Nozick and many others, that the DLP act as a categorical constraint on efforts to optimize the social good. The attempt to assimilate paternalism and optimization to totalitarian collectivism is unconvincing for another, perhaps connected, reason. Paternalism and optimization cannot be regarded as straightforwardly illiberal in the way that totalitarianism is. As the arguments of Rawls and Berlin illustrate superbly, paternalism and optimization can be clearly discerned within the liberal tradition as well as outside it. Thus Berlin sees Kant and Rousseau as opening the door to illiberal forms of paternalism, but Rawls regards these figures as key heroes in the liberal struggle against the optimizing urges of the utilitarians. And of course it is just this utilitarian tradition, suspect from the Rawlsian point of view, that provides Berlin with such prominent and (to him) commendable negative libertarians as Bentham and Mill. In seeking to resist paternalism and optimization, then, Berlin, Rawls and their successors in the liberal 15 D. Brock, ‘Promoting the Good’, in R. Sartorius, ed., Paternalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 248. 16 S. Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 115.

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tradition have not been attacking alien political ideals; rather, they have been reflecting on, and seeking to perfect, the liberal tradition itself, often in ways which place different aspects of that tradition at odds. The contributions of Berlin and Rawls illustrate this in a particularly striking way, since their arguments often seem to incriminate each other’s preferred liberal paragons in exactly the forms of illiberalism they are trying to eradicate.17 These important anomalies about the arguments of Berlin and Rawls raise an apparently innocent and rarely asked question. Is it possible, within the framework of liberal ideas, simultaneously to oppose both paternalism and social optimization in the name of individual liberty? Very few have doubted this. Indeed, the individualist ideal I laid out in chapter 1 is an effort to embrace both. This is best illustrated by the libertarians, who (as we saw) take a puritanical view of that ideal. Such libertarians want to purge any and all paternalistic and optimizing elements from liberal ideas. They regard the exclusive commitment to an inviolable private sphere as a single expression of these twin projects. In this, they have often aligned themselves with Berlin in upholding negative against positive liberty,18 and with Rawls in urging Kantian considera¬ tions against utilitarianism.19 This sort of liberal individualism has been vigorously criticized as callously obsessive, or as lacking an adequate conception of human community, but the critics have rarely suggested that it is incoherent to resist both positive liberty and utilitarianism, paternalism and optimization, in the name of ‘the individual’. It has seemed obvious to almost everyone that negative liberty, Kantianism, anti-paternalism and anti-optimization do indeed flow naturally together 17 It is useful to note here that the three most important historical protagonists in this debate, Rousseau, Kant and Mill, all endorse versions of the DLP. Thus Rousseau: ‘Liberty consists less in doing your will than in not being submitted to the will of another; it consists further in not subjecting another’s will to our own ... in the common liberty no one has the right to do what the liberty of another forbids him, and true liberty is never self-destructive’ in John Hope Mason, The Indispensable Rousseau (New York: Horizon Press, 1979), p. 247; Kant: ‘A constitution of the greatest possible human freedom according to laws, by which the liberty of every individual can consist with the liberty of every other ... is ... a necessary idea which must be placed at the foundation not only of the first plan of the constitution of a state, but of all its laws’, in Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 191; Mill: ‘The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it’ in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, p. 81. 18 For example, J. Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, pp. 22-40; L. Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community, p. 177; D. Boaz, Libertarianism: a Primer, p. 75. 19 For example, R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 32-3; J. Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, p. 152; L. Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, p. 17; D. Boaz, Libertarianism: a Primer, p. 97.

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to form a coherent, integrated individualist position, however unattrac¬ tive such a position might turn out to be. The debate has thus tended in practice to slump back into a mould reminiscent of (and surely influenced by) the earlier cold war debate, with everyone portraying the libertarians as the pure individualists, the moderate liberals seeking to qualify pure individualism and the communitarians completely repudiating individu¬ alism (qualified and unqualified) in the name of the common good, or of the community as a whole. One way of expressing the main thesis of this book is to say that it raises the possibility that liberal individualists cannot resist paternalism and optimization at the same time. If this is so, the values and ideals of liberal individualism cannot be fully insulated from paternalist or optimizing imperatives. In the next chapter, I will suggest that this makes the contemporary individualist project not merely undesirable or callous, but conceptually incoherent, and I trace out the destabilizing impli¬ cations of this conclusion for recent libertarian theories. This chapter lays some of the ground for this conclusion by taking seriously the anomalies about Berlin’s and Rawls’s arguments noted above. I argue that these anomalies tip us off to the presence of two diverging accounts of the DLP, one associated with a Rousseauan and Kantian approach, the other associated with Mill and the utilitarian tradition. Although both interpretations are recognizably liberal, they protect the security, liberty and autonomy of ‘the individual’ in different ways, and generate importantly different accounts of the relations between individuals, society and the state. This chapter thus characterizes the differences between these two interpretations of the DLP in terms of differences between the conceptions of collectivity to which they give rise. In a certain sense, then, my argument agrees with Rawls and Berlin on at least one point, that the forms of paternalism and optimization to which they allude raise questions about the relation between individual agents and agencies that claim to act on behalf of the community as a whole. But by repeatedly insinuating a connection between them and totalitarian forms of collectivism, Berlin and Rawls did little to dis¬ courage the naive view that anti-paternalism and anti-optimization are alike expressions of a single overriding issue about the ‘priority’ of individual security, liberty and autonomy over projects pursued in the name of the collectivity or ‘society as a whole’. As we shall see, this formula elides important discontinuities in the arguments of Berlin, Rawls, Kant, Mill and others. These arguments actually raise several different issues about how individuals are to be protected and what they need to be protected from. This chapter uses the distinctions introduced in the previous chapter to show not only that they raise different issues

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about the integrity ot ‘the individual’ under different collective arrange¬ ments, but also that these arguments conflict in important ways. Under¬ standing the differences and conflicts between these two accounts of the DLP is the key to my claim that the unity of the individualist ideal I laid out in chapter 1 is more apparent than real. To bring out these two interpretations of the DLP and the conceptions ot collectivity to which they are connected, I will explore in some detail the complaints made by Berlin about Rousseau and Kant and by Rawls about Mill and utilitarian accounts of the DLP. The discussion proceeds in four phases. First, I discuss Berlin’s criticism of Rousseau. 1 show that this objection does not hinge on the concept of negative liberty because Kant was able to make exactly the same criticism using a positive concept of liberty. Second, I offer further clarifications of Berlin’s notion of negative liberty and explore common misconceptions about its relation to liberal ideas. Third, I give an extended account of Mill’s defence of the DLP in order to assess its vulnerability to the anti-utilitarian arguments of Rawls and his followers, and its relation to Kantian views about the distribution of liberty. Finally, I pull together the strands of the discus¬ sion and lay out the two accounts of the DLP which have emerged. From Rousseau to Kant I begin, then, by considering Berlin’s arguments about Rousseau’s theory of the General Will. Berlin’s own antipathy to this theory has led him to pronounce Rousseau to be ‘the most sinister and most formidable enemy of liberty in the whole history of modern thought’.20 Although Berlin’s claim here is astonishingly strong, it is quite representative of the claim, made familiar by liberals in this century, that Rousseau’s doctrine of the General Will laid the foundations for the kinds of totalitarian collectivism which developed in the twentieth century. On the face of it, this looks like a grossly uncharitable view of Rousseau’s position. Throughout his political writings, Rousseau endorses views that seem archetypically liberal. For example, he insists that political institutions exist to secure the ‘goods, life and liberty’ of individual citizens.21 And somewhat like Rawls and other anti-utilitarians, Rousseau regards the idea that individuals should be sacrificed ‘for the welfare of the multi¬ tude’ as tyrannous and ‘despicable’.22 20 This comment was made by Berlin in a BBC radio broadcast, 5 Nov. 1952, in a series entitled Freedom and Its Betrayal. Quoted in G. H. Dodge, Benjamin Constant’s Philosophy of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 57 n. 18. 21 Rousseau, Basie Political Writings, pp. 116, 122. 22 ibid., p. 122.

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Critics like Berlin are presumably aware of these apparently liberal claims. What then is their objection? For Berlin and his followers, the problem is not just that Rousseau indulges in anthropomorphic talk about the collectivity possessing its own self and will.23 It is also that the very notion of the ‘will’ invoked by Rousseau presupposes a positive concept of liberty. Unlike a negative concept of liberty, under which restraint and discipline always signify a lack of liberty, the positive conception of liberty precisely equates liberty with the exercise of a will which is appropriately self-disciplining or self-restraining. The result is a conflation of liberty and a certain kind of coercion. When, as in Rousseau, that conception is collectivized into the notion of a General Will, it becomes possible to claim that the coercive intervention by the state in individuals’ private lives is not merely compatible with their liberty, it is actually the realization of their liberty. By equating political liberty with the coercion of those who refuse to obey the General Will, Rousseau’s theory permits and even encourages the violation of some individuals’ liberty for the sake of the collectivity as a whole and its ends.24 That is why in Two Concepts of Liberty Berlin treats Rousseau’s theory of the General Will as a classic, and salutary, illustration of the totalitarian implications of the positive account of liberty. The claim then is not that Rousseau intended to launch modern totalitarianism, but that even if he thought of himself as committed to the cause of individual liberty, his theoretical apparatus is ill-equipped to secure it. According to Berlin, all this stands in marked contrast to the position taken by proponents of a purely negative concept of liberty. By keeping liberty and restraint conceptually separate, defenders of a negative concept of liberty are in a much better position to secure a genuinely liberal distribution of liberty. Berlin takes Mill’s worries about a tyranny of the majority as a classic statement by a proponent of the negative concept of liberty of the flaw at the heart of Rousseau’s doctrine: Liberals of the first half of the nineteenth century ... pointed out that the sovereignty of the people could easily destroy that of individuals. Mill explained, patiently and unanswerably, that government by the people was not, in his sense, necessarily freedom at all. For those who govern are not necessarily the same ‘people’ as those who are governed, and democratic self-government is not the government of ‘each by himself’, but, at best, of ‘each by the rest’. Mill and his disciples spoke of the tyranny of the majority ... and saw no great difference between that and any other kind of tyranny which encroaches upon men’s activities beyond the sacred frontiers of private life. 23 ibid., pp. 114, 122-3; liberals also reject the further suggestion that the ‘public self’ is in some sense individuals’ ‘true' self: see ibid., p. 125. 24 On this point, Rousseau’s critics always quote his infamous remark about being ‘forced to be free’: ibid., pp. 150, 162.

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Berlin s invocation of this famous argument was intended to connect his own objections to Rousseau’s theory with the idea of negative liberty to which Mill himself subscribed.25 Only by holding fast to a negative concept ot liberty - like Mill’s - can the totalitarian implications of Rousseau’s theory be avoided. Insisting on the negative concept of liberty makes it harder to confuse liberty with the violation of some individuals’ liberties by the self-directing sovereign of Rousseau’s Social Contract. A liberal distribution of liberty is more likely to be secured if we embrace a negative concept of liberty, and refuse to be seduced by the fatally attractive ideals of the positive libertarian tradition. In what follows, I suggest that this argument against the General Will does not, as Berlin implies, turn on the distinction between positive and negative liberty. The reason for this is that a similar objection to Rousseau was formulated within the positive libertarian tradition by his successor Kant. Kant’s argument is decisive, yet it does not, as I shall show, depart from Rousseau’s concept of liberty: instead, it reinterprets and deepens it. Moreover, understanding some of the properties of Rousseau’s and Kant’s arguments is crucial for understanding the differences between the two interpretations of the DLP which this chapter aims to uncover. The first point to note here is that Rousseau’s theory of the General Will centres on an associative (see the last chapter) conception of collectivity.26 Rousseau’s theory is not, at least in the first instance, concerned with individual interests or a conception of social utility. At base, it is a theory about the relations between individuals, and in particular relations of power, domination and dependence. Notoriously, Rousseau believes that the existence of relations of power, domination and dependence is a deplorable but ineradicable feature of human civilization.27 In his view, civilization can be redeemed only if the relations of power and dependence that characterize it are made legit¬ imate and authoritative, and this can come about only by specifying relations of power and dependence that are equitable.28 This in turn is possible, according to Rousseau, only when those relations express and guarantee the equal moral status of individuals.29 Throughout his moral and political writings, Rousseau connects this associative ideal of moral equality with a notion of fairness or justice, and in particular with the notion of ethical reciprocity embodied in the Golden Rule, which he once refers to as the ‘sublime principle of reasoned justice’.30 Although Rousseau is at best oblique on this point, it 25 I. Berlin, Four Essays, p. 163 . 26 Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, p. 147. 27 ibid., pp. 70, 77 - 8 . 28 ibid., p. 141. 29 ibid., p. 123. 30 ibid., p. 55.

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is pretty clear that the institutional underpinning of the General Will is supposed to offer a procedural rendition of this kind of ethical recipro¬ city: It should be seen that what makes the will general is not so much the number of votes as the common interest that unites them, for in this institution each person necessarily submits himself to the conditions he imposes on others, an admirable accord between interest and justice which bestows on common deliberations a quality of equity.31

Rousseau’s claim is that when the sovereign power is structured in the way he suggests, individuals’ attitudes to their private interests will be altered so that the requirements of fairness and reciprocity are met. Because they will be forced to impose upon others only what they would be willing to accept themselves from others, there is some kind of institutional guarantee of equal treatment. Individuals will be less ready than otherwise to pursue their private interest in ways which are incompatible with the equal moral status of others. Some requirement of equal treatment, then, will constrain individuals’ decisions about the General Will, or so the theory supposes. This idea of a reciprocal balance of political responsibility and liberty was not original with Rousseau, but at this point he introduces a major conceptual innovation. Rousseau suggests that his theory of the General Will secures the appropriate relations of equal respect between indi¬ viduals by supplying an account of moral relations within individuals.32 Because Rousseauan citizens are both subjects and members of the sovereign, the appropriate relations of authority and dependence between individuals are mirrored in and underpinned by an intrapersonal relation between individuals’ private selves and their public selves. On the one hand, citizens bear a private person with its own private will and interests which is to be regulated by the General Will and the laws that are derived from it. On the other, they bear a public person who participates in public deliberation about the General Will. In exercising their capacities in the latter context, then, individuals subject their private wills and interests to public rules of which each is a partial author. This helps to explain Rousseau’s rather condensed claim that the sovereign is an association which involves a ‘reciprocal commitment between the public and private individuals, [in which] each individual, contracting, as it were, with himself, finds himself under a twofold

31 ibid., p. 158. 32 See Andrew Levine, The General Will: Rousseau, Marx, Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 30, 33-4.

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commitment: namely as a member of the sovereign to private individuals, and as a member of the state toward the sovereign’.33 According to Rousseau, by bringing their private desires into align¬ ment with the General Will in this way, citizens submit themselves to self-imposed rules of justice. That is why Rousseau says that citizens obtain 'moral liberty’ in return for renouncing their natural liberty: they become autonomous in the sense that they are obedient only to selfimposed laws.34 As is well known, Rousseau here arrives at a positive, 'moralized’ concept of liberty that anticipates Kant’s conception of moral autonomy. Moreover, like Kant, Rousseau claims that individuals who are 'morally liberated' in this sense command respect from their associates. A person who strikes the appropriate balance between his public reason and his private interests exhibits the virtues of the good citizen, and achieves a moral status in so doing. To achieve, or to aspire sincerely to attain, that moral status is to become worthy of the equal respect which the General Will is supposed to guarantee: 'If it is a fine thing to command, it is when those who obey us can honor us. Therefore respect your fellow citizens and you will make yourself respectable.’35 Participation in General Willing under the appropriate conditions, then, will lead one to respect others’ moral status; but in so doing one will also realize one’s own moral status and become inviolably worthy of their respect.36 For Rousseau, citizens are not owed such respect in virtue of some passive, natural attribute, but in virtue of actively cultivating their capacity to be virtuous citizens. It follows from this that Rousseauan moral status has no meaning outside of social and political relations, since it is only in the context of political participation that the qualifying virtue of self-discipline will be systematically displayed. Like his contemporary Hume, Rousseau thus rejects the idea that public morality is based in a set of primitive, pre¬ social ethical principles, the central assumption of the classical theory of the social contract.37 But unlike Hume, Rousseau does not account for ethical conventions and moral character in terms of the social and individual interests they serve. Instead, he assumes moral properties to be ineradicably associative, disclosed always in a pattern of relations between selves rather than in the supply of goods or benefits in which individuals have some kind of stake. Rousseau shows great ingenuity in then arguing that the appropriately egalitarian relations of mutual independence which characterize a just social order depend on a set of 33 34 36 37

Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, p. 149. ibid., pp. 145, 150-1. 35 ibid., p. 123. N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 166, 162-3. Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, pp. 52-5.

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intrapersonal relations between individuals’ public and private indentities. Thus for Rousseau, the politics of the just societyvinvolves a politics of the self. The relations of respect which ought to pattern the former have their counterpart in the relations which ought to structure the deliberative encounters between our private selves (and their interests) and our public selves (and their responsibilities).38 What emerges, then, is a conception of public agency which is not merely associative, but also symmetrical in the sense given in the last chapter. On Rousseau’s view, a public agent acts correctly when it suppresses those passions and interests that might lead individuals to act in ways inconsistent with the egalitarian relations of respect and mutual independence that ought to structure society. But of course, in Rous¬ seau’s theory, the appropriate public agent is the sovereign, and the sovereign just is the whole citizenry collectively organized so as to be capable of General Willing. And as we have seen, the effect of the procedural contrivance of the General Will is to set up a model of individual agency in which the realization of one’s own virtue consists in suppressing those passions and interests which are inconsistent with the appropriate relations of respect and mutual independence which char¬ acterize a just society. The principles by which individuals act on their own behalf and those by which the public agent acts on behalf of society as a whole are thus effectively the same, and are united in the institution of the popular sovereign. It was this rather intricate conceptual structure which Kant inherited from Rousseau. But Kant amended and deepened it in several ways. One disagreement is particularly important. As we noted above, Rousseau thinks that moral duties and responsibilities could have little meaning for a solitary Robinson Crusoe, since for him ethical demands only come with social interaction. But while for Rousseau it is not clear that Crusoe has any moral duties, Kant’s theory implies that he does. For Kant, Robinson Crusoe is not in any way absolved from moral duties in virtue of being alone, for he still has duties towards himself, not only is Crusoe likely to have a strong desire to preserve himself by foraging for food on the island, he is morally bound to do so. No doubt in such a situation Crusoe will frequently be tempted to give up the fight for survival, but, for Kant, to give in to such temptation would be a dereliction of duty: Man cannot renounce his personality as long as he is a subject of duty, hence as long as he lives; and it is a contradiction that he should be authorized to withdraw from all obligation, that is, freely to act as if no authorization were needed for 38 See M. Viroli, The Concept of Ordre and the Language of Classical Republicanism in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, in A. Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in EarlyModern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 167-8.

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this action. To annihilate the subject of morality in one's own person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world, as far as one can, even though morality is an end in itself. Consequently, disposing of oneself as a mere means to some discretionary end is debasing humanity in one’s person (homo noumenon), to which man (homo phaenomenon) was nevertheless entrusted for preservation.39

This striking passage illustrates that Kant accepts, but deepens, the Rousseauan idea that individual agents are composed of moral personae which stand in a moral relationship. The difference is that in the Kantian account individuals do not come to understand this internal relationship on the basis of a reflection on their status within some actual scheme of association; instead, it is based on Kant’s own elaborate metaphysic of freedom which in principle applies in all contexts, independent not just of a particular political backdrop, but also of the very existence of any other agent. In this view, the rules and procedures which promote ethical action in the world become a viable project for the individual conscience rather than something which only a community of individuals could realize. But although Kant’s view was in this sense individualistic, it retained the Rousseauan insight that moral concepts are essentially relational. Even in a one-person world, Kantian morality remains ineradicably relational, because such an agent is still responsible for respecting his own moral freedom; and his responsibilities to himself parallel his duties to others (where they exist). The key point is that for Kant, each individual is already a selfsufficient moral entity like Rousseau’s body politic - no external relation¬ ship is necessary for the realization of his or her moral status: to put it in more familiar Kantian terms, the individual agent is an autonomous source of morality. It was this idea which enabled Kant to deliver a decisive objection to Rousseau’s theory of the General Will: Of the three forms of sovereignty, democracy, in the truest sense of the word, is necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power through which all the citizens may make decisions about (and indeed against) the single individual without his consent, so that decisions are made by all the people and yet not by all the people; and this means that the general will is in contradiction with itself, and thus also with freedom.40

Although Kant’s point is here highly compressed, his argument delivers precisely the kind of point against the General Will which Berlin had in mind when he invoked Mill’s arguments about the tyranny of the majority. 39 I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 219. 40 I. Kant, Political Writings, p. 101; cf. I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. J. W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), p. 42.

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The key to unpacking Kant’s claim lies in the concept of freedom which his remark presupposes. Kant accepts Rousseau’s claim that freedom is obedience to a law one gives to oneself, and Vie accepts that to exhibit this kind of autonomy is to be worthy of the equal respect which Rousseauan citizens are owed as a matter of inviolable right. For both Rousseau and Kant, to be autonomous in this sense is to attain to a certain kind of moral status. But Kant’s objection is that there is a contradiction between the achievement of that status and the political procedures under which Rousseau’s General Will is supposed to secure it. The complaint is that the theory of the General Will is internally unstable because it tries to combine the following two claims: (i) individuals possess moral worth and dignity when they are autono¬ mous in a particular way: i.e., when they submit to a self-legislated rule. (ii) the achievement of this moral status depends upon becoming a good citizen, which means accepting the authority of decision procedures which occur outside oneself. The problem that Kant identifies is that if (i) is a function of (ii), we cannot be sure that individuals will be subject only to laws that their own autonomy could countenance. For (ii) entails that the General Will cannot be specified authoritatively outside of the procedural mechanism which is supposed to disclose it. Even if each citizen is a partial author of the General Will, it remains the case that the procedure is conducted outside the minds of any of the individuals who are its subjects. Indeed, Rousseau regards this feature as a major selling point of his theory, for it is the fact that individuals are subjected to an impersonal procedure which ensures that they ‘give themselves to no one’ in agreeing to the social contract.41 However, Kant correctly realizes that giving oneself to no one in particular is not enough to ensure that one will be subject only to oneself. If the institutional factors (individuals deliberating on their own, the absence of ‘partial associations’ and so on)42 which are supposed to constrain the deliberations of the sovereign fail to have the appropriate effect upon the deliberations of the majority, there is nothing to rule out the majority denying the appropriate moral status to particular minorities or individuals. The problem, then, is that the political procedures set up by Rousseau to protect individuals may be followed perfectly, and yet the outcome

41 Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, p. 148 and cf. ibid., p. 60. 42 ibid., pp. 156-7.

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may still violate individuals autonomy. But because there is no author¬ itative moral criterion independent of the General Will to appeal to, the theory will tend to misdescribe such violations as actually securing the autonomy of the violated; for, on Rousseau's view, the achievement of individual autonomy is the product, not the premiss, of the procedures under which the General Will is supposed to emerge. Kant’s conclusion was that there is something wrong with the way in which Rousseau specified the procedures; his own solution was to generate an ethical procedure which would always protect individual autonomy as long as it was properly followed; and that procedure was of course the Categorical Imperative. Kant’s objection takes issue with Rousseau’s argument on its own terms: tar trom claiming that Rousseau had an incorrect conception ot liberty, Kant’s suggestion was that he had an incomplete understand¬ ing of how the correct conception ought to operate. Indeed, the standard by which the argument is evaluated is the very goal which Rousseau set out to promote: the inviolability of autonomous agency. Kant, then, thought that the theory of the General Will was danger¬ ously self-defeating in just the way that Berlin does. But we can now see that this argument clearly does not hinge on the notion of negative liberty, for Kant’s argument inherits the positive conception of freedom used by Rousseau. Like Rousseau’s earlier inadequate version of the same argument, and in exactly the way that Berlin thought problematic, Kant identifies freedom with obedience to an internal authority; it is in virtue of their capacity for this kind of autonomy that agents possess a moral status which makes them inviolable. On this view, each individual is inviolably entitled to the conditions under which they may exercise their autonomy. It is on this basis that Kant endorses his version of the DLP: the only legitimate interferences with individual liberty are those which are necessary to guarantee the inviolable and equal entitlement of each to exercise their own capacity for moral autonomy. Kant’s argument, like Rousseau’s, generates an associative and strongly symmetrical conception of public agency. It is associative in that individuals (ought to) relate to the collectivity to which they belong through the medium of certain irreducible reciprocal relationships of authority and respect among themselves. These interpersonal relation¬ ships specify the obligations and duties which define a well-ordered collectivity. Thus, for example, Kant’s ‘kingdom of ends’ is a theoretical ideal in which agents’ actions systematically conform to appropriately reciprocal relations of respect and mutual independence. The theory is symmetrical in that principles under which individual agents ought to act on their own behalf are essentially the same as those under which a public agent ought to act on behalf of the collectivity as a whole. The

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imperative to regard autonomy as inviolable is the overriding factor in ethical deliberation in both arenas. v Again, Rousseau is the source for this feature of the Kantian theory, for it was his idea that the relationships which define a political commun¬ ity have an analogy in an intrapersonal relation between sovereign and subject which Kant elaborated in a non-political context. This is striking because it reveals that Berlin was perfectly right to detect in the positive libertarian tradition a tendency to assimilate individual and public agency. It is not necessarily here that Berlin is wrong; rather, Berlin’s argument may have been mistaken in a more surprising way: he may well have been wrong to suppose that this kind of assimilation of individual and public agency is necessarily illiberal. Clarifying negative liberty Nothing I have said so far has given us any reason to doubt Berlin’s claim that proponents of a negative concept of liberty must reject Rousseau’s theory on grounds similar to those given by Kant. And it is still open to Berlin to claim that Rousseau’s theory illustrates some of the dangerous implications of the theory of positive liberty. All we have denied is that one has to reject the positive concept of liberty in order to accept Berlin’s objection to the theory of the General Will. But is it true that the concept of negative liberty, as used by Berlin and Mill, gives rise to exactly the same claim about the inviolability of individuals that Kant’s argument generates? It is helpful here to distinguish between two aspects of the concept of negative liberty which theorists (including Berlin) frequently run to¬ gether. On the one hand, there is the ‘basic concept’ of negative liberty itself, which essentially provides a definition of what freedom is. Accord¬ ing to that definition, freedom is nothing other than the ‘absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities’, as Berlin put it.43 A person’s freedom is then a function of the number and superability of the obstacles that lie in the path of activities and projects which they might choose to pursue. On the other hand, there are the various political uses to which this definition of liberty may reasonably be put. I call this the ‘political interpretation’ of negative liberty. It is in this narrower context that Berlin says, ‘you lack political liberty only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings’. Berlin refines this further still by adding that the kind of ‘prevention’ that is relevant in the context of 43 I. Berlin, Four Essays, pp. xxxix-xl.

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political liberty is coercive interference. This he distinguishes from other forms ot ‘inability:’ ‘It I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced.’ Moreover, Berlin assumes that coercion involves deliberate or intentional, and hence potentially culpable, inter¬ ference with another person’s liberty: thus he writes, ‘coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act’.44 In these passages Berlin seems to imply that an exclusive concern with coercion naturally results from incorporating the basic concept of negative liberty into a political theory. Although other parts of Berlin’s discussion arguably support rather different views of how negative liberty falls out in political contexts, few have actually pursued these alternative suggestions. As a result, many have assumed (and believed that they were following Berlin in assuming) that when applied to politics, negative freedom demands essentially the absence of coercion, where coercion implies a culpable infraction of liberty 45 This assumption of course makes it very easy to assimilate negative libertarian theories to Kantian views about the distribution of liberty. Since treating individuals as means rather than as ends in themselves, in the Kantian sense, seems to be a paradigm case of coercion, there seems no reason to deny that something very like Kant’s view of individual inviolability is strongly implied by the negative concept of liberty. I do not mean to deny here that it may be possible to derive something like this Kantian view from within a negative theory of political liberty. However, it would be a serious exaggeration to suggest that negative liberty points unequivocally in a Kantian direction. To see why, we need to examine more carefully the intuition that not all obstacles to a person’s liberty are equally significant or qualitatively similar: obstacles come in different shapes and sizes, and some are particularly important. The distinction between the basic concept of negative liberty and the political interpretation of negative liberty depends on just this intuition, because it assumes that only certain categories of obstacles are serious enough to warrant the attention of the state. I am going to suggest that when we look more closely at this intuition, we realize that adopting the basic concept of negative liberty does not uniquely imply an account of political liberty which defines 44 ibid., p. 122.

45 For example, J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, pp. 409, 410; J. Reiman, Justice and Modem Moral Philosophy, p. 228; R. Plant, Modern Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 102, 222, 244; P. Pettit, The Common Mind, p. 309.

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political freedom in terms of the absence of coercion alone. Once we see why this is so we will be in a position to appreciate the differences between Kantian and negative libertarian views of the distribution of liberty. I begin by distinguishing four obvious and interdependent sub-classes of the general category of obstacles to human activity: (1) obstacles caused by human action or behaviour; (2) coercive obstacles; (3) ob¬ stacles that are remediable through political action; and (4) obstacles that are interferences. These distinctions reveal that applying the basic concept of negative liberty to politics does not imply an exclusive concern with the prevention or absence of coercion. In particular, these distinctions reveal that there is a difference between seeking to curtail non-interference (4) and seeking to prohibit coercion (2). I suggest that if there is any natural political interpretation of the basic concept of negative liberty, it will take non-interference as seriously as non-coercion, if not more so. I take it that the distinctions between the first three classes of obstacles are straightforward. There are obviously many obstacles that deprive me of options but which are not caused by humans (hurricanes, diseases, gravity). By contrast, such obstacles as traffic-jams, the Great Wall of China and border controls are the result of human actions and be¬ haviour. These latter obstacles fall into the first category. I define a coercive obstacle as any violation or restriction of liberty which results from the deliberate action of an agent, such that the agent can be held morally responsible for any resulting wrong. This usage of the term is followed by Nozick and Raz (and Berlin himself in some passages).46 It follows from this definition that coercive obstacles are all cases of obstacles caused by human action. But clearly, traffic-jams and the Great Wall of China do not coerce me in the way that a mugger does, for example, even though both deprive me of options. The second category of coercive obstacles is thus a sub-category of the first. The third category comprises those obstacles that are removable or otherwise remediable via public action. Gravity deprives me of options, but there is nothing that a 46 See R. Nozick, Coercion, in P. Laslett, W. G. Runciman and Q. Skinner, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society (Fourth Series) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 104-6; J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, pp. 149ff. I am using the term ‘coercion’ in this way simply for the sake of clarity. It may well be that our ordinary language use of the term ‘coercion’ implies a broader category of actions. Nothing in my argument would be affected by objecting to my usage of a more restrictive criterion. All I wish to maintain is that adopting the basic concept of negative liberty does not necessarily commit us to an account of political liberty which restricts only those unacceptable infringements or abridgements of individual liberty for which specific individuals can be held accountable.

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state can reasonably do about it. The obstacles which result from the activities of criminal organizations like the Mafia, on the other hand, might well generate serious impediments to individuals’ liberty, and we do normally assume that the state can do something about them. Obstacles of this category may belong to any of the other categories I have mentioned. The fourth category, that of interferences, is less straightforward than the others, but is nonetheless the critical one. As Jan Narveson has written, interferences are 'where the action is’ within discussions of political or moral liberty.47 But it seems natural to say that not all obstacles to my liberty of action necessarily count as interferences. Someone who buys the last copy of the The Social Contract available in New York clearly restricts the liberty of a visitor to the city: the visitor is no longer at liberty to obtain that copy of the Social Contract. Although this is clearly a very minor infraction, it nonetheless counts as an obstacle to his liberty of action, since it reduces the options which are available to him. But if the visitor is not in town to buy books, or if he already possesses a copy of the Social Contract adequate to his needs, this obstacle to his liberty is clearly not an interference. On the other hand, if I am planning to play golf by the sea, the fact that a hurricane is forecast to sweep over the links is an obstacle to my actions which would count as an interference. It would count as an interference because it prevents or hinders me from carrying out an option which I have selected and in which I have some interest. Let us then say that an obstacle becomes an interference when it hinders, thwarts or meddles with some activity or project which an agent chooses to engage in, or in which an agent has some particular interest or whose continued availability is of real concern to the relevant agent. While not all obstacles must be interferences, on this account, all interferences count as obstacles, since they must restrict the options available to an agent in some way. I note in passing that the identification of an interference is, on the definition I have just given, independent of any claims about what kinds of activities or goals individuals ought to select. All we need to know in order to determine whether some obstructing factor is or is not an interference in some instance is whether or not it hinders some activity or goal in which the agent in question in fact has an interest. This is an important point since some might suggest, along the lines of an argument proposed by Charles Taylor, that any effort to distinguish mere obstacles from interferences forces us in the direction of a positive conception of freedom as the liberty to perform certain kinds of 47 Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, p. 20.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

‘significant’ actions.48 But this is not necessarily the case. Defining interferences as obstructions to activities to whicvh some individual attaches significance does not require us to agree that the agent in question is correct or praiseworthy in taking an interest in those activities. We may think that our children would be wasting their lives by choosing careers in the circus over careers in the legal profession. But if they have no interest in the latter and have contrived a deep desire to lead a clown’s life, then any attempts to prevent them from realizing this goal would count as interferences. Interferences in this sense may or may not be the result of human activity, they may or may not be the result of coercion49 and they may or may not be remediable by public action: the category of interferences is therefore logically independent of the other three I have mentioned. This reveals an important feature of the negative concept of interference which I have been sketching: the basic distinction between obstacles which merely restrict our liberty and those which interfere with those activities to which individuals attach value is independent of claims about how the relevant obstacles were causally generated, as Berlin sometimes seems to recognize.50 The only information that is relevant concerns the relation between the options and interests of a specific agent and factors which impinge upon them in one way or another. The nature of the source of the interference is irrelevant. Thus although they may often overlap, there is no equivalence between interferences and coercive obstacles, for the latter are source-sensitive while interferences are source-neutral. The distinctions I have been drawing are summarized in the diagram opposite. The point of this diagram is not merely to indicate the most important logical relations among the various categories given above. It is also intended to illustrate how those categories are likely to impinge upon the effort to generate a conception of political liberty from the basic concept of negative liberty. The bottom line represents possible political interpretations of the concept of negative liberty. Obviously, the focus of 48 C. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers Vol. 2, pp 213 215 219-20, 228-9. 49 Berlin equivocates about the relation between interference and coercion. At one point he writes of ‘non-interference’ as ‘the opposite of coercion’: Four Essays, p. 128. Earlier he had defined coercion as deliberate interference: ibid., p. 122. But in another part of his discussion of negative liberty he writes: ‘the criterion of oppression is the part I believe to be played by other human beings, directly or indirectly, with or without the intention of doing so, in frustrating my wishes. By being free in this [negative] sense I mean not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom’: ibid., p. 123.1 see no easy way of reconciling these three different claims. 50 ‘liberty [in the negative sense] is principally concerned with the area of control, not its source’, ibid., p. 129.

Individualist distributions of liberty

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BASIC CONCEPT OF NEGA TIVE LIBER TY -freedom from ... obstacles caused by human action coercive (culpable) interferences remediable by public act on

I_L

A

B

CD

E

F

G

H

I

POLITICAL INTERPRET A TION OF NEGA TIVE LIBER TY attention should be between points D and F along that line, since it would seem unreasonable to expect the state to take responsibility for what it cannot do. The diagram clearly indicates why there is no reason to suppose that the basic concept of negative liberty demands only freedom from coercion in political contexts. This would be the case only if there was some reason, intrinsic to the notion of negative liberty itself, for restricting the state to the sector DE in the diagram. But this is not the case, for it ignores the sector EF. And, as Berlin acknowledges, there is no reason to doubt that under certain kinds of circumstance the unintended consequences of human interaction may generate very serious interferences with the liberty of some individuals. To take the most obvious example, it is notorious that an unregulated free market may sometimes cause very significant interferences with individuals’ liberty. It may be that the combined effects of certain economic transac¬ tions can put me in a position where my fundamental aspirations and interests are badly hindered or thwarted completely. The fact that no single agent can be held individually responsible for these hindrances does not prevent them from being interferences. These cases fall squarely within the sector EF. The defence of a ‘minimal area of non-interference’ within negative libertarian assumptions, then, need not imply an exclu¬ sive concern with the prevention of coercive interferences with individual liberty.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

This is an important point, for the negative concept of liberty is often associated with a strongly libertarian view, accordingvto which the public use of coercion is only legitimate when it prevents or punishes other coercive interferences.51 But the central focus in the theory of negative liberty is the idea of non-interference, and as we have seen, that category is broader than that of non-coercion. The libertarian might object that this misses the point, because what is at stake is not just what the state should try to prevent, but what the state would have to do in order to successfully correct non-coercive interfer¬ ences. If success requires the state to use coercion to supply services such as welfare programmes and public healthcare this will itself infringe the requirement of non-interference, and so will be ruled out on these grounds. But this argument is misleading, at least as a claim about what a negative theory of non-interference necessarily demands. The fact that we could only correct non-coercive interferences through coercive means is not necessarily a reason for saying that the state should not do so, within a negative theory of liberty. For this would only be problematic if coercion always entails an unacceptable interference in the coerced person’s liberty. But the diagram shows decisively that this need not be the case: sector BC indicates the possibility of a category of coercive actions that are not interferences. There is nothing odd about this category: I am coerced into not driving at over 70 m.p.h. on motorways; my local council coerces me into not placing window-boxes outside the windows of my tenth-floor flat by imposing crippling penalties on violations of health and safety laws. Do these coercive interventions necessarily count as interferences? Certainly, they may do: if I have to drive between Glasgow and London in less than two hours, then the coercive enforcement of speed limits would in this case count as an interference. Similarly if I get depressed without flowers in my windows, the health and safety laws interfere with a personal interest of mine. But these are all contingent features of particular situations. They do not have to be present. Being forced to drive at under 70 m.p.h. does not necessarily interfere with any activity or project in which I have an interest, even though the coercion involved necessarily limits my options. Being prevented from having window boxes in my apartment will similarly limit my options to some degree, but it need not interfere with any activity in which I have a particular interest.52 51 For example, P. Pettit, The Common Mind, p. 320; J. Narveson, The Libertarian Idea pp. 32-40. 52 It is important to stress here that the fact that these obstacles are generated as a result of deliberate human action makes no difference to their status as interferences. If I need to get from Boston to New York in under two hours, then any factor which impedes this

Individualist distributions of liberty

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Moreover, even when these obstacles do count as interferences for these sorts of reasons, and when the state’s actions (coercive or not) are causally responsible for them, it does not follow that they fall into the category (DF) ol interferences that are properly remediable by public action. It is surely a fact of life that the actions of governments, corporations and other organizations will inevitably interfere with indi¬ viduals' interests in a myriad of unpredictable ways. But no state could be reasonably expected to take account of, let alone try to correct, all of these highly localized and contingent forms of interference, even when its own actions are at issue. It seems likely then that the kinds of interference involved in these sorts ol cases fall under the sectors CD and FG in the above diagram. This means that, in practice, governments concerned with non-interference must use some working criterion for distinguishing serious, systematic and predictable forms of interference from minor, localized and unpredictable ones for which it would be unreasonable to expect the state to assume responsibility. However (as we have seen) there is no reason why that criterion should exclude non-coercive interferences from serious public consideration. It is also difficult to see how and why it would necessarily regard coercion required to correct the latter as constituting a serious interference. I am not claiming here that a political theory with a negative concept of non-interference at its heart could never generate libertarian conclu¬ sions about the legitimacy of (say) income redistribution. But in order to do so, such a theory must explain why income taxation to pay for services which go beyond securing non-coercion always or usually counts as a serious interference with individual liberty. To my mind, this is a tall order. It is far from obvious that progressive taxation to fund redistribu¬ tive policies necessarily counts as a serious and systematic interference with the liberty of those who are taxed. Notice that we are not denying that taxation is a systematic infraction of liberty: clearly, taxation reduces the options available to agents to some degree. Nor are we even denying that taxation will sometimes result in localized and contingent interferences with the specific projects and plans of particular individuals. The question is not whether liberty is reduced by taxation, but whether the reduction of liberty entailed by taxation is always serious enough to be counted as the kind of interference which individuals should never have to suffer, and which the state should never consider imposing. A point of great importance here is that the Kantian account of moral becomes an interference. The fact that in this case the interference arises from the intentional enforcement of a speed limit, rather than (say) the fact that my engine cannot manage speeds of more than 65 m.p.h., does not help to explain why this obstacle to my liberty should be regarded as an interference.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

liberty we discussed above, which incorporates Berlin’s positive concep¬ tion of freedom, is much more amenable to the libertarian view than the v negative conception I have just been sketching. For, unlike the negative theory, Kant’s view places restrictions only on the actions of responsible agents. The associative relations of respect and mutual independence which Kant thinks ought to govern human communities are observed or violated only in responsible, rational action. Thus the categorical im¬ perative only constrains the actions of responsible rational agents, and for that reason it will not detect infringements of liberty which arise from non-rational agencies. For example, because the market system is not itself a rational agent, but a non-rational combination of many individual actions, its outcomes do not fall under the regulation of the categorical imperative: even if the results of the behaviour of the market are, with respect to some individual, apparently coercive, the categorical impera¬ tive imposes no restriction unless a particular individual can be held directly reponsible for the infringement in question.53 This kind of theory clearly accounts for the libertarian intuition that only coercion for which specific individuals can be held responsible is subject to moral assess¬ ment, and then possible political regulation in a way that a theory containing the negative account of freedom I sketched above does not.54 This helps to explain why so much libertarian theory has been explicitly Kantian in character.55 There is another important contrast here with the Kantian view we considered earlier. Unlike that Kantian view, a negative theory of political liberty involves an aggregative rather than an associative conception of collectivity. This is the case for two connected reasons. First, negative liberty is a matter of degree. An assessment of the impediments and obstacles that confront a particular agent can only yield a claim about the extent to which that agent is free: I am more free if I am confronted by fewer obstacles, and less free if I am confronted by more. Unlike his Kantian counterpart, a negative libertarian public agent will not depict the political community as structured by certain irredu53 F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) pp. 12-13,99. 54 This libertarian intuition is apparently overlooked in David Johnston’s recent criticism of Robert Nozick’s libertarian theory. Johnston’s objection to Nozick turns on assuming that ‘effects’ of market interaction can ‘violate ... rights’: The Idea of a Liberal Theory, pp. 50, 52 But Nozick does not assume that ‘effects’ or ‘transactions’ can violate rights. Only those consequences for which specific moral responsibility can be assigned count as possible cases of rights-violation. 55 For a discussion (and rebuttal) of the idea that Kantian theories tend to be libertarian, see A. D. Rosen, Kant's Theory of Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1993) pp. 173-208.

Individualist distributions of liberty

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cible interpersonal relationships, but as an aggregate of units each of which may be said to be more or less free. Second, the question of the value of a given amount of individual liberty cannot be settled by reflecting on the concept of negative liberty itself. The negative concept of liberty can only tell us how impediments structure the range of opportunities and options available to an agent. But in order to develop an account of political liberty, we need to assess which liberties are particularly important, and to decide what kinds of interference count as sufficiently serious (and sufficiently remediable) to warrant the attention of the state. In a negative libertarian theory, this will be done indirectly, by reference to the value to individuals of goods and opportunities which the absence of the relevant interference would pennit them to enjoy. A public agent seeking to determine an appropriate political distribution of negative liberty will do so by considering individuals’ interests and values separately. We have already seen that it is unrealistic to expect a state to take responsibility for all the interfer¬ ences which individuals might suffer. Instead, the public agent will likely focus on certain fundamental opportunities in which all individuals either do, or may be presumed to, take an overriding interest. But however this determination is made, the underlying assumption will be that the community is an aggregate of separate individuals each of whom has certain tastes, interests, proclivities and personal projects with which the actions of others might interfere. The public agent may then deploy coercive devices to manipulate and structure collective interactions such that the appropriate individual entitlements to a certain measure of negative liberty are secured. Berlin seems to be alluding to a political procedure along just these lines in the following important passage: The extent of a man’s negative freedom is, as it were, a function of what doors, and how many, are open to him; upon what prospects they open; and how open they are. This formula must not be pressed too far, for not all doors are of equal importance, inasmuch as the paths on which they open vary in the opportunities they offer. Consequently, the problem of how an over-all increase of liberty in particular circumstances is to be secured, and how it is to be distributed (especially in situations, and this is almost invariably the case, in which the opening of one door leads to the lifting of other barriers and the lowering of still others), how, in a word, the maximization of opportunities is in any concrete case to be achieved, can be an agonizing problem, not to be solved by any hard-andfast rule.56

In this passage, the utilitarian evocations of the negative concept of liberty are unmistakable. Clearly, one can be a negative libertarian without being a utilitarian, for one can be a negative libertarian and deny 56 I. Berlin, Four Essays, pp. xlviii-xlix.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

that one ought always to maximize utility. Still, these affinities with the utilitarian tradition raise important questions. Can negative libertarians avoid maximizing arguments entirely when they try to determine the appropriate distribution of individual liberty? If one accepts that freedom is a matter of degree, and one takes the political community as an aggregate of individuals to each of whom liberties and opportunities have a certain value, can one avoid slipping into the language of ‘maximizing opportunities’, as Berlin does above? Again, the important point of comparison here is the Kantian position we considered earlier. Under that theory, the question of how liberty ought to be distributed is resolved by a ‘hard and fast rule’: prohibit all actions that violate relations of mutual respect and independence between autonomous agents, and permit all others. In such a view, the question of the appropriate distribution of liberty is never, at any level, a matter of the value of goods to individuals, but rather a matter of whether individuals’ actions remain within certain categorical side-constraints. Such a theory has no use for optimizing criteria, and it is for that reason that contempo¬ rary theorists like Rawls and Nozick have exploited the Kantian argument to attack utilitarian optimization. But even a non-utilitarian theory of negative liberty seems driven to reduce the value of liberty to individual interests and values. Not only is it unclear how this could generate anything like the Kantian notion of a side-constraint, it is also unclear how this can deter optimizing arguments which seek to improve the overall distribution of liberties. The fact that we are optimizing oppor¬ tunity rather than utility will not fully remove the suspicion that indi¬ viduals’ rights are subject to the calculus of social interests. It may seem then that theories of negative political liberty are illiberal in certain respects, at least by the lights of the test apparently applied by Rawls and Nozick. Does this mean that liberal individualists ought to abandon negative liberty? As we shall see in our discussion of Mill, this need not be the case, for two reasons. First, while it may be true that a negative libertarian is bound to admit mitigated forms of optimization, it is not clear that this is necessarily illiberal in the way that full-dress utilitarian conceptions have been thought to be. Second, the negative concept of liberty can perform one crucial liberal individualist task for which (as we shall see) the Kantian argument is less well equipped: it can motivate a strong, principled objection to paternalist interference. Mill’s defence of liberty The account of the distribution of liberty offered by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, Utilitarianism and several other works presupposes a

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strongly negative concept of political freedom. As we have seen, deter¬ mining an appropriate distribution against the background of such a concept of freedom will typically involve identifying certain fundamental individual interests and values interferences which are sufficiently serious to justify the use of coercive preventions. This is the only way that the task of removing unacceptable interferences in individual liberty can become a realistic and manageable political goal. Not surprisingly, this is exactly the strategy that Mill adopts. The starting-point for Mill’s argument is a fundamental assumption about the overriding political importance of individual security char¬ acteristic of the English tradition of political thought. In particular, Mill inherited from Hobbes and Bentham a subtle conception of the relation between security and individual liberty. As good negative libertarians, both Hobbes and Bentham distinguish sharply between security and liberty: since for them individual security cannot be guaranteed without the use of coercive interference, they see an inevitable conflict between the pursuit of individual security and efforts to liberate individuals from interference. Still, Bentham and Hobbes both claim that the provision of legally enforceable rights against force, fraud and theft indirectly supplies individuals with a measure of negative liberty. Thus Bentham distin¬ guished between ‘liberty without security’, enjoyed, he said, by the ‘Patagonians’ and ‘Hottentots’, and ‘liberty by security’, which he called the ‘pride of Englishmen’.57 However, for Bentham, even proud Eng¬ lishmen would be making a mistake if they claimed that liberty was properly a ‘gift of the law’ because, strictly speaking, laws can only coerce or restrain. Nevertheless, the law can ‘restore liberties once previously held but not enjoyed because insecure’.58 Hobbes’s view that the liberty of subjects depended upon the ‘silence of the Law’, where the law is understood as coercive regulations intended to promote the security of citizens,59 is obviously an early ancestor of Bentham’s view. The special concern with personal security looms large in Mill’s political thought. ‘Security of person and property,’ he writes, ‘and equal justice between individuals, are the first needs of society, and the primary ends of government.’60 Moreover, Mill’s attempt to make space for an authentic conception of individual rights within utilitarianism hinges crucially on a claim about individuals’ overwhelming interest in security. Mill asserts that, unlike almost any other good, ‘no human being can 57 Quoted in D. Long, Bentham on Liberty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 78. 58 ibid., p. 77 . 59 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 143. 60 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, p. 386.

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possibly do without’ security. Security is thus overwhelmingly utile for everyone. Since rights to personal security express the ‘claim we have on our fellow-creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence’, they assume ‘that character of absoluteness, that apparent infinity, and incommensurability with all other considerations, which constitute the distinction between the feeling of right and wrong and that of ordinary expediency and inexpediency’.61 Mill assumes, then, that basic rights against force, fraud and theft are essential political institutions. And, like Bentham and Hobbes, he accepts that the provision and enforcement of such rights allows citizens the freedom to act within the ‘silence of the Law’. But (thanks to Bentham) this idea is now housed within a broader utilitarian theory. The question which would have been obvious to any utilitarian in this context is whether there are not strong reasons, under certain circumstances, to interfere further with individuals’ liberty in order to make them better off. In fact this is only a problem for the utilitarian on the assumption of a negative concept of liberty. As I argued above, a feature of the negative theory is that the value of liberty in a given instance is parasitic upon the value to agents of goods which that liberty permits them to enjoy unmolested. But by the same token, possessing a measure of negative liberty implies option: and while liberty allows us to enjoy the benefits of our choices, it also permits us to make injudicious choices and to suffer the malign consequences of our errors. But if our liberty permits us to select options which are less utile than the alternatives there would seem to be a prima facie case on utilitarian grounds for restricting our options so as to induce us to select better alternatives. I take it that Mill’s argument for the Harm Principle in On Liberty is supposed to give utilitarian grounds for resisting the immediate utili¬ tarian temptation to intervene in individuals’ range of choices for their own benefit. The argument presupposes the existence of a stable distri¬ bution of equal rights against aggression, force, fraud and theft.62 The claim made by the Harm Principle is, then, that there are no further considerations apart from a concern with security (or ‘self-protection’) which can justify the interference with individuals’ opportunities. Ac¬ cording to the Harm Principle, ‘compulsion, either in the direct form or 61 ibid., pp. 56, 61-2. 62 Those who are inclined to read Mill’s essay on liberty as a self-contained utilitarian justification for the complete liberal package of rights against aggression, as well as our rights to pursue our own good in our own way, badly misunderstand his argument. On Liberty presupposes that the justification for basic rights has already gone through, on the basis of considerations to do with our overriding interest in security against the aggression of others. See, on this point, A. Ryan, J. S. Milt (London: Routledee, 1974), p. 134 and n. 32.

Individualist distributions of liberty

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in that ol pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others ,63 Efforts, then, to interfere with an individual’s decisions to order his protected person and property as he sees fit, even if we think he will be made better off by our efforts, are always ruled out. Mill’s liberalism, therefore, is an attempt to supplement the traditional pro¬ hibition on the infringement of individual security with a further prohibition on paternalistic interference. Such paternalistic interference would not necessarily infringe individuals’ rights to security - laws against self-intoxication do not necessarily involve aggression against person or property, for example - but are to be ruled out for additional reasons. In Utilitarianism, written shortly after On Liberty, Mill explicitly calls attention to this distinction between two kinds of significant, and unjust, harm: The moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another (in which we must never forget to include wrongful interference with each other’s freedom) are more vital to human well-being than any maxims, however important, which only point out the best mode of managing some department of human affairs ... thus the moralities which protect every individual from being harmed by others, either directly or by being hindered in his freedom of pursuing his own good, are at once those which he himself has most at heart.. ,64

Mill is here suggesting that interference with our freedom to pursue ‘our own good in our own way’ is an indirect harm different from the direct harms against person and property which our basic rights to security forbid. The line dividing these two forms of harm is fuzzy and shifting (as with many such lines of distinction in Mill). However, we can clarify the point that Mill is making by considering the case of a Hobbesian sovereign who secures individuals’ persons and property in the appro¬ priate way, but who also restricts freedom of speech and exercises rigorous censorship. Mill believes that such restrictions constitute wrongful interference in individual liberty even though they are not offences against the person or property of any individual. They are wrong, not because they threaten our security, but because they interfere with our opportunities for self-development, and stifle the inventiveness and creativity which are always necessary for human progress.65 63 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, p. 79; emphasis mine. 64 ibid., p. 62; see also ibid., p. 144. 65 The difference between these two kinds of harm comes across particularly clearly in Mill’s famous account of heresy in the second chapter of On Liberty (ibid., p. 101). There is no suggestion here that the problem with the suppression of heretical views is that it threatens to deprive us of the security to which all are rightfully entitled. Rather, the claim is that interfering with freedom of thought and speech harms us in a quite different

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This accounts for the characteristic examples of infringements of liberty we encounter in On Liberty. In chapters 4 and 5, Mill discusses, among other things, restrictions on freedom of conscience and worship,66 Sabbatarian legislation,67 the regulation of trade in liquor,68 gambling and prostitution.69 The question of personal and proprietary security is not directly involved in any of these issues. Rather, they are issues about how far we should allow the ‘moral police’ to encroach upon the liberty of the individual to act as he wishes, at least in his self-regarding conduct.70 Such encroachments constitute wrongful interference because they deprive individuals of the opportunity for self-development (ch. 3), and deprive society in general of the preconditions of intellectual and moral progress (ch. 2). Mill’s account of the appropriate distribution of liberty, then, goes like this: the basic entitlement to negative liberty is pegged to individuals’ rights to personal and proprietary security, rights which Mill simply assumes all individuals should possess equally. Those rights grant each of us the security to dispose of our persons and property as we see fit. The Harm Principle invokes our further interest in opportunities for self¬ development to block any subsidiary arguments for abridging our liberty of action on grounds other than the protection of individuals’ rights to security of person and property. It is true that Mill seems to allow for a slightly broader warrant for interference, since under the Harm Principle any form of harm to others, not just violations of individuals’ rights, is in principle open to public regulation. But Mill makes it clear that harm to others is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the justification of public actions. Here, he explicitly acknowledges the need (which will arise, as we have seen, in any negative libertarian political theory) to prioritize certain harms and interferences and to ignore others.71 As we have just seen, Mill measures the importance of harms and interferences against two fundamental interests: personal security and the appropriate opportunities for self¬ development and intellectual progress. For Mill, these dual concerns effectively exhaust the range of individual interests that are at stake in the distribution of liberty, and the Harm Principle is proposed as the broad political guideline that strikes the appropriate balance between them. The effect of this argument is to create an extremely strong presumption against interfering with individual liberty on grounds other way, by depriving us of essential opportunities for self-development, whether individual or social. The argument of On Liberty really only pertains to the second kind of harm. 66 ibid., pp. 152, 153-6, 160-2. 67 ibid., p. 159. 68 ibid., pp. 157-8, 166, 169-70. 69 ibid., pp. 169-70. 70 ibid., p. 153. 71 ibid., pp. 146, 163.

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than the protection of individuals’ rights to personal and proprietary security. As soon as we consider weakening that presumption, concerns about our interests in self-development and intellectual progress are triggered to fortify it. This argument effectively permits only those interferences with individual liberty that are necessary in order to protect individuals’ basic rights. Since those rights supply to individuals the measure ol liberty to which Mill thinks all individuals are equally entitled, on the basis of their overriding interest in security, the argument results in an elegant negative libertarian version of the DLP.72 It remains true, of course, that individuals’ entitlements to a sphere of negative liberty are, on Mill’s theory, defeasible. This is so for at least two reasons. First, Mill’s defence of a sphere of individual liberty appeals to a composite set of interests in certain kinds of goods and opportunities - our fundamental interests in security and in opportunities for self¬ development and mental progress. The possibility thus exists for conflicts and trade-offs between these goods. For example, consider again the case of a Hobbesian sovereign who successfully protects individual citizens’ security, but who judges that, in the interests of their security, we ought to curtail freedom of speech (suppose, for example, that a number of insidious and mutually antagonistic cults are gaining extensive support in a given community). Mill implicitly acknowledges the possibility of this kind of conflict, because he makes it clear that his defence of the Harm Principle only applies under particular historical circumstances: Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne.73

A second, and much more important, reason for the defeasibility of Mill’s account of the DLP is that on his theory it is always possible that allowing local violations might produce a better outcome overall. In such cases, we would have good utilitarian reasons for sacrificing some persons’ rights for the sake of a greater overall utility. It is the possibility of this kind of trade-off that lies behind Rawls’s suspicion of utilitarian deriviations of the distribution of liberty principle, and he implicates Mill The perfection both of social arrangements and of practical morality would be, to secure to all persons complete independence and freedom of action, subject to no restriction but that of not doing injury to others: and the education which taught or the social institutions which required them to exchange control of their own actions for any amount of comfort or affluence, or to renounce liberty for the sake of equality, would deprive them of one of the most elevated characteristics of human nature. (J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), p. 206) 73 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, p. 79.

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in this quite directly. In his discussion of Mill, Rawls writes, ‘whenever a society sets out to maximize the sum of intrinsic value or the net balance of the satisfaction of interests, it is liable to find that the denial of liberty for some is justified in the name of this single end’.74 How vulnerable is Mill’s version of the DLP to this famous objection? The answer to this question seems to me to depend on whether it is reasonable to saddle Mill’s argument with the responsibility of demon¬ strating that security and self-development are so overwhelmingly utile as to completely overpower other interests in the calculations mandated by the utility principle. There is no doubt that Mill saddles himself with this responsibility, because he insists in On Liberty that the utility principle is the ‘ultimate appeal on all ethical questions’. Moreover Mill does not make a systematic case for the overriding utility of these twin interests, and it is in the end unclear whether one could be successfully mounted. As long as Mill’s argument is hostage to the utility principle, the Rawlsian argument will seem decisive. But, on the other hand, why should a liberal individualist accept Mill’s requirement that in order to certify the overriding and fundamental significance of individual interests, security and self-development we must hold them up to the tribunal of the utility principle? The utility principle is clearly not the only conceivable standpoint from which liberal individualists can argue for the special significance of these interests and values. Perhaps it is just an empirical fact about human agents that security and self-development are of great importance to them, or perhaps these interests are the only ones that are sufficiently general and universal to yield an account of impartial political responsi¬ bility suited to pluralist social conditions. Both of these seem plausible, though perhaps not decisive, lines of argument. It is not even clear, in this context at any rate, that the liberal individualist needs to justify these values at all: perhaps she can simply say that their overriding importance is a ‘properly basic’ commitment of liberalism.75 On such a view, liberalism just takes it for granted, at its core, that security and self¬ development are ‘primary goods’ in the Rawlsian sense. Others may disagree, but, whatever their reasons, they cannot be regarded as liberals. These sorts of considerations allow us to detach Mill’s argument from the utilitarian framework that haunts On Liberty. The critical inference from the special importance of security and self-development to Mill’s 74 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 211; I am grateful to Will Kymlicka for helping me to improve the presentation of the argument of the next few paragraphs. 73 For the idea of‘properly basic’ beliefs, see A. Plantinga, ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 16-93.

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negative libertarian interpretation of the DLP not only survives such transplantation intact, but arguably benefits from being severed from the problematic utilitarian imperative. Cleansed of utilitarian sin, it is no longer clear that Mill’s argument is vulnerable to Rawls’s objection. Indeed, an individualist who takes this line can presumably agree with Rawls that the optimization of overall utility does not trump individuals’ rights to liberty, since for her that entitlement is pegged to claims about goods (security, self-development) that are now justified or held on non¬ utilitarian grounds. However, it is not possible to remove all consequentialist and welfarist considerations from Mill's argument. As we have seen, the worth of individual liberties will, on a negative libertarian theory, be a function of the equal value to agents of the opportunities and goods which the non¬ interference of others leaves them free to enjoy. But once this aggregative account of the worth of individual liberties is conceded, there is no way to banish optimizing considerations from the argument completely. If we know that more individuals will obtain the liberty that comes from the enforcement of basic rights by allowing local violations of similar rights, we surely have every reason to do so, for the sake of ‘the greater good of freedom’.76 In this sense, Mill’s proposal would allow the violation of individual rights under certain circumstances. Mill’s argument, then, amounts to something like a ‘utilitarianism of rights’, as John Gray has argued.77 Though it could permit violations, it would only do so in order to better preserve the distribution of liberty, or to minimize the overall number of violations of liberty preserving rights. There is no reason to suppose that this would result in the sorts of routine and systematic violations that the optimization of overall utility undoubtedly permits in principle. For the goal, after all, would be the minimization of violations, and the argument would not allow violations on grounds other than the optimization of opportunities, a presumption easily strong enough to exclude the greatest happiness principle.78 76 These sorts of example are the ones which Samuel Scheffler has recently used to call into question the rationality of what he terms ‘agent-centred restrictions’: S. Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism. 77 J. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 66; the term ‘utilitarianism of rights’ is due, of course, to Robert Nozick, not to Gray. 78 It would seem that there is in Mill’s argument an inbuilt bias towards the view that coercion is justified only in order to prevent coercion. Since Mill’s position is that generally public coercion is only justifiably deployed to deter or punish violations of rights to security of person and property, and since violations of those rights are (virtually by definition) coercive, the default position will be that coercion may only be used to prevent coercion. But even the non-utilitarian variants of Mill’s argument that we are currently considering will, in principle, allow departures from that default position. For ultimately the worth of individual liberties depends on the value to

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Rawls is willing to envisage violations of this kind himself, under the rubric of‘partial compliance theory’.79 But some of hjs puritan individu¬ alist critics, such as Robert Nozick and Loren Lomasky, have been unwilling to accept even this, and explicitly reject the idea of a ‘utilitar¬ ianism of rights’.80 They do so because they believe that the complete protection of the individual from compromise at the hands of collectivist designs requires us to purge any optimizing elements from individualist theories. In order to do this, they have leaned heavily on the Kantian arguments considered earlier. As we shall see in the next chapter, this creates as many difficulties for the libertarian position as it seems to solve. But it is possible to identify here the root cause of the difficulty that I will discuss in subsequent chapters, for libertarians not only argue that we must banish optimization from individualist ideals, they also demand a similar purge of paternalistic elements. But in abandoning Mill for Kant, the libertarians may cut from under their feet an essential tool in resisting forms of paternalism they despise. It may seem that Mill’s argument is neither more nor less well equipped to combat paternalism than is Kant’s. After all, in prioritizing the value of self-development, Mill might seem to abandon a pure ‘opportunity concept’ of liberty for a positive, exercise concept of liberty. On this view. Mill is very much like Kant in equating liberty with a personal ideal of autonomous self-development.81 Moreover, Mill seems to be suggesting that it is good for people to live autonomous, selfdirected lives, and this arguably opens Mill to the same sorts of charges individuals of personal security (in the first instance) and of opportunities for self¬ development (in the second instance), not (as in the Kantian theory) on the categorical wrongness of certain classes of liberty-infringing actions. Public intervention to prevent actions that are not in themselves coercive (buying guns, forming and joining whitesupremacist militias, advocating violence) in order to increase individuals’ security and opportunities for self-development, and to thereby improve the distribution of liberties, thus remain theoretically justifiable. 79 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 242-3. 80 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 28-30; L. Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community, pp. 18—19ff. 81 In his System of Logic Mill does say that ‘it is said with truth, that none but a person of confirmed virtue is completely free'. G. W. Smith uses this passage to argue that Mill’s understanding of liberty comes close, at a number of points, to a positive rather than a negative conception. G. W. Smith, ‘Social Liberty and Free Agency: Some Ambiguities in Mill’s Conception of Freedom’, in J. Gray and G. W. Smith, eds., J. S. Mill On Liberty in Focus (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 244-8. However, Smith’s suggestion is implausible, for two reasons. First, the passage from the Logic can probably be excluded from consideration since it appears in the context of a discussion of free will, which is a subject which Mill is at pains to stress is irrelevant to his concerns in On Liberty. Second, while it is true that an ideal of personal autonomy haunts all of Mill’s political writings, I know of no passage where he explicitly identifies this ideal as a concept of liberty. Rather, this ideal belongs to a different part of Mill’s theory, his theory of individuality and self-development.

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of paternalism or perfectionism that Berlin (and others) have levelled at Rousseau and Kant.8~ Perhaps, then, the logic of Mill’s position compels us to interfere in peoples’ lives in order to educate them into autonomy. If Mill did equate freedom with autonomous self-development,83 such interferences, if successful, could only increase individual freedom. But this completely misrepresents Mill’s position. It is true that Mill takes it as a basic fact about human beings that they have a fundamental (and often unacknowledged) interest in opportunities for autonomous self-development. But this does not imply that Mill argues that only those who successfully develop themselves as autonomous agents are politically free. According to Mill, political freedom requires merely that individuals enjoy adequate opportunities to live autonomous, selfdirected, lives should they wish to do so. Nowhere does Mill suggest that those who fail to take that opportunity are politically unfree, though there is no doubt that he would regard such individuals as underdeveloped human beings. This is an important point, for it reveals that a common criticism of Mill’s political theory is somewhat misleading. Recent critics have often argued that a difficulty with Mill’s argument is that it turns on the endorsement of a controversial ideal of the good life. They suggest that Mill’s liberalism is therefore a thinly disguised form of perfectionism.84 But Mill’s theory is not perfectionist in the sense that it advocates political measures to force individuals to live autonomously. It is true that Mill believed that an autonomous life is better than a nonautonomous one, and that this judgement plays a key role in the arguments of On Liberty. But Mill is merely saying that an autonomous life is an option which the law should always leave open to individuals by securing their goods, and by ensuring that individuals have unimpeded access to opportunities for self-development. This does not imply that the state or the law should foist autonomous ways of life upon indi¬ viduals against their will. Indeed, the Harm Principle itself directly implies that the law should not be used as a device for forcing individuals to live autonomously if they do not wish to do so. It is for this reason that Joseph Raz’s recent reinterpretation of Mill’s Harm Principle, which extends it to cover cases of harm to oneself, runs counter to the spirit of Mill’s original proposal.85 It is true that Mill is 82 For the view that, with respect to autonomy, the arguments of Kant and Mill converge, see J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 199, and C. Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 127-8, 130, 131. 83 This suggestion is made by Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society, p. 19. 84 Something close to this suggestion is made in D. Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory, pp. 90-2, and in I. Katznelson, Liberalism's Crooked Circle, pp. 141-3. 85 J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, pp. 412-13.

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vague about what counts as ‘harm’, but, with one notable exception, Mill insists throughout On Liberty that what is at stake i§ harm to others.86 The one thing that the Harm Principle always forbids is the presumption to decide for another what is in his interest: according to Mill, individuals should always have the right of veto in their own case: Considerations to aid his judgement, exhortations to strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even obtruded on him, by others: but he himself is the final judge.87

If Mill’s argument is to be consistent, this proviso must presumably apply equally to efforts on the part of outsiders to induce people to believe that they ought to strive for an autonomous life. This is over¬ looked by Raz, who does not consider in detail Mill’s anti-paternalist arguments. This does not mean that Raz’s own position is wrong, of course; but it does suggest that it is misleading for Raz to claim that his interpretation of the Harm Principle is merely ‘somewhat wider’ than Mill’s own account of it.88 To my mind, Raz’s proposal is deeply at odds with Mill’s conception. Here again there is a sharp contrast with the Kantian position. As we saw above, Kant’s account of moral autonomy generates a symmetrical conception of individual and public agency. For Kant, the reasons why a public agent acting on our collective behalf ought not to violate our autonomy (and to do what it can to hinder others from doing so) are essentially the same as the reasons why an individual agent should never violate his own autonomy. This has the important consequence that the Kantian account of the appropriate distribution of rights and liberties is inseparable from the claim that individuals possess certain duties towards themselves. There are, of course, vital questions about the enforceablity of such duties in the Kantian theory. We will address these 86 The exception is Mill’s discussion of voluntary slavery. In my opinion. Mill's view that voluntary slavery should be restricted is unmotivated by and inconsistent with his general stance elsewhere in On Liberty. In his discussion of temperance legislation Mill writes that ‘we are now speaking of conduct which, while it does no wrong to others, is supposed to do great harm to the agent himself: and I do not see how those who believe this can think otherwise than that the example, on the whole, must be more salutary than hurtful, since, if it displays misconduct, it displays also the painful or degrading consequences which, if the conduct is justly censured, must be supposed to be in all or most cases attendant on it’. I see no reason why this principle should not apply equally well to the case of voluntary slavery, in cases where it does no harm to others. If individuals bring upon themselves the indignity of slavery and its attendant disadvan¬ tages and miseries, one wonders why Mill would not regard this as a salutary illustration which would deter almost any rational person from wanting to sell himself in this way. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government pp. 171-2. 87 ibid. 88 J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, p. 412.

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in the following chapter, but for now it is important to note that it is not possible for a Kantian to consistently maintain that the relevant duties to self are optional, or permissibly subject to veto within a private sphere of individual action. For, as we saw in our discussion of Rousseau and Kant, the ability to give laws to oneself is not, in their theories, simply taken for granted as a presupposition about 'human nature’. It is instead a fragile and corruptible capacity, the proper use of which is the sole condition under which agents achieve an appropriate moral status. In order to merit respect, in such a theory, one must first make oneself respectable, and to do this one must take one’s own autonomy seriously and act within the bounds set, not only by others’, but also by one’s own dignity. A Kantian cannot regard this as a merely elective commitment in the theory, one which individuals may freely override. It is rather an essential structural feature of the delicate associative and symmetrical conception of collectivity Kant inherited from Rousseau. As we have seen, Mill agrees with the Kantians that an autonomous life is a good life. But it is a fundamental characteristic of Mill’s argument that this yields no account of duties to oneself. In fact Mill was suitably insouciant about the very possibility of a duty to oneself: self-regarding faults ... are not properly immoralities ... they may be proofs of any amount of folly, or want of personal dignity and self-respect; but they are only the subject of moral reprobation when they involve a breach of duty to others, for whose sake the individual is bound to care for himself. The term duty to oneself, when it means anything more than prudence, means self-respect or self-development, and for none of these is any one accountable to his fellow creatures, because for none of them is it for the good of mankind that he be held accountable to them.89

The fact that Mill here cordons ‘morality’ off within the domain of interpersonal relations testifies to the fundamental asymmetry of his implicit conception of public agency. Mill acknowledges that there are normative points of view from within which individuals will have good reasons for acting in particular ways towards themselves. But the central ‘moral’ notions of duty, right, injury and obligation do not, for Mill, properly belong in any of them, even as they are central to his conception of what it means for a state to act correctly on behalf of society as a whole. Moreover, if the state forced individuals to adopt a particular ethical view that required certain self-regarding attitudes or ‘duties’, it would be violating the Harm Principle. Mill is able to construct an asymmetrical conception of public agency because, for him, the possibility of self-government or personal autonomy 89 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, p. 147.

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is not the basis for a liberal order, but the product of a social regime in which rights to dispose of person and property as vone sees fit have become an axiomatic and overriding feature of the political order. Once that social regime has, at a particular historical moment, emerged, we have special reasons for refraining from further abridgements of liberty because opportunities for autonomous self-development would be unac¬ ceptably diminished as a result. Thus Mill’s account of the appropriate distribution of liberties permits us to act as we wish in what concerns only ourselves. In his view, we can endorse that distribution of rights and liberties without having to endorse any particular view of how we ought to act with respect to the private sphere of conduct made available to us by our rights to security in person and property. We each have a sphere of activity upon which no public ethos should intrude: no outsider, least of all one who claims to represent the received moral wisdom of the community, has the right to interfere with our right to act as we wish in our private conduct. Strictly speaking, however, the Kantian view is incompatible with this view for reasons which are by now obvious. For the Kantian view does suggest that there are certain duties to ourselves to which all ought to attend, whether or not they want to do so.90 Mill’s theory is able to resist the paternalist implications of this assumption by elaborating a strongly asymmetrical conception of public agency. The idea that there is, and ought to be, such an asymmetry between public and individual agency is one that is stressed in the writings of many modern liberals. This is what Rawls means when he says that on a contractarian view, ‘social and personal integration must proceed by entirely different principles, the latter by rational prudence, the former by the concurrence of persons of good will’.91 What now seems peculiar about Rawls’s remark here is that he associates the utilitarian tradition of Mill and Bentham with a symmetrical view of social and personal integration; this is, after all, what he means when he says that ‘utilitar¬ ianism ... improperly extends the principle of choice for one person to choices facing society’.92 But if the argument I have sketched above is right, Rawls may have things the wrong way around: it is Mill’s utilitarian account that keeps personal and social principles separate, while the Kantian tradition, on which Rawls himself claims to be drawing, involves the assimilation of personal and social ethics. 90 There is, of course, the further question of whether, on a Kantian view, these duties are interpersonally enforceable: if not, this would reduce the incompatibility considerably. More will be said about this in the following chapter. 91 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 141. 92 ibid.; see also J. Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, p. 152; C. Larmore, Patterns of Mora! Complexity {Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 62-3.

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Conclusions I want now to draw together the salient points of the account I have given of the two interpretations of the DLP. These two theoretical constructions both seek to configure and relate three sets of fundamental liberal values. First, and most important, is the idea of the security of the individual. Second, in both of these accounts, the relevant conception of security is connected to an account of liberty. Third, a concept of selfgovernment or autonomy plays a role in both traditions. However, in each case, these values interact in importantly different ways. In the Kantian/Rousseauan account with which we began, these three elements are very tightly connected. As Berlin was correct to point out, self-government is equated with freedom. The importance of individual security is then derived from a claim about the special value of self-governing individuals: self-governing individuals need a measure of security from predation in order to make room for their selfdetermination. On this view, those who threaten individuals’ security are not subject to moral and political censure because they threaten to deprive them of a good which is of value to them. Rather they are subject to moral censure because actions which violate others’ security conflict with the relations of respect and authority which express the moral status of self-governing or autonomous individuals. The negative libertarian tradition of Bentham and Mill relates these three values together according to a looser scheme. The rights of the individual against aggression are not grounded upon a particular concept of liberty; rather, they are based on the idea that individuals have a special interest in the security necessary to dispose of their persons and property as they see fit. Once established on these foundations, such rights then give rise to a certain measure of negative liberty. Maintaining that liberty to order our persons and property as we see fit is then justified by reference to our further interests in opportunities for auton¬ omy and self-development, and in the conditions for social and intel¬ lectual progress. These two theories about the distribution of liberty imply, in turn, two differing conceptions of public agency, as the categories introduced in the last chapter reveal. As we have seen, Kant’s theory is associative where Mill’s is aggregative, and this is what allows Kantians to resist completely the optimizing tendencies of Mill’s argument. But we have also seen that Mill’s theory is asymmetrical where Kant’s is symmetrical, and that it is by virtue of this that Mill avoids some of the paternalist implications of Kant’s uncompromising views about duties to oneself. Neither of these positions is able by itself to generate the fully-fledged

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individualist ideal of a politics centred exclusively on an ‘inviolable private sphere’. The image of a sphere of activity with only external boundaries cannot coexist with the form of symmetry we find in Kant. In suggesting that individuals must equally respect both their own and others’ autonomy, Kant recognizes internal as well as external bound¬ aries to the zone of action within which agents may permissibly act. Similarly, the notion of a self that is utterly inviolable in the face of consequentialist trade-offs and calculations cannot be reconciled with Mill’s aggregative conception of public agency, which permits violations of rights in order to improve the overall distribution of security and opportunity. If the fully-fledged individualist ideal is intelligible, we will need a conception of public agency that is both associative and asymmet¬ rical. Contemporary libertarians have sought to develop just such a conception. But, as we shall see, they have greatly underestimated the difficulties involved in so doing.

5

Self-ownership and individual inviolability

Contemporary theorists have drawn freely from both of the traditions of liberal thought explored in the previous chapter. This is particularly true of today’s individualist puritans - the libertarians. The rise of libertar¬ ianism in recent years has been one of the most remarkable and distinctive features of the development of liberal thought since the publication of Rawls’s Theory of Justice. Few of the theoretical traditions that have flourished in the past three decades can match that of libertarianism for the philosophical acuity of its main protagonists, its sense of historical mission, its cohesiveness, its contagion within intel¬ lectual circles, its (malign) influence on political discourse and public policy and its evangelical vigour.1 The rising tide of libertarianism shows no sign of receding and will surely be a significant ideological force in the early decades of the coming century, and probably beyond. Growing disillusionment with the Keynesian welfare state in the 1970s undoubtedly provided the major stimulus to the development of liber¬ tarian ideas. But this cannot fully explain their remarkable ascendancy in Western political discourse. This success owes more to the fact that libertarianism was able to represent itself as the true heir to the liberal mainstream rather than as a revolutionary departure from Western political values. That is not to deny that libertarians often portrayed themselves as radical and even socially progressive: but at root libertar¬ ianism claims to be radicalizing the familiar (individualism, freedom, rights) rather than to be familiarizing the truly radical. This is illustrated particularly well by the characteristic libertarian claim that in taking the individualistic commitments of liberalism seriously, they are retrieving the pure thing itself from the confused morass of proto-socialistic ideas 1 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia; J. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty, David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); D. B. Rasmussen and D. J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (La Salle: Open Court, 1991); Tibor Machan, Individuals and Their Rights; Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community; Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea; D. Boaz, Libertarianism: a Primer; C. Murray, What it Means To Be a Libertarian.

139

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into which post-war liberal ideas had fallen. On this view, the authentic individualist project, postponed by the vast and horrifying worldhistorical detour of world war, collectivism and totalitarianism, can now enjoy its second coming. The two distinctive theses in virtue of which libertarians present themselves as thoroughgoing individualists will by now be familiar to readers, since they correspond to the two sets of ideas set out in chapter 1. On the one hand, they have insisted (with the Kantians) that individuals and their rights are inviolable in a way that prohibits their sacrifice in order to optimize aggregate welfare. On the other hand, they have insisted (with Mill and the negative libertarians) that inviolable individuals inhabit a private sphere within which they are free to act just as they please in what concerns only themselves. Libertarians usually render this second claim as a commitment to individual self-ownership. The thesis of self-ownership allows libertarians to reject paternalism, for if we are our own proprietors it must in the end be up to us how we decide to invest our selves, talents and personal resources: attempts to force us to act in ways that outsiders judge to be in our best interests violate self-ownership. Almost no one has seriously denied that these two theses are com¬ patible. Indeed it is invariably taken for granted by both critics and proponents of libertarian doctrine that the theses of self-ownership and individual inviolability are simply two sides of a single coin.2 This chapter suggests that this is a mistake. Not only are these two theses not equivalent, they may well be inconsistent. The problem arises, I will suggest, because the attempt to combine them amounts to an effort to construct a conception of public agency that is at once associative in a Kantian way and asymmetrical in a Millian way. The difficulties involved in making such a conception intelligible are serious and probably insurmountable. They have been effectively obscured, however, by the widespread view that the theses of individual inviolability and of self-ownership are alike expressions of a single, univocal, individualist theory of politics. This has allowed the conceptual instabilities that infect the libertarian ideal to hide behind empty slogans about ‘the priority of the individual over society’. This chapter attempts to lay these instabil¬ ities bare. I argue that once we do so we discover that libertarians may have to choose between individual inviolability and a commitment to self-ownership. My argument begins by clarifying these two commitments. I want to 2 Thus James Tully says that self-ownership is ‘said to ground the values of autonomy, individual liberty, and inviolability of the person’: An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke In Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 242.

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highlight distinctive features of the libertarian interpretation of indi¬ vidual inviolability and self-ownership, and also to explain why they correlate respectively with associative and asymmetrical conceptions of public agency. The thesis of individual inviolability Individuals, says Robert Nozick, ‘may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviol¬ able.'3 The basic intuition here is that each individual carries an over¬ riding moral status and can (almost) never be legitimately used or exploited against his or her will. According to Nozick and other libertarians, this imperative is to be institutionalized in the form of inviolable ‘side-constraint’ rights that forbid these forms of exploitation, and which the state is empowered to enforce. This is an example of an associative conception, because the general acknowledgement of the special status of individuals defines a pattern of interpersonal relation¬ ships through which the appropriate status of individuals is reciprocally recognized, preserved and realized. On the side-constraint theory, a special set of moral relationships takes priority over all others: the relation of respect which is putatively operative between an active agent and a passive bearer of rights. This relation of respect regulates and intervenes between all pairs of transacting agents: every agent must satisfy the same set of side-constraints with respect to every other agent who stands to be affected by the relevant action. In this sense, the bilateral relation of respect on which Nozickean side-constraints are erected embodies an agent-relative prohibition on the violation of others’ rights, to use Thomas Nagel’s famous terminology. That is (to para¬ phrase Nagel) side-constraints only regulate an agent’s conduct with respect to the violations he might commit; there is no requirement that he take responsibility for any other violations, and hence he should never be forced to do so by the state or anyone else. It is important to stress the moral stringency of the kinds of inviolable rights libertarians recommend. Libertarian rights are of such weight that it is not only the case that they cannot be violated in order to produce greater overall welfare. They are also not to be violated even to prevent a greater number of similar violations in the future. That is the point of Nozick’s rejection of the ‘utilitarianism of rights’ view, a rejection followed explicitly by Loren Lomasky and implicitly by other libertarians

3 Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 30-1.

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as well.4 The rejection of the ‘utilitarianism of rights’ view is an attempt to insulate the libertarian proposal from any claim about the value of end-states or consequentialist goals.5 *■ The thesis of self-ownership The kind of ownership right that matters to libertarians is the right to exclude others from making authoritative decisions about how the owned object is to be disposed of.6 Applied to the ownership of the self, this implies that outsiders have no right to decide how the bundle of attributes, assets and resources that comprise a ‘self’ are to be used. If individuals are self-owners in this sense, it seems that seizing the results of someone’s labour is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions. This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you.7

Libertarians maintain that redistributive taxation, paternalism and other coercive interferences in an individual’s private action all involve an outsider implicitly claiming the right to direct an individual’s personal resources. According to libertarians, this necessarily implies that the coercing agency is asserting a property-right in the coercee’s actions. Such coercive interventions are thus incompatible with individual self¬ ownership. This argument hinges on a crucial suppressed assumption, which it is important to make explicit, for it reveals much about the libertarian interpretation of the thesis of self-ownership. The assumption is that, apart from the state’s right to enforce self-ownership rights themselves, all eligible justifications for a right to compel particular uses of a self’s resources must in the end stand or fall as claims about someone’s ownership of the relevant resources. On this assumption, if I claim the right to compel you to invest your resource R in a certain way, and you claim the right to invest R in a different way, the conflict must in the end be resolved by deciding which of us has the right to do with R as we 4 ibid., pp. 28-30; Lomasky, Persons. Rights and the Moral Community, pp. 18-19. 5 Even if some exceptions might be ‘written in’ to the definition of the side-constraint; see J. Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, p. 55. 6 M. Rothbard, Power and Market (Menlo Park: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), p. 76; Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 172; G. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 68; J. Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, pp. 66-7, 175; D. Boaz, Libertarianism: a Primer, pp. 61ff. 7 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 172.

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please. Thus if the state claims the right to spend 10 per cent of your earnings on welfare payments to the disadvantaged, the only conceivable way in which it might have that right, according to the libertarian, is if it (or someone on whose behalf it acts) owns that increment of your earnings. It follows from this that if their position is to be fully consistent, libertarians must assume that individuals are comprehensive self-owners. That is, they must maintain that there is no part or aspect of the self and its capacities that is unowned or unownable by that same self. The self is, on this view, fully owned by itself.8 According to this view, there is no part or aspect of the self’s own activity over which others are entitled to make authoritative decisions. As long as they do not violate any other’s self-ownership rights, individuals have the right to decide just as they please how the personal assets and resources that comprise their selves should be disposed of. To see why libertarians must be committed to comprehensive self¬ ownership, consider one way in which self-ownership might be noncomprehensive. Suppose, for example, that there were aspects or features of the self that are ‘unownable’, such that no one is in a position to dispose of them just as they please. Instead, individuals are under a duty to not act towards this (sacrosanct, inviolable) aspect of themselves in certain ways, a duty that individuals have no right to veto. In such a view, self-ownership would not be comprehensive, but partial, since there would be some feature of the self that one is not free to use and abuse as one wishes, and to which one owed particular duties. An outsider who intervened to prevent me from violating these duties would not neces¬ sarily be asserting a property right in me. She would rather be enforcing the limits of my property-rights in myself, the limits of my entitlement to dispose of myself just as I please. She would be doing exactly what a libertarian state does when it intervenes to stop me from violating others’ ownership rights, which (for the libertarian) mark the external limits of my property-rights. The only difference is that in this case, the right to dispose of our property as we see fit is bounded not only by an external limit (set by the presence of others’ ownership rights), but also by an internal limit, specified by certain overriding moral duties to some unownable (sacrosanct, inviolable) feature of one’s own self. In neither ‘what is owned, according to the thesis of self-ownership, is not a self, where “self” is used to denote some particularly intimate, or essential part of the person ... the moral self¬ owner is ... possessed of himself entire and not of his self alone. The term “self” in the name of the thesis of self-ownership has a purely reflexive significance. It signifies that what owns and what is owned are one and the same, namely the whole person’, G. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, pp. 68-9.

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instance need the justification for the intervention involve claiming that the intervening agency has the right to direct others’ actions or personal assets just as it pleases.

As we saw above, libertarians claim that the coercive direction of my R to serve ends that I have not chosen entails that the coercer is my partowner. But this inference does not go through under the assumption of enforceable internal limits on self-ownership of the sort sketched above. For then the coercing agency need not be claiming that it has the right to direct my R just as it pleases (i.e. that it owns it). Rather, it might be claiming the more limited right to direct R merely in order to enforce a general constraint on property ownership, one that no one (including the coercing agency) is entitled to override just as they please. It follows that libertarians cannot admit such internal constraints on self-ownership and must therefore assume self-ownership to be comprehensive.9 The assumption of comprehensive self-ownership generates a power¬ fully voluntarist ideal of individual freedom, which goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of libertarian ideals.10 As Jonathan Wolff notes, ‘self-ownership ... has consequences for freedom: what I do is my business, and I can do whatever I like, provided I respect the rights of others’.11 Partly for this reason, the thesis of comprehensive self-ownership naturally implies a commitment to political neutrality. If a public agent is to take individual self-ownership seriously, it has no reason to take any particular view of how personal assets and resources ought to be used (assuming that the rights of others are not in question), since any effort to enforce such a view would violate individuals’ rights. Its sole concern will be to regulate interpersonal interaction to ensure that self-ownership rights are not violated. The thesis of comprehensive self-ownership effectively models the claim that ‘moral theory is deemed to succeed if it identifies rules or principles for adjudication of interpersonal clashes of interest to which all can ... rationally assent. The flip side of this conception is that it is not the business of moral philosophy to tell individuals where their good lies, or what they ought to desire (beyond the harmony that observance of moral rules affords each of us).’12 This confirms that the thesis of comprehensive self-ownership points to 9 Thus the libertarian argument has the following form: (1) The state needs to use R in order to take a particular kind of action. (2) R is a part of X’s self. (3) X is a comprehensive self-owner. (4) Hence, the state’s use of R without X’s consent violates her self-ownership rights. If (3) were false (4) would not necessarily follow, for the reasons given above. 10 It is for this reason that G. A. Cohen regards the principle of self-ownership as the ‘organizing centre of libertarianism’, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, p. 12. 11 J. Wolff, Robert Nozick (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 8. 12 Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, p. 228.

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a strongly asymmetrical conception of public agency. A public agent charged with acting on behalf of a community of self-owners is most naturally viewed as an institutional agent whose point of view and principles of action are asymmetrical to those applied by private indi¬ viduals in their own lives. Its goal, as it were, is to regulate the interaction between self-owners without itself being a self-owner. Thus Lomasky: Unlike individuals acting in their private capacity, the state may not commend one rights-respecting mode of life above others. It is only the state that is denied this prerogative. Surely individuals are not illiberal if they make such judgments with regard to their own ends. To have a project is to be very much partial concerning ends ... The state is different. Its possession of title to exercise coercive powers is not justified on grounds of any special ability to discern value but because the enforcement of rights is necessary if individuals are to be at liberty to engage in their own pursuit of value. Coercion that goes beyond enforcement of rights goes too far. The function of the state is to protect the rights of agents, not to act as an agent in its own right.13

The point here cannot be that there are no normative principles which define the functions of the state: clearly, to say that the state is under an obligation to prohibit absolutely violations of rights within a community of self-owners is to invoke a normative principle. Rather, the claim is that this principle and its corollaries define so truncated a conception of agency as to bear no similarity with the model of agency under which self-owners act out their personal projects and seek to realize their personal projects and values, whatever they may be. When it acts legitimately, the state simply operates at a different level and with different principles from that of individuals. As Lomasky puts it: ‘The state can be depicted as the umpire enforcing the rules of the (meta)game, but not as a player in the game.’14 The libertarian conception of an ‘inviolable private sphere’, then, represents an attempt to combine two major commitments: the thesis of individual inviolability (which points towards a Kantian associative 13 ibid., pp. 252-3. 14 ibid., p. 253. Another effect of adopting the libertarian thesis of self-ownership is to depict a political community in which individuals are permitted to act towards themselves in ways which they could not act towards others. There is, on such a view, an asymmetry between self and other-regarding licence. This is explicitly recognized by Nozick, who writes that ‘some things individuals may choose for themselves, no one may choose for another’. For example, while individuals may never coerce others into slavery, Nozick claims that voluntary slavery would be permitted under a ‘free system’. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 331, 58. In his defence of libertarianism, Charles Murray writes, ‘Self-ownership is unalienable ... .a person cannot sell himself, any more than he can sell his rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, What It Means to be a Libertarian, p. 6. In this passage, Murray demonstrates that he does not understand the meaning of libertarian self-ownership, since (as Nozick correctly recognizes) the ability to alienate oneself and one’s liberties is exactly what self-ownership claims to individuals as of right.

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conception of public agency) and the thesis of self-ownership (which implies an asymmetrical conception of public agency). This is a powerful and challenging formula. It allows libertarians to claim that enforcing a scheme of libertarian basic rights not only secures a private zone of activity within which individuals are free to do as they please; it simultaneously protects individuals against being treated as means towards social ends. As libertarians recognize, this reverses the most fundamental assumption behind orthodox Marxian criticisms of capit¬ alism: that enforcing a system of private ownership systematically treats individuals as means because it is really an institutionalized scheme of exploitation. But if Nozick and the libertarians can successfully integrate the Kantian ideal of individual inviolability into their scheme of self¬ ownership rights, then they can plausibly maintain that enforcing a freemarket system of private ownership is partially constitutive of, not inimical to, an ideal of non-exploitation and inviolability. It is for this reason that Marxists such as Gerald Cohen have been so disturbed by the libertarian challenge initiated by Robert Nozick:15 for stated in its strongest form, the libertarian position is that asserting unqualified self¬ ownership is equivalent to asserting that individuals are inviolable. If that equivalence holds, then it seems that those who want to eradicate exploitation should applaud rather than decry the free-market system, for if (as the libertarian maintains) all of the alternatives inevitably threaten or restrict self-ownership to a greater degree, the free market alone best protects individuals from exploitation and guarantees their inviolability. This chapter questions that equivalence. Indeed, it makes a stronger claim: if we are justified in believing that all citizens possess inviolable rights (in the libertarian sense), then those rights could not be compre¬ hensive self-ownership rights (in the libertarian sense), and vice versa.16 I do not present this claim as a theorem which the arguments of this chapter prove, but rather as a hypothesis which my arguments make plausible. The argument is strong enough, though, to shift the burden of proof back to libertarians and other liberal individualists. If my argu¬ ment works, the challenge facing the libertarian is to explain how self¬ ownership and individual inviolability can be integrated. 15 G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, pp. 4, 12-13, 17. 16 The plurals in this sentence are important. Although I want to claim that the effort to defend inviolable rights of self-ownership may be incoherent, my argument will not be that the idea of an inviolable right of self-ownership is logically inconceivable, for that is obviously not true. My argument hinges on the way in which claims about inviolability and self-ownership can be justifiably generalized across society as a whole. It is at this collective level alone that the incoherence I want to identify appears.

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Inviolable self-ownership rights? The first point to make is that the thesis of self-ownership actually plays a very specific role within the libertarian theory. The thesis of self¬ ownership is the premiss of a key argument about the coverage of our ownership rights. This argument claims that if individuals own them¬ selves, they must own, with equally strong moral right, the income and external goods they acquire in the course of any series of uncoerced transactions in which no other ownership rights are violated. It is thus used to establish one critical component of the libertarian claim, the highly controversial view that a tax on earned income is, ceteris paribus, just as much a violation of our rights as a direct act of aggression against the person. It is well known that this argument faces a number of serious problems, particularly in the absence of a well-developed theory of justice in acquisition.17 But I propose to ignore those problems and concede this point to the libertarian.18 My argument assumes then, that the libertarian is right to argue that the thesis of comprehensive self¬ ownership entails that the theft of legitimately generated income is just as much of a violation of self-ownership as direct physical aggression or injury. Moreover, I will allow the libertarian to maintain that the coercive extraction of income for redistributive purposes counts as just such a violation. This may seem foolish, especially to those who find the libertarian view of income redistribution unacceptably callous. But in fact it is not as rash a concession as one might initially suppose. For the claim that a tax on earned income is, under most circumstances, just as serious a violation of our rights as a direct act of aggression against the person is only a part of the libertarian position. Distinctive and impor¬ tant though that claim is, I do not agree with Gerald Cohen that it is the ‘organizing centre of libertarianism’. Arguably as critical, if not more so, is the claim about the inviolable character of libertarian rights we discussed above. And that remains as yet unaddressed, and it is when we try to account for this idea that the libertarian position starts to break down. To understand why this happens, we need first to grasp that the thesis of self-ownership cannot resolve this issue, given its role in the libertarian theory. For the argument of which it is a premiss claims to establish that 17 For example, R. Arneson, ‘Lockean Self-Ownership: Towards a Demolition’, Political Studies, 39 (1991). 18 This does not mean that I believe that the objections are wrong; in fact, I think that they are right. I concede this point simply to move attention away from that issue and on to one which I think is of as much, if not more, general significance.

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our property-rights in such things as income, cars, houses and furniture are just as strong as our ownership rights in the initial endowment we exploit to obtain them. That argument says that, if I have legitimately acquired my income and goods, the moral weight of my rights in them is equivalent to that of my rights in my self and its resources (my labour time, my talents, experience, skills and so on). But this says nothing about whether rights of ownership generally may legitimately be over¬ ridden or violated for the sake of other considerations, such as utility or the common good. And that is just the issue that is raised by the libertarian notion of inviolability. What is in question, then, is whether relations of ownership generally, those between self and its initial endow¬ ment, or those between self and earned income, ought to be inviolably respected. The libertarian has to establish that the relation of ownership itself ought to hold sway against other possible considerations: but repeating the thesis of self-ownership in this context simply begs that question. Indeed, the situation is worse than this, because we can show that without supplementary arguments, a bare appeal to the thesis of self¬ ownership will tend to legitimate violations in cases in which libertarians usually disallow them. The following thought-experiment shows why. Suppose that a public agent is charged with acting on behalf of society as a whole. This agency may be conceived as a pre-established state, or some prior agent, or set of agents, charged with codifying its functions and limits in advance, like the individuals in Rawls’s Original Position. Now suppose we tell them that, with the exception of the public agent himself, every member of the society on whose collective behalf the public agent is to act is a comprehensive self-owner. So each individual has a rightful entitlement19 to dispose of himself and his legitimately acquired property according to his own standards, beliefs and procliv¬ ities. The question for our public agent is this: in the absence of any further normative considerations, does the inviolability of self-ownership rights automatically follow? Just how far does the fact of universal comprehensive self-ownership automatically constrain a public agent’s view of what it might mean to act legitimately on behalf of a community of individual self-owners? At first sight, the answer to this question seems to be obvious. If the fact of universal self-ownership is indeed the only constraint on its actions, then surely the public agent is limited to those proposals to which each and every individual has actually consented. Tempting 19 I say a rightful entitlement because we do not yet know what the normative strength of this entitlement is.

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though this answer seems to be, the public agent is not yet in a position to endorse it; for (pending further argumentation) this answer amounts to simply presupposing that self-ownership rights are inviolable, and this obviously begs the question. The fact that there are no principles beyond self-ownership which compete against it does not by itself imply that self¬ ownership rights are inviolable in the strong libertarian sense. There might be considerations internal to the net of ideas that constitute the fact of universal comprehensive self-ownership that justify violations under certain circumstances. Of course, the public agent does not yet have reasons to accept that either; but the key point is that at this stage neither of these answers is immediately available to the public agent. Further argumentation is necessary before we can declare that the thought-experiment has reached a conclusion. Suppose the public agent then asks, why not violate the self-ownership rights of individuals? This is the crucial question because answering it requires us to investigate the kinds of circumstance in which a right of self-ownership might be justifiably violated, and that just is the appro¬ priate measure of its violability. Notice that it is no objection here to say, invoking Nozick’s historical entitlement theory, that a public agent could have legitimately acquired the right to consider violating rights of self¬ ownership in the first place only by violating self-ownership rights in the past. For, even if it is true that past violations have, or must have, occurred, such considerations will only be decisive if we already know that rights of self-ownership can never justifiably be violated. But that is just what is currently in question, and what the thought-experiment is designed to address.20 So the question before our public agent remains: given that all individuals have comprehensive self-ownership rights, what stops us from regarding them as violable? Suppose the public agent reasons as follows. Refusing to recognize any normative constraint beyond the fact of self¬ ownership commits us to the view that the only values that may be taken into account are the personal values of the self-owners themselves. That is, any effort on the part of the public agent to subsume self-owners’ own particular values and standards under some independent, impersonal standard of value is ruled out, because the thought-experiment prohibits the public agent from invoking any principles beyond the fact of self¬ ownership itself. The public agent, then, has access to no standard against which he might rank or discriminate between the values and 20 It is also no objection to claim that the concept of inviolability is already built into the concept of the ‘right’ that is implicit in the notion of self-ownership. For inviolability is not part of the definition of the term, as is shown by the fact that the idea of a ‘prima facie right’ is not self-contradictory.

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goals of the self-owners. He must simply take them at face value, and (as it were) reason from within the diverse perspectives and viewpoints of self-owners. But he can then argue, quite reasonably, that for any self¬ owner, the ability to act out whatever goals and projects are validated by the dictates of their own conscience will be of fundamental value. So it seems that a public agent can legitimately assume that there is at least one fundamental interest shared by all the individuals on whose collective behalf he is to act: all self-owners naturally attach fundamental value to those conditions under which they may pursue their own values and projects unhindered by others. Since the strict enforcement of compre¬ hensive self-ownership rights would appear to secure individuals against such interference, the public agent ought to regard them as inviolable, and should coerce citizens into respecting the self-ownership rights of others. In so doing, the public agent ensures a reciprocal supply of non¬ interference which each self-owner, ex hypothesis has reason to value. A version of just this argument has been adopted by Loren Lomasky in his attempt to specify a rigorous justification for a libertarian theory of rights, a justification which his predecessor, Robert Nozick, notoriously failed to provide.21 But despite its explicit deployment by Lomasky and others, and its congruence with the fact of universal self-ownership, this argument leaves us well short of the strong libertarian account of inviolability. The basic problem is that there is nothing in this line of argument to rule out a ‘utilitarianism of rights’. This is illustrated by the following three examples. First, if our public agent knows that violating, or authorizing others to violate, some self-ownership rights will prevent a greater number of similar violations in the future, it seems that it has no reasons not to do so, at least in principle. The argument above does not rule this out because its conclusion is that the violability of rights is a function of the fundamental disvalue to all self-owners of the kind of interference caused by violations of self-ownership. At best this generates the conclusion that violations (and hence the associated interference) should be minimized. But that is not the same as saying that they must be avoided at all costs. In fact, it leaves ample room for Schefflerian cases in which, if we assume 21 See Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, pp. 56-78, 94-100. I have put the argument in terms that Lomasky does not use himself, but I believe that the essentials of his argument are captured in the thought-experiment I have sketched. A possible point of difference is that Lomasky does not explicitly appeal to the idea of self¬ ownership. But there is nothing in his view that is clearly opposed to the self-ownership ideal, and see his claim that to posit basic rights to property is neither more nor less warranted than is the positing of basic rights simpliciter. If there are basic rights, then there are basic rights to property’.

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that X violations will deter Y violations, we have good reason to perpetrate or authorize X violations where Y > X. The argument above points directly to the kind of utilitarianism of rights which libertarians including Lomasky himself - explicitly reject.22 Second, it is open to the public agent to observe that not all violations of self-ownership rights are equally serious or harmful relative to a standard of non-interference. That is, even if we grant that petty theft and murder are both violations of the victims’ rights of self-ownership, no one would claim that they are equally serious interferences in individuals’ ability to pursue their personal values and projects. But then why would it be illegitimate for the public agent to trade-off a relatively harmless violation for the prevention of a very harmful one? For example, suppose the state confiscates my legitimately acquired gun. Certainly, this violates my self-ownership rights; but if that confiscation prevents me from killing someone else, then presumably our public agent can say that the confiscation is justified because it prevents a worse violation. There is nothing in the logic of our thought-experiment which blocks this justification. Finally, as is usually recognized, there are cases in which merely supplying non-interference to individuals will not be enough to guarantee to self-owners the opportunity to pursue their self-chosen projects. This is explicitly acknowledged by Lomasky: there is, however, no assurance that liberty will universally guarantee to each person the requisites for project pursuit. In the most liberal society, unless there are rights to provision, it is possible for some to starve while others dine on the tongues of hummingbirds ... if a person is unable to secure that which is necessary to live as a project pursuer, then he has a rightful claim to provision by others who have a surplus beyond what they require to live as project pursuers. In that strictly limited but crucial respect, basic rights extend beyond liberty rights to welfare rights.23

This is a damaging concession. Part of the problem is that Lomasky does not fully explain how or why this principle is ‘strictly limited’. But the more important point is what it reveals about the status of self-ownership rights whose normative force is a function of the value to self-owners of non-interference. Lomasky suggests here that the severely disadvantaged have a residual right to the ‘surplus’ of the extremely well-off. This focuses attention on the issue of whether or not severely disadvantaged self-owners ought to receive some additional support as a matter of right, rather than for other reasons (need, for example). But that is not the only, or most important, issue of principle here. For suppose the public 22 S. Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism, pp. 87-90. 23 Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, p. 126.

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agent agrees that disadvantaged self-owners ought to receive some support drawn from the surplus income of wealthy self-owners: it does not necessarily follow from this that the latter do not have a right to their surplus, as Lomasky seems sometimes to imply.24 Moreover, this remains true even if the redistribution is justified on the grounds that the disadvantaged can claim the surplus as a matter of right. That they can claim that surplus as of right in no way automatically entails that the wealthy self-owners cease to have a right to that surplus as well; for we can still say that the latters’ rights to the surplus can be legitimately violated to meet the more pressing rights of the disadvantaged. The important matter of principle here is that the rightful ownership of the surplus on the part of the wealthy self-owners need not block the justification for the kind of redistribution Lomasky envisages: ownership rights can be legitimately violated when doing so meets a more pressing claim to non-interference on the part of disadvantaged self-owners. Since the importance to all individuals of non-interference can be inferred from the thesis of self-ownership itself without appealing to independent considerations, even a public agent whose concerns are limited to self¬ ownership can legitimately violate self-ownership rights in these kinds of cases. Our thought-experiment suggests, then, that assuming univeral com¬ prehensive self-ownership cannot automatically generate a libertarian view of inviolability. The thought-experiment instead illustrates that endorsing the libertarian thesis of self-ownership can imply both that taxation of individuals for redistributive purposes is a violation of self¬ ownership, and that in some cases (not admitted by libertarians) redis¬ tributive taxation is legitimate. One might think that this is incoherent, since the fact that redistributive taxation violates self-ownership rights seems to imply its absolute illegitimacy. But, if my argument is correct, this is worse than a non sequitur. Some violations may actually be required once the public agent considers the polity to be a community of self-owners. One does not have to pretend that taxation is not really a violation of self-ownership in order to defend it: one can, as it were, ‘come clean’ and admit that self-ownership rights are violated, and still maintain that the violations are justified by gains in terms of self¬ ownership itself that will result. Notice that the thought-experiment does not deny that self-owners’ rights carry an appreciable resilience against the pull of standard utilitarian considerations. Orthodox utilitarian arguments are success24 ibid., p. 128: ‘basic rights to property are not unconditional but are limited by the otherwise unsatisfiable needs of others’.

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fully ruled out, because to appeal to the value of maximizing overall utility (say) is to assert an impersonal standard of value against which the public agent can assess the worth of self-owners’ projects. To that extent Lomasky’s argument can be vindicated: as we saw, once the public agent is restricted to the principle of self-ownership, appeals to impersonal value schedules are rendered illegitimate. By contrast, the value of non¬ interference, as Lomasky reasonably suggests, can be seen as an extended form of personal value, since its importance to self-owners can be inferred from the special stake they have in the pursuit of their own values, whatever they may be. But while standard utilitarian criteria are disallowed, libertarians cannot look to this argument alone to rule out any and all consequentialist or end-state arguments. What the thoughtexperiment shows is that, at best, the thesis of self-ownership discrimi¬ nates within the set of possible end-state or consequentialist arguments. But it does not give us enough by itself to exclude the category of endstate or consequentialist arguments altogether, and, clearly, that is what is required to vindicate the libertarian notion of inviolability. It is tempting to object that any ‘consequentialist’ tendencies which emerge in this context cannot be attributed to the thesis of self-ownership itself but are, rather, an artifact of the underlying design of the thoughtexperiment, which is built around the assumption of an agency that is responsible for ‘society as a whole’. That assumption, one might claim, smuggles in precisely the sort of anti-individualism that Nozick, Rawls and others have associated with the forms of utilitarianism they have vigorously resisted. But this objection misses the point. Even if we accept, contrary to the arguments of the first two chapters of this study, that it is helpful to describe this assumption as problematically antiindividualistic, the thought-experiment still carries force. For it shows that the thesis of self-ownership is perfectly at home in that supposedly non-individualistic setting. There is nothing intrinsic to the net of ideas that constitute the idea of universal comprehensive self-ownership that rules out this kind of minimal consequentialism, and so there is nothing intrinsic to those ideas which makes self-ownership rights inviolable. Nothing I have said so far, of course, shows that self-ownership rights could not be inviolable in the libertarian sense. What has been shown is that to justify inviolable self-ownership rights, libertarians must invoke additional arguments, arguments that appeal to considerations beyond the orbit of self-ownership itself. Moreover, it has been shown that libertarians must make some such appeal, for otherwise self-ownership rights will be violable in ways they would not recognize as legitimate. In what follows, I argue that it is very difficult to see how libertarians can account for the level of inviolability they have in mind without quali-

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fying, and perhaps abandoning, their commitment to the idea of compre¬ hensive self-ownership. But before I go on to this next phase of the argument, I want to note another important conclusion suggested by our brief thoughtexperiment. I noted above that there is an elective affinity between the libertarian appeal to the idea of self-ownership and the idea of political neutrality. The two are connected because it seems that a state which recognizes that individuals are self-owners must acknowledge that indi¬ viduals are free, within their own sphere, to act on whatever values or (if you like) conceptions of the good they choose to endorse. Our thoughtexperiment models this kind of neutrality very well; for our public agent discovers that if universal self-ownership is the one normative considera¬ tion available to her, she cannot appeal to any impersonal schedules of value against which to rank or discriminate between the diverse values according to which self-owners decide to dispose of themselves and their property.25 Now it is sometimes suggested by libertarians (and others) that this kind of neutrality requires the state to treat individuals’ rights as inviolable. Our thought-experiment reveals that this is a mistake, because it shows that there can be justifable violations of self-ownership rights even when a public agent invokes no values or standards independent of those endorsed by self-owners themselves. None of the permissible violations discussed above are justified by the public agent on the basis of an evaluation of the intrinsic worth of the victims’ values. For example, suppose a wealthy self-owner wants to donate a certain sum of his legitimately acquired income to the Lutheran church, his preferred religious institution. But now suppose that the public agent taxes the wealthy self-owner in order to pay for a programme which will prevent a greater number of more serious violations of self-ownership in the future. In so doing the public agent thereby prevents this individual from making the donation. In this case, then, the public agent violates this self-owner’s right to make the donation, but the justification for the violation does not hinge on the claim that supporting Lutheranism is inherently unworthy, or even that it is less worthy than the personal goals and values of those others whose self-ownership rights will be secured as a result of this particular violation. The argument hinges 25 This does not mean that the social agent has no basis for evaluating and restricting individuals’ personal values and projects, because as we saw, the social agent has good reasons for instituting and enforcing a general regime of non-violation; and that means that the social agent may judge that particular actions prejudicial to the rights of others are wrong and are to be prohibited. But at no point need the social agent be committed to a view about the worth of values, projects and activities which affect merely oneself or consenting others.

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simply on the claim that it is better, all other things equal, for more self¬ owners to have the opportunity to pursue their own values, whatever they are. Local violations are then justified when they would make it easier for everyone to live by the lights of their own consciences, not because the values of the victim are suspect in the eyes of the public agent. This shows that the public agent can justify the sort of violations discussed earlier without impugning its impartiality or neutrality. It is therefore unlikely that an appeal to the value of neutrality can explain why self-ownership rights ought to be regarded as inviolable: the notion ot neutrality is already implicated in the thesis of self-ownership whose insufficiency in this context is now clear. Two strategies of justification I have argued, then, that the libertarian needs to provide some indepen¬ dent grounds for asserting that the rights individuals have, or ought to have, are inviolable. What kinds of argument might be adduced in support of this claim? Considerations of space and my own lack of imagination rule out an exhaustive survey of all possible alternatives. Instead, I will focus on the Kantian, or neo-Kantian, arguments on which libertarians themselves explicitly and heavily rely. I argue that the Kantian strategy can only succeed in justifying the appropriate form of inviolability at the cost of the thesis of comprehensive self-ownership. This casts considerable doubt on the stability of the alliance between self¬ ownership and inviolability on which the stability of the libertarian project as a whole depends. I argue for this claim indirectly, first by sketching the basic difficulty, and then attempting to rebut some of the most obvious ways in which one might deny that I have really identified a genuine problem. The essence of the Kantian strategy is easily stated. On this kind of view, rights are inviolable because to violate them would be to fail to acknowledge or respect a morally privileged capacity or feature of the right-holder. That is, individuals possess some special property or characteristic, which is of supreme and independent moral significance, to which unconditionally binding duties of respect are owed. Rights are then necessary and inviolable because they forbid the kinds of inter¬ personal transactions in which these unconditional duties are ignored. In the Kantian structure, then, rights simply inherit the inviolability of whatever morally privileged capacity or personal attribute that they protect. On Kant’s own view, the relevant feature of persons is their capacity for autonomy as self-legislation. However, this need not be the case; clearly other capacities or features of persons could be plugged into

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the basic Kantian structure, and certainly many theorists and philoso¬ phers have argued for the equivalent importance of other, more-or-less related personal attributes and capacities.26 This kind of argument, however, does not sit well with the idea of comprehensive self-ownership. The problem arises because all forms of the general Kantian strategy rely on something like the following principle: ‘all agents have duties to respect some supremely and intrinsi¬ cally valuable feature F of agents’. But this principle not only implies that individuals have duties to respect others’ F, but also that they are responsible for ensuring that their actions respect their own F in an appropriate way. The argument implies therefore that individuals have certain responsibilities towards their own moral capacities. As in the theories of Locke and Kant, the claim that others ought never to violate my rights is coupled to the claim that / ought never to act towards myself in analogous ways. That is why (for example) they connect the idea of an inviolable right against murder with a moral prohibition on suicide. But as I suggested above, the burden of the thesis of comprehensive self¬ ownership was to permit individuals to veto any alleged responsibilities of this self-regarding kind. So if this argument is to combine a commit¬ ment to self-ownership with one to the thesis of individual inviolability the argument must include some mechanism whereby individuals may make an exception for themselves merely by invoking their personal inclinations and values. But can this be done in a way that does not undermine the unconditional nature of our duties to F which the Kantian strategy requires? This seems impossible because, on the argument we are currently considering, the basis for the imperative that rights ought to be inviolably respected is the claim that violations of rights would violate a more general duty to respect F. The thesis of self-ownership would require, however, that (where no other individuals are affected) individuals can exempt themselves from this more general requirement by invoking their own inclinations and personal values. But the effect of this is to make the general duty to respect F optional, or at any rate to subordinate it to whatever values individuals contrive to endorse or pursue. So - to return to our thought-experiment - a public agent who accepts the thesis of self26 For example, the capacity for project pursuit (Lomasky), the capacity to select, revise and rationally pursue a conception of the good (Rawls), a capacity to vest one’s life with meaning (Nozick, Ackerman) or the capacity to wholeheartedly and successfully pursue valuable activities (Raz). As will become clear later in the argument, I believe that Marx makes exactly this kind of argument, with reference to the capacity for realizing oneself through meaningful creative labour. Note that while in this context we are considering how rights might be defended as inviolable on this conception, it does not follow that all such conceptions must make an appeal to the notion of rights.

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ownership must accept that, in principle, what is of value to individuals (that is, whatever self-owners want to do with their property) trumps the independent value of any relevant F. But if what is of value to agents can so defeat the putatively independent value of F, then an appeal to the latter becomes too weak to rule out the sorts of violations allowed in the thought-experiment above. Consider, for example, a case in which the public agent is considering violating my self-ownership rights in order to secure the self-ownership rights of many more others. The appeal to the special value of F is supposed to give our public agent some reason to refuse to do so because (let us suppose) this would violate the general duty to respect my supremely valuable F. But as long as the public agent accepts the thesis of self-ownership, she can have no objection to my deciding that it is better for me to violate my own F, because she accepts that self-owners like me must have the moral freedom to act on whatever personal values we wish as long as others’ self-ownership is unprejudiced. Since this will also be true of all the self-owners on whose collective behalf the public agent is acting, it seems that no self-owner has any intrinsic reason to regard their own F as supremely valuable, and that the public agent understands and endorses this. It follows from this that the public agent accepts that what has value to self-owners trumps the independent value of F, so that it remains the case that what has value to individuals takes priority in the eyes of the public agent. But this obviously fails to block the justification for the kinds of violations of self-ownership rights our earlier thought-experiment legitimated. For those justifications hinged on just this claim: whatever has value to self-owners is the ultimate con¬ sideration. The utilitarianism of self-ownership rights we discussed there gets going precisely because the public agent was entitled to infer that the good of non-interference was of equivalently fundamental value to all self-owners. If the public agent is willing to allow individuals to violate their F to secure what is of value to them (whatever it is), what is to stop a public agent from violating some others’ F if it is known that doing so will allow more self-owners to obtain what is of value to them, the good of non-interference? In so doing the public agent is merely upholding and generalizing a principle that the thesis of self-ownership compels it to accept: what is of value to self-owners trumps the independent value of any F. The alternative is for the public agent to uphold the independent value of F in the face of any dissenting self-owners; then the argument for the inviolability of rights which protect F will go through, for the duty to respect F is then genuinely unconditional (or at least a necessary condition for its unconditionality is met). But this comes at a price. The

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thesis of self-ownership is now significantly qualified: the public agent is then committed to the view that there are certain forms of self-regarding activity which are morally forbidden and in that sense beyond right, even when no other individuals are affected. In other words;, the commitment to comprehensive self-ownership has been abandoned, since under this argument F effectively becomes an ‘unownable’ attribute of the self, one which individuals are not free to use and abuse as they please.27 I have now stated the central dilemma which I believe faces a libertarian public agent. My argument suggests that a libertarian public agent must choose between two conflicting strategies for justifying rights of a certain shape and strength. The first is the Kantian strategy under which individuals have an inviolable status in virtue of some especially important feature or characteristic which they possess. The central claim of this Kantian approach, then, which I will refer to as ‘strategy (i)’, is the claim that the fundamental public consideration is the independent value of the individual and of the particular characteristics or features of agents which cause them to have this special value and status. Unfortu¬ nately, as we have just seen, this does not leave enough room for the strong kind of self-ownership which libertarians demand. For on strategy (i) the public principle, ‘respect the rights of individuals at all costs', entails an analogous private principle - respect the value of (some special aspect of) your own person at all costs. But the idea of self-ownership requires a justification which leaves the question of how individuals ought to act towards themselves entirely open. The point of construing our relationship to ourselves on the model of property-ownership is to make space for the idea that outsiders (such as moral and political philosophers or public agents) are in no position to dictate to individuals how they ought to dispose of themselves, just as they are not entitled to dictate to individuals how they should use their property (as long as they do not infringe the property-rights of others). The second strategy, which I will refer to as ‘strategy (ii)’, does not take the value of the individual to be fundamental, but rather what is of value to individuals. As we have seen, this strategy is not only favourable to the idea of self-ownership, it largely follows from it. The advantage of this strategy from the libertarian point of view is that it justifies the 27 In a recent defence of libertarian ideas, Charles Murray has written, ‘To me ... it seems axiomatic that the government has no right to keep an ordinarily competent adult from doing something that others judge harmful to him - so axiomatic that it is hard to enter into a dialogue with people who think otherwise’: What it Means To Be a Libertarian, p. 104. Many of Murray’s readers will share his intuitive suspicion of paternalistic interference, but it is not in the end clear that libertarians can avoid asserting unconditional duties to self if they are to retain a commitment to the idea of inviolable individual rights.

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general practice of non-violation of self-ownership in a way which does not commit the public agent to the view that certain self-regarding activities are beyond right or intrinsically wrong. For example, the public agent can acknowledge that I ought not to murder you because we share a fundamental interest in the liberty to act out our lives according to our own decisions. But this leaves ample scope for me to decide for myself that I should end my life. After all, in making such a decision I would simply be exercising my own liberty to live (or die) according to my own decisions and values. Strategy (ii) thus allows the exception which strategy (i) cannot accommodate: that the capacity for liberty itself is not morally important or necessarily worthy of respect unless it is attached to another person whose decisions are not mine to make, and whose goals and attitudes are largely opaque to me. But as our thought-experiment shows, this strategy does nothing to rule out the possibility of a utilitarianism of self-ownership rights. It therefore fails to generate rights of the requisite violability. Moreover, if I am right, not only does this idea fail automatically to generate the claim that rights are strongly inviolable, it also undercuts the most obvious strategy for defending the inviolability of individuals’ rights: the Kantian arguments to which libertarians have explicitly appealed. If this is right, our initial hypothesis starts to look quite plausible: if there are any inviolable rights (in the libertarian sense), they are unlikely to be rights to self-ownership (in the libertarian sense). Before moving on, I note two important clarifications of the argument I have given. First, I want to emphasize that at no point does my argument depend on the (false) claim that there is something logically incoherent about the idea of a right to violate or abuse oneself, or whatever features of oneself might be regarded as of special moral significance. The idea of a right to do such things is perfectly intelligible. My argument does not require us to deny that there could be rights to abuse oneself, or rights to do wrong. The point is the more subtle and surprising claim that the normative stringency of such rights (the extent to which they are violable) seems necessarily limited. If there are rights to do certain kinds of wrong, or rights to abuse oneself, there may be no easy way to argue for their inviolability, in the libertarian sense of that word. The argument raises the possibility of an economy of rights. It may be that strongly inviolable rights require an account of the special and inviolable value of some feature of human agents. But such an account would qualify any rights to do wrong, and undercuts the breezy voluntarism on which libertarianism relies for much of its intuitive appeal. Second, it is no objection to try to point out that there is something

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odd about the idea that individuals might be in a position to violate their own rights. This is of course true, but the Kantian strategy (i) does not involve the counterintuitive claim that it is possible for individuals to violate their own rights. All that is necessary is that the theory state that individuals have certain responsibilities to respect and (perhaps) develop some morally privileged capacity or feature they possess. This does not require us to say that a person who fails in these tasks thereby violates his own rights. The point is rather that if libertarians like Nozick insist on the inviolability of rights, they may have to make some kind of argument about the importance of a particular moral capacity or feature and, further, that such a claim will entail that individuals ought to acknowledge its importance in their own lives and have special reasons for acting in an appropriate way towards it. That is enough to conflict with the thesis of self-ownership, however, because self-ownership does not merely require that individuals not have rights against themselves, but also that they may legitimately veto any alleged responsibilities to themselves. This last point is nicely illustrated by Kant’s own theory. Kant endorses the legal maxim volenti non fit iniuria: no injury is done to one who consents. According to this principle, it is impossible for an individual to injure himself, since rights and justice only come into play in the interpersonal domain. We might be tempted to interpret Kant’s endorsement of this principle as indicating that he embraced the volun¬ tarism of self-ownership after all. But nothing could be further from the truth. Despite his endorsment of the volenti maxim, Kant consistently denied that human agents owned themselves: ‘a man can be his own master (sui iuris) but cannot be the owner of himself {sui dominus) (cannot dispose of himself as he wishes) - still less can he dispose of other men as he pleases - since he is accountable to the humanity in his own person’.28 Moreover, for Kant the existence of duties to oneself is a crucial precondition for all other duties: For suppose that there were no such duties [to oneself]: then there would be no duties whatsoever, and so no external duties either. For I can recognize that I am under obligation to others only insofar as I at the same time put myself under obligation, since the law by virtue of which I regard myself as being under :s I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 90; see also I. Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. L. Infield (New York: Harper and Row), p. 165: ‘Man cannot dispose over himself because he is not a thing; he is not his own property; to say that he is would be self¬ contradictory; for in so far as he is a person he is a Subject in whom the ownership of things can be vested, and if he were his own property, he would be a thing over which he could have ownership. But a person cannot be a property and so cannot be a thing which can be owned, for it is impossible to be a person and a thing, the proprietor and the property.’

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obligation proceeds in every case from my own practical reason; and in being constrained by my own reason, I am also the one constraining myself.29

There is nothing contradictory about Kant’s view here: to say that it is impossible for individuals to act unjustly towards themselves need not mean that it is impossible for individuals to act wrongly towards themselves, or that they have no decisive moral reasons for not acting in certain ways towards themselves. Nor - as we shall see below - does it imply that these self-regarding considerations lie outside the domain of public concern. An economy of rights

As I hope is clear, the problem we have identified is a special instance of the tension between the two conceptions of public agency we explored in the previous chapter. Libertarians need the asymmetrical conception of public agency implicit in their notion of self-ownership in order to derive the idea that individuals may act entirely as they wish within a defined private sphere of action. But (as our thought-experiment shows) if we depict the public as a community of comprehensive self-owners, it is difficult to avoid the kind of aggregative conception of the collectivity which I associated in the last chapter with Mill and the negative libertarian tradition. For in such a view self-owners are depicted as separate, discrete beings to whom values are held to be relative; for a public agent charged with acting on their collective behalf, better and worse states-of-affairs will then naturally be a function of whether a greater or lesser number of individuals are able to obtain what is of value to them. As I have been suggesting, such an account of the collectivity, despite its utilitarian affinities, can sustain a broadly liberal distribution of rights and liberties, particularly under the special assumption of comprehensive and universal self-ownership. If we assume, as seems empirically quite plausible, that personal security and the opportunity for self-development are of overriding value to each self-owner, and interference of fundamental disvalue, a liberal schedule of rights flows quite naturally, as the theories of Mill and Lomasky illustrate. But we will nevertheless remain firmly within a consequentialist, Millian, context, in which trade-offs between violations of self-ownership can be justified in principle. It should not surprise us, then, that Mill endorses the principle of self-ownership in all but name: ‘Nothing is implied in property but the right of each to his (or her) own faculties, to what he can produce by them, and to whatever he can get for them in a fair 29 I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 214.

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market; together with his right to give this to any other person if he chooses, and the right of that other to receive and enjoy it.’30 The affinity between the idea of self-ownership and an aggregative conception of collectivity is clear; and it is precisely this affinity, as \ have argued, that undermines the idea of strongly inviolable individual rights. The notion of a Kantian side-constraint might seem to allow the libertarian to resist these aggregative implications. As we have seen, such a Kantian position implies an associative conception of collectivity, in which irreducible relations of respect are supposed to constrain human interactions. But while this may indeed allow optimizing considerations to be discounted, it does so at the cost of the asymmetry that libertarians need to resist paternalism. It is not clear that the priority of associative side-constraints can carry the necessary conviction absent from an account of duties to oneself. It may not be completely clear why the associative conception pre¬ serves the privilege of bilateral, agent-relative side-constraints that the asymmetrical aggregative conception undermines. The fact that neoKantian theories privilege certain relations of respect does not immedi¬ ately clinch the issue. As Scheffler points out, ‘if you are worried that a violation of [a right] corrupts the relationship between agent and victim, and that the corruption of a human relationship is a bad thing, then why is not it at least permissible to corrupt one valuable relationship if that is the only way to prevent the corruption of five equally valuable human relationships?’31 The answer is that Scheffler’s argument presupposes a normative point of view which is ruled out from the start in an associative conception of collectivity. In the Lomasky/Mill view (aggregative and asymmetrical), the liberal public agent oversees the community as it were from the outside: he considers the interests of each individual separately, and justifies a view about the normative stringency of individuals’ claims and rights on that basis. As I have already hinted, this ideal conjures up the image of the impartial utilitarian spectator, though in a way which does not commit us to a crass utilitarianism (as Scheffler himself has elegantly argued).32 But the associative account adopted in the neo-Kantian theories I have discussed here precludes this perspective. In this concep¬ tion, duties and rights are always to be viewed from the perspective of a particular agent whose relations with all other similar agents are governed by certain prior relations of respect and authority. Those relations of respect and authority define individuals’ rights and duties. 30 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, pp. 215-16. 31 S. Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism, pp. 89-90. 32 ibid., pp. 14-41.

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All agents are responsible for maintaining and reproducing the appro¬ priate relations of respect between persons, but particular individuals are (as Nagel puts it) only responsible for the violations they might commit. There is no vantage-point outside the network of moral relationships which define the ethical community. The perspective of public agency implied by such a theory, then, will itself be embedded within this web of moral relationships. The state does not stand outside this web, just in virtue of its greater power and distinctive abilities. No less than the citizens it governs, the state must be predominantly concerned to recognize their status as inviolable, as ends-in-themselves or as unexploitable in whatever it does. It is this feature of the theory which allows neo-Kantian associative conceptions to preserve the privilege of agentrelative side-constraints over the logic of consequentialist or end-state conceptions. A related point which deserves emphasis here is that, in this kind of associative model, the relevant moral principles will tend to be ‘historical’ in Nozick’s sense. That is, when we ask whether a given state of affairs is legitimate, we do not consider whether or not that state of affairs instantiates some valuable end-state. Rather, we ask whether it came about through a process in which the appropriate relations of respect were observed in the actions and processes which produced the outcome. Nozick’s objection to end-state theories of justice is that they typically assume at the outset that the state is a public agency which stands outside these associative relations of respect. I do not take Nozick to be saying that the state should never aim at valuable end-states; rather, I take him to be saying that we should not exclusively define legitimate political action in terms of the realization of an end-state, since this would justify violations of rights as means towards the achievement of that end-state. Instead, we should insist that the state is itself immersed within the web of reciprocal relations of respect which prohibit violations of rights. Nozick is here arguing - along Kantian and Lockean lines that a liberal public agent, qua agent, is subject to the same restrictions as any human agent. At least in the Kantian and Lockean versions of this argument, those restrictions are built around an associative conception of collectivity, in which relations of authority and respect within and between individuals are determined by the special value of a human capacity. There is an important point to be made about the ‘historical’ nature of these principles. In Nozick’s original argument, the appeal to historical (rather than end-state) principles is made in order to legitimate the market as an instrument of distributive justice. Nozick represents uncoerced market exchange, regulated only by a minimal state, as the

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only distributive method compatible with the strict observance of sideconstraints against violations of self-ownership. Any effort to interfere with the distributive results of uncoerced market exchange will violate this side-constraint. With this assumption in place, it isva short step to the conclusion that the distributive outcome of unfettered market exchange will be prima facie legitimate at any given time. At first glance, this connection seems straightforward and obvious. But the argument given here suggests that the move from historical associa¬ tive principles about individual inviolability (strategy (i)) to a claim about distributions of property is fundamentally problematic. For the purported link between the two hinges on the idea of an inviolable right of self-ownership. But the argument I have given in this chapter shows that this idea is paradoxical. As I put it above, the argument I have given supports the conclusion that if there are any comprehensive self-owner¬ ship rights, they will not be inviolable in the characteristic libertarian sense. Moreover, I have suggested that a liberal public agent who takes the polity to be a community of self-owners will assess better and worse states-of-affairs on the basis of a comparison of end-states. The idea of historical principles fits with the idea of inviolable relations of respect between citizens, but in themselves such relations of respect imply nothing about legitimate procedures for allocating property-rights. As soon as we try to do so by appealing to a notion of comprehensive self¬ ownership, the idea of inviolable rights becomes problematic, and the whole notion of historical principles becomes moot. The point is that the ‘historicity’ of a side-constraint theory does not unproblematically imply that we can take the market to be an authoritative procedure for allocating property. As we shall see in the next section, this hints at a fundamental problem for the libertarian: what is the connection between an inviolable prohibition against exploitation and being treated as mere means, and a claim about what people own privately? In a way, libertarianism can effectively be defined as the view that these two parts of the story are intimately bound up with each other: on this view, to be exploited is always a form of theft. But the argument I have given suggests that this link is problematic, as orthodox Marxism has always maintained. The picture of contemporary libertarianism that I hope is now emerging is of a political theory which is marked by a fundamental conceptual hiatus. That hiatus originates in the effort to combine two families of ideas, each of which presupposes a different conception of collectivity. Libertarians may have to choose between historical prin¬ ciples and inviolable individual rights on the one hand, and comprehen¬ sive self-ownership, the idea that collective and personal principles are

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disanalogous, a commitment to a certain form of voluntaristic neutrality and a justification for capitalist accumulation on the other. The first pair of ideas depends on an associative and symmetrical conception of collectivity which I related in the previous chapter to the work of Rousseau and Kant. I will later suggest that the work of Karl Marx also belongs to this tradition of thinking about the structure of the collec¬ tivity. The second family of ideas relies on the aggregative asymmetrical conception of the political community I associated with Bentham and Mill, and today with the work of Loren Lomasky. It is understandable that libertarians have sought to combine these views: together they promise an attractive vision of a society in which individuals carry an inviolable moral status and simultaneously occupy an indivisible private sphere in which they may act as they wish. But the economy of rights that I have sketched here may preclude satisfying both of these desiderata in the same theoretical frame. I do not mean to suggest that the economy of rights is given a priori or that it is built into the structure of reason or rational morality in some other way. The parameters of the conflicts that I have been exploring are historical. The economy of rights stems from the misguided effort to draw ad libitum from the variety of traditions and theories which have been thought to be in some sense liberal’. This approach assumes that history somehow deposits concepts and ideas like Lego bricks that the theorist can mix and match at will according to his needs. But historical concepts and ideas are not like this. They typically come complete with a network of entailments, ambiguities and implications. When combined, these entailments can interfere with each other, thwarting efforts to achieve coherence. To my mind, this is what has happened in the case of contemporary liberal individualist - and especially libertarian - theory. I do not claim that it is inconceivable that there might be a way for libertarians to devise a theory which could combine self-ownership and individual inviolability somehow. But I do claim that such a theory would have to be of a radically new sort: it could not be based on an effort to combine the historical traditions of thought which have put these ideas into circulation. This does not mean that we cannot identify a general conceptual source for the economy of rights. In fact, there is such a source. It is the simple distinction between what is valuable to particular individuals and the independent value of the individual. It is this fundamental point of grammar which ramifies into the two conceptions of collectivity that I have described over the past two chapters. Acknowledgement of the independent value of the individual as per strategy (i) logically extends to intrapersonal cases as well as interpersonal ones. This is what generates

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the symmetry between self- and other-regarding principles in the associa¬ tive conception of collectivity associated with the Kantian tradition. Similarly, the assumption that political principles reduce to what is of value to particular individuals encourages us to construe the collectivity as an aggregate of separate sites of valuation. This allows the kind of asymmetries between self- and other-regarding principles which liberals often insist upon. It is this central ambiguity that generates the conflict between self¬ ownership and individual inviolability. I do not know if the alternative between value to individuals and the value of the individual is theoreti¬ cally exhaustive for political theory in some purely conceptual sense. But I do not think that matters. What matters is that this ambiguity traces to a set of claims associated with the self-description of ‘liberal individu¬ alism’. The ambiguity stems from the historical fact that liberals have defended their view by reference to a set of principles which could mean two different things. David Johnston is surely right that, historically, liberals have often presented their theories as interpretations of the maxims that ‘only individuals count’ and ‘each to count as one, no one as more than one’. But what do these claims amount to? Are they a set of claims about the ‘value of individuals’, as Johnston himself implies?33 Or should we endorse Narveson’s interpretation: ‘only individuals’ values count, and ... none of them count, as such, for more than any others’?34 This alternative is salient to liberalism, not because it is a fundamental axiological puzzle, but simply because, as a matter of history, liberals have not been clear about which of these two views is primary for them. Perhaps the conflict can be resolved with some completely novel theory. But the onus is now on the liberal individualists to produce this theory and to explain how it resolves the problem. Until that challenge is met, the conflict I have identified will arise. The enforcement objection In order to bring out some of the ramifications of the discussion, I want now to address an important objection to which my argument might seem vulnerable. Following G. A. Cohen, I will call this worry the ‘enforcement objection’, and it runs as follows. Suppose libertarians embrace strategy (i): that is, they fully endorse something like a Kantian moral theory and premiss their commitment to the inviolability of the person on some inviolable moral capacity which they allegedly possess. 33 D. Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory, pp. 18-19. 34 J. Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, p. 10.

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The enforcement objection then says, it may well be true, as you have argued here, that this claim commits the theorist to the view that individuals owe certain responsibilities to themselves. But since we were unwilling to categorize these duties as duties to respect one’s own rights, this merely implies that individuals have certain private and unenforce¬ able duties to themselves. So even if the theorist is committed to a particular view about individuals’ duties to themselves, it would not follow that these duties are politically enforceable. But this leaves the essentials of the libertarian political position substantially intact: even if a libertarian lawgiver is committed to the belief that (say) suicide is a sin, he would not possess any right to enforce my obligation not to kill myself. In that sense, I would remain politically free to commit suicide, if I chose to do so. A similar argument has been urged by Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen (henceforth: ‘Denmussen’) against the suggestion of Henry Veatch that natural rights are derived from duties one naturally owes to oneself. According to Denmussen, Veatch’s argument ignores the fact that ‘having a right has a broader extension than doing (or being in pursuit of) what is right’. Instead, Denmussen rightly insists that rights must often permit individuals to act immorally. This is not because those rights excuse those acts of immorality. Rather, they forbid efforts to force others to act morally, even when the moral status of those actions is in no doubt.35 The enforcement objection raises a serious pragmatic worry about the argument presented here. It concedes the substance of that argument but claims that the point is ultimately scholastic: it will make very little practical difference to the form of libertarianism which results. If the enforcement objection goes through, libertarians can simply drop their commitment to comprehensive self-ownership and be left with a view that remains essentially unchanged. However, the enforcement objection greatly underestimates the diffi¬ culties created by the arguments rehearsed above. There are three points to be made in response to the enforcement objection. First, enforcement is not the only issue. I have been at pains to stress that libertarians characteristically claim that one of the cardinal virtues of their view is its neutrality. Libertarians view the state as an institution rather than as a private individual with its own ethical beliefs, desires and needs. On this view, its legitimate functions are supposedly restricted to the enforcement of individual rights, and those rights are supposed to guarantee indi35 D. B. Rasmussen and D. J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order, pp. 108-10.

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viduals’ ability to live by the lights of their own consciences as far as possible. But strategy (i) undermines this presumption. To the extent that the libertarian state (or, more accurately, its officers) takes the idea of individual inviolability seriously, it is committed to certain beliefs about the way in which citizens ought to act in their private lives. There is nothing to stop such a state from publicizing and arguing for these beliefs, or from publicly denouncing those who fail to observe these private principles. Even if such a state could never force individuals to act appropriately in their private lives, then, there remains the question of why, on the libertarian view, it should further refrain from publicly commenting on these moral issues in non-neutral ways.36 Most of us take it for granted that the state legitimately publicizes its advice about safe sex or about how to survive tornadoes. Why should a libertarian state not do the same for ethical principles whose validity is presupposed in the justification for a libertarian constitution?37 Denmussen avoids this problem by sacrificing a characteristic liberal and libertarian commitment. They apparently reject the requirement that the justification for a legitimate constitutional settlement be one which is (or would be) endorsed by all of those who have to live under it. Denmussen writes, ‘we regard rights ... as meta-normative principles. As such, they do not provide normative guidance to individuals in the conduct of their lives ... Rights are a moral concept which provides the normative basis to law. This concept provides guidance to the creators of a constitution and those who would seek to explain a constitution’s meaning or justify its presence.’38 It is difficult to be sure what this means, because it is unclear what Denmussen intends by the phrase ‘normative guidance in the conduct of [individuals’] lives’. But if it means that the justification for a libertarian constitution need be accessible only to an elite of libertarian constitution-makers (and hence possibly com¬ pletely mysterious to everyone else), this violates the liberal requirement that a legitimate constitution is one which is, or would be, endorsed by all citizens. But if we restore that traditional liberal requirement, then it follows that to the extent that libertarian citizens endorse a strategy (i) 36 Neutrality is usually interpreted as requiring that the state do nothing to promote or criticize controversial conceptions of the good which do not threaten others’ rights and freedoms to pursue their own. To be sure, forcing citizens to refrain from some private activities is one way of being non-neutral. But it is far from being the only one. 37 ‘Even when it does not ban something, the government intrudes on our personal choices. It hectors us about smoking, nags us to eat a proper diet - all our daily foods organized into a neat pyramid chart - and advises us on how to have safe and happy sex. Libertarians do not mind advice, but we do not think the government should forcibly take our tax money and then use it to advise everyone in society on how to live’: D. Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer, p. 80. 38 D. B. Rasmussen and D. J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature, pp. 111-12.

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justification for inviolable rights (which the enforcement objection con¬ cedes to be the operative justification), they are also committed to believing that there are certain things they ought not to do to themselves in their private sphere of conduct. While it would remain the case, strictly, that rights do not specify normative guidance for individuals in their private conduct, it would also be the case that the justification for those rights (putatively endorsed by all) would specify such principles. Expecting all individuals to be in a position to embrace the justification for a libertarian constitution, then, could have quite profound impli¬ cations for the ethical beliefs by which citizens live their lives. If I start out as a passionate advocate of the view that suicide is morally excusable, for example, I will have to revise my ethical views radically if I am to be in a position to endorse a Kantian justification for the libertarian constitution. A second point against the enforcement objection is that it just is not clear that strategy (i) does preclude the enforcement of personal duties in all relevant cases. Understanding why this is so requires an excursion into the details of the Kantian position, which I have been taking as a paradigm instance of a strategy (i) theory of inviolability. That is, Kant maintained that individuals are owed respect because they possess the inviolable capacity for moral autonomy: the categorical imperative directly implies that one always act in ways which allow all rational agents (including oneself) to exercise that capacity. It is this ethical principle which decisively shapes Kant’s view about the limits of legitimate political rule, a view which at first sight looks similar to the libertarian position. Kant assumes that the state is fundamentally an instrument of coercion. This assumption immediately renders political rule ethically problematic, for the coercive manipulation of human behaviour through the use of punitive sanctions and other incentives is precisely the kind of activity usually prohibited under the categorical imperative. To the extent that a person’s actions are moti¬ vated by a fear of punishment, or by a desire for some material reward, they cannot be considered as exercising their capacity for moral auton¬ omy. So the central political question, for Kant, is how the coercive mechanisms which define political activity can ever be morally legitimate. Kant’s answer is that only those forms of coercion which allow each individual to exercise his own capacity for autonomy are allowed. Such legitimate forms of coercion constitute (what Kant calls) the ‘Doctrine of Right’, which he defines as ‘the sum of those laws for which an external lawgiving is possible’.39 This compact phrase needs to be carefully under39 I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 55.

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stood. An ‘external lawgiver’ (of which the state is the most obvious and salient example) is defined as follows: she is someone other than ourselves who (i) decides for us how we ought to act (i.e. she promulgates general laws or otherwise specifies that we must act in a particular way) and (ii) attaches a material incentive to the performance of the required actions (i.e. she uses coercion or the threat of coercion to compel performance). By contrast, an internal lawgiver is a rational agent who (i) decides for herself on the basis of a categorical imperative what she ought to do and (ii) is motivated to so act on the basis of incentives which her own practical reason imposes and have no extraneous source.40 As should be obvious, the notion of an internal lawgiver is simply the definition of an autonomous agent for Kant. For it to be legitimate, then, external lawgiving must allow all citizens to be internal lawgivers: that is, external coercive punishments and rewards must be scheduled in a way that does not impinge on the capacity of individuals to live their lives by self-imposed ethical rules (i.e. categorical imperatives). Kant argues, much as the contemporary libertarian, that this is possible only if coercion is deployed only to prevent or punish actions of individuals which themselves threaten the capacity for internal lawgiving, or moral autonomy. Kant writes: ‘if a certain use of freedom is itself a hindrance to freedom in accordance with universal laws (i.e. wrong), coercion that is opposed to this (as a hindering of a hindrance) is consistent with freedom in accordance with universal laws, that is, it is right’.41 In such a view, external coercion is only justified to prevent coercion. It cannot be used to induce goodness or virtue in citizens, because, for Kant, virtue only carries moral value when it is self-motivated. Since the motivating incentives used in external lawgiving are extraneous, using external coercion in this way is necessarily self-defeating. This explains Kant’s deep antipathy to paternalistic legislation: since such legislation neces¬ sarily trespasses on the legitimate jurisdiction of internal lawgivers, it is always illegitimate. So far, this seems entirely consistent with the libertarian position. But, as we already know, the jurisdiction allotted to internal lawgiving does not, for Kant, imply the moral discretion to act entirely as one might

40 ibid., pp. 46-7.

41 ibid., p. 57.

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wish within it. Possessing the right to be respected as an internal lawgiver is merely the right to have the capacity for self-legislation available. Those who properly exercise that capacity also recognize that they ought not to abuse it. The decision to commit suicide, sell myself into slavery or to offer my services as a prostitute cannot be reconciled with a principled respect for one’s own capacity for self-legislation, at least as Kant interprets this capacity. By itself, this is not enough to answer the enforcement objection, for we still have to show that the theory would permit the state to interfere in such actions, not merely that the theory requires us to regard them as immoral. But is it clear that the Kantian theory does prohibit interference in such cases? It is not. Suppose that a citizen has, through his or her actions, decided to violate a Kantian duty to oneself. For example, suppose my neigh¬ bour has asked a doctor to assist him in committing suicide, or suppose Sid is lurking provocatively at a dimly lit streetcorner, obviously advertising his services as a prostitute. In these cases, the morally significant transaction has already occurred - the parties concerned have been given the scope to be internal lawgivers, but (from a Kantian point of view, at any rate) they have abused that authority and are about to perform actions which would permanently or temporarily reduce them to mere means. It is by no means clear that a state which then intervened to prevent these actions from taking place would be violating the Kantian doctrine of Right. It cannot be said that such interference would be violating the parties’ capacity for autonomy, for that capacity is not disclosed through an action, but in the internal deliberation in which the agent resolves to perform an action, and that deliberation has already taken place. It is perhaps not clear either that the state would be obliged to interfere in these instances, but why would such interference be impermissible, on the Kantian view? Kant himself clearly suggests that the state may legitimately interfere with prostitution,42 voluntary slavery43 and suicide.44 Commentators have had trouble with Kant’s account of these cases. This is not merely because Kant’s views about prostitution, voluntary slavery and suicide run counter to his general anti-paternalism. More specifically, they apparently conflict with his endorsment of the volenti non fit iniuria doctrine, according to which it is impossible in principle for an individual to act unjustly towards himself, since action towards oneself implies consent, which is a necessary and sufficient condition for justice to have been done 45 Alan Rosen argues, for example, that if we 42 ibid., p. 135 . 43 ibid., p. 139. 45 ibid., pp. 125,219.

44 ibid., p. 218.

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assume that the Kantian state is restricted to the enforcement of duties of justice, then a state which intervened in any case of voluntary immorality would be acting beyond its legitimate brief, since (by the volenti maxim) no injustice is done to one who voluntarily consents. vRosen concludes that Kant is caught in an unresolvable dilemma, though it should be said that he claims that Kant can grasp one of its horns and limit the damage to his overall view.46 Still, I think Rosen is wrong to claim that Kant is actually caught in a dilemma here. Kant’s two main allusions to the volenti maxim both occur in the context of an argument to the effect that the people as a whole can be the only legitimate legislative body. Kant assumes here that a legitimate legal system must be just. Since (by the volenti maxim), individuals cannot act unjustly towards themselves, a constitutional order to which some have not consented could, in principle, act unjustly towards those that have not given their consent. Hence, only if there is a genuinely popular legislative can we guarantee legal justice. But why should Kant’s invocation of the volenti maxim in this context show that he denies that duties to oneself could be enforced by an external lawgiver? This might make sense if, for Kant, the category of external lawgiving is exhausted by that of legal justice. But in fact Kant assumes that the doctrine of Right (which is defined as the domain of possible external lawgiving) is not so restricted, for he acknowledges a whole range of nonstatutory duties of Right.47 The Kantian doctrine of Right does not say that only illegal or unjust hindrances of freedom justify coercive enforce¬ ment by an outsider. Nor does it say that coercive interventions that hinder or prevent violations of the doctrine of Right are illegitimate, or even that that they are themselves unjust. So Kant can escape Rosen’s dilemma simply by refusing to accept the premiss that Rosen (incorrectly) attributes to him - that outsiders are only permitted to enforce any legal obligations for which citizens are responsible. Moreover, he can point out that to say that it is impossible for an individual to act unjustly towards himself is merely to say that the action in question is neither just nor unjust. It is not in any way to exempt it from moral criticism, nor does it imply that it is any less serious a transgression for being ‘not unjust’. Indeed, in claiming that violations of duties to oneself are ‘crimes against humanity’ rather than merely crimes against the state, Kant arguably regards them as more serious: there is here more than a residue

46 A. D. Rosen, Kant’s Theory of Justice, pp. 24-5. 47 I. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 120—5.

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ol Natural Law thinking in the Kantian position.4K In any case, the fact that such actions are ‘not unjust’ need not preclude direct political intervention on other grounds. Such interventions, where they are possible, are not ruled out by the principle of Right, which states merely that external coercion is only justified if it hinders a hindrance of (Kantian) freedom. Part of the confusion that has arisen about Kant’s views about selfregarding actions is the result of a natural tendency to misconstrue his distinction between the internal and external aspects of individual actions. It is tempting to think, perhaps because we readily presuppose something like an aggregative conception of collectivity, that the distinc¬ tion corresponds directly to that between self- and other-regarding actions. On this supposition, individuals are depicted as separate, discrete entities, with, as it were, an inside and an outside. Actions that merely affect whatever is inside the individual count as ‘internal’; those with effects beyond the individual count as external. But this is not how Kant intends the distinction. For Kant, the internal aspect of an action corresponds with its inner principle, its motivating rationale as under¬ stood by a self-motivating agent. The external aspect of an action refers to its practical effects or consequences in the world of sense. What is important here is not what is internal or external to individuals or to the self, but what is internal or external to deliberation. Once we understand this, it becomes clear that actions can be external in Kant’s sense and yet directly affect only the individual agent who is acting. His distinction between internal and external actions cannot therefore be equated with that between self- and other-regarding actions. Notice that the Kantian defence of duties to oneself is not like the superficially similar argument proposed by Henry Yeatch and repudiated by Denmussen. As I mentioned above, Veatch’s argument claims that our natural rights are derived from our natural duties to ourselves. Denmussen rejects this argument because it conflicts with our intuitive sense of what it means to have a right: ‘there is nothing in Veatch’s argument that gives one the right to deviate from the path of virtue’. According to Denmussen, then, Veatch’s view commits the ‘moralist fallacy’, the failure to distinguish having a right from doing what is right.49 This is a good argument against Veatch because the operative duty to oneself for him is an Aristotelian duty of self-perfection. Clearly, as long as the duty of self-perfection shapes our natural rights, they are unlikely to include the right to deviate from the path of virtue. But this 48 See here J. M. Finnis, ‘Legal Enforcement of “Duties to oneself”: Kant v. NeoKantians’, Columbia Law Review 87, 3 (1987), pp. 449, 451. 49 D. B. Rasmussen and D. J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature, pp. 109-10.

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argument does not apply to Kant. The operative duties to oneself for Kant are not ones of self-perfection; they are merely negative duties not to treat oneself as means. While this rules out certain actions as beyond the pale (suicide, prostitution, voluntary slavery), this (eaves the specifi¬ cation of virtue open-ended. Moreover, while Kant acknowledges that there are duties of self-perfection, they are imperfect duties: a failure to perform them, though lamentable, is not ethically impermissible. Kant’s view therefore accommodates the intuition that we have rights to deviate from the path of virtue, even as it insists that certain duties to oneself can be legitimately enforced under certain conditions. Although I have focused exclusively on the Kantian theory in devel¬ oping this response to the enforcement objection, I do not mean to make a fetish out of Kant. Still less do I mean to signal agreement with Kant’s views about suicide and prostitution. I have discussed Kant’s theory so extensively because it is the paradigm instance of a strategy (i) account of inviolability. I believe Kant is critical because he understood better than any philosopher has done since the implications of grounding the thesis of individual inviolability on a claim about the independent value of a human capacity. It is those implications which I am trying to bring to light. But I want to stress that, despite its historical influence, Kant’s theory remains but one species of the wider genus of strategy (i) approaches. His distinctive contribution was to ground his account on the moral importance of the capacity for autonomy. But the same difficulty will arise if we try to make the argument by reference to another supposedly crucial human capacity. Suppose, for example, that we interpreted Lomasky’s capacity for ‘project pursuit’ along the lines of strategy (i). In such a view, individuals would possess inviolable rights against the efforts of a state or other citizens to violate their capacity for project pursuit. These inviolable rights would reflect a web of mutual and reciprocal relations of respect. These relations would determine the legitimate terms of association among project pursuers. All agents, including the state, would have to abide by the prohibitions entailed by these relations of respect; these prohibitions would function exactly like Kantian side-constraints. Just as in the Kantian theory, then, there would be things which a state could never do. The state could never presume to specify for its citizens what projects they should pursue (on the assumption that authentic projects must be, in some appropriate sense, self-chosen).50 The state’s coercive apparatus could never be used in a way which violated citizens’ capacities for project pursuit. Moreover, like the Kantian capacity for 50 Oddly, Lomasky makes no reference to such a requirement.

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autonomy, the capacity for project pursuit will be permissive with respect to the contents of personal projects. Lomasky hints at the diversity and range ot potential projects by listing the following examples: ‘raising ones children to be responsible adults, striving to bring about the dictatorship ot the proletariat, serving God, serving Mammon, following the shifting lortunes of the New York Yankees come what may, bringing relief to starving persons in Africa, writing the Great American Novel, promoting white supremacy, and doing philosophy’. As Lomasky says, both ‘saints and sinners’ can be project-pursuers, and so an association of projectpursuers would have to tolerate some projects which many might regard as perverse or immoral.51 But Lomasky also points out that not just any human end will count as a project. Projects, he says, are those human ends which ‘reach indefinitely into the future, play a central role within the ongoing endeavours of the individual, and provide a significant degree of structural stability to an individual’s life’.52 But once we have acknowl¬ edged some restrictions as to what will count as a project, it follows that one can behave in ways which can threaten or impair one’s own capacity to pursue projects. For reasons which the enforcement objection con¬ cedes, the prohibition imposed by strategy (i) on violating that capacity in others entails an obligation on the part of each agent to foster that capacity in his own person. Arguably, if I fall into drug addiction or alcoholism, for example, and it becomes impossible for me to attain the kind of sustained and ‘structurally stable’ endeavours required by the pursuit of projects, I have failed in that obligation. Does a state which then intervenes to rehabilitate my capacity for project pursuit violate rights to non-interference grounded on the capacity for project pursuit? The answer is surely no, since in such an instance something has gone wrong with the capacity the proper exercise of which is the basis for others’ respect and non-interference. The justification for such inter¬ vention exactly parallels the cases we discussed in the context of Kant’s theory. While selecting a different human capacity, then, may imply that the state is justified in intervening in self-regarding behaviour in different instances (could not a career of prostitution count as a project?), it will always leave scope for political intervention in cases where individuals themselves threaten that capacity (whatever it is) in their own persons. If this is paternalism, it is a mitigated form of it: on either Kant’s view, or the hypothetical reinterpretation of Lomasky I have just considered, 51 Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, p. 26. 52 ibid.

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there would still be large areas of life in which individuals would possess the (enforceable) right to do what is morally suspect in the eyes of others. In that sense, there would be a sphere in which everything was up to us, within which, if you like, we possess something like rights of self-owner¬ ship. But such a form of self-ownership would be limited: we would possess the right to dispose of ourselves and our property by our own lights only up to a point, the point at which we come up against a capacity whose independent value is not subject to trade-off or nego¬ tiation. That capacity would be an aspect of one’s person which is unownable in the sense I discussed above. This brings us to a third difficulty overlooked by the enforcement objection. As I stressed above, the thesis of comprehensive self-ownership plays a particular role in the libertarian theory: it serves as the crucial premiss in an argument which purports to show that our rights in our external acquisitions are as strong as our rights in our initial endowment - that is, ourselves. This claim is behind the otherwise counterintuitive libertarian view that redistributive taxation of earned income is ‘on a par with forced labour’,53 or morally analogous to theft. I suggested that this argument faces a number of important challenges even as it stands. But the argument sketched here pushes the libertarian back a further step and suggests that it may not even be available to the libertarian in the first place. For, as the enforcement objection concedes, if the libertarian opts for strategy (i), he can no longer endorse the thesis of comprehensive self¬ ownership, and he is then deprived of the critical premiss in his argument for unconstrained capitalist accumulation. The claim of comprehensive self-ownership is critical for this argument for at least two reasons. First, the accumulation of wealth and income through voluntary market exchange cannot, of itself, violate rights of comprehensive self-ownership. As long as rights of self-ownership are given priority, then, there will be no reason to doubt that voluntary market exchange, and any distribution of wealth which results, are prima facie legitimate. Second, if the thesis of comprehensive self-ownership is true, any effort on the part of an outsider to decide how a person’s resources should be used without that person’s consent must be a violation of self-ownership. Redistributive taxation is patently such a violation, and so there is every reason to expect that efforts to tamper with the market’s distribution of income are prima facie illegitimate. The thesis of comprehensive self-ownership thus implies that the only limits on rightful action are imposed by the ownership rights of others; since capitalist accumulation is consistent with this limitation, and redistribu53 Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 169.

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tive taxation obviously is not,54 the libertarian justification for an unfettered market derives essential support from the thesis of compre¬ hensive self-ownership. But once strategy (i) is embraced, self-ownership can no longer be comprehensive. The claims of an inviolable human capacity limit the right ot self-owners to act as they please towards their own persons and all of its faculties. 'Self-ownership' then becomes little more than a metaphor for the residual entitlement individuals possess to live their lives as they want within limitations which preserve an inviolable human capacity. But this inviolable limitation is no longer specified by the ownership rights of others, but by the special value of an unowned and unownable capacity shared by all individuals. Individuals are not owed respect from their fellows because they own that capacity (or indeed because they own anything), but because no one owns it. That is, nobody has the right to decide how it should be disposed of just as they wish, and it is for that reason that I ought not to be exploited or otherwise violated by others. On this mitigated account of self-ownership, individuals only possess rights to decide as they wish how their possessions should be disposed of to the extent that this is required by the more fundamental demand of respect for the relevant human capacity. If an individual’s ability to decide for himself how a particular possession should be disposed of is not required in order to preserve this human capacity, it is not clear that any rights would be violated if he was deprived of it, even against his will. No doubt the exercise of any of the plausible candidates for an inviolable human capacity requires some area of proprietary control: individuals must rightfully possess things (bodies, goods, re¬ sources, talents, assets etc.) to exercise the relevant capacities with. Capacities, even spooky Kantian ones, cannot be exercised in vacuo. But this concession leaves us well short of the strong libertarian claim that one rightfully owns whatever one acquires in a sequence of voluntary market exchanges, and therefore that even progressive taxation of the well-off is a violation of a basic right. The libertarian will be able to defend his view about the illegitimacy of such taxation within the frame¬ work of strategy (i) only if he can show that in every case the taxation of the wealthy necessarily prevents them from exercising their inviolable human capacities. But surely any such claim is totally fanciful. The implications of my claim that if there are any inviolable rights 54 Readers may now be puzzled by the argument I gave earlier to the effect that once we endorse self-ownership, redistributive taxation is justifiable. But here we are merely discussing whether redistributive taxation violates self-ownership rights. The argument given above concedes that it violates self-ownership; but it denies that this concession is enough to show that violations must never be countenanced.

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they cannot be rights of self-ownership are thus quite far-reaching. By breaking the link between the right to private accumulation and the right not to be exploited, it reveals the conceptual gulf separating the ideal of personal inviolability from the libertarian theory of property. The fundamental question I have been exploring is the following: in virtue of what are individuals to be treated as inviolable? The libertarian wants to say that they are inviolable in virtue of their natural ownership rights in themselves and their personal assets. The great libertarian intuition of the 1970s and 1980s was the idea that something like a Marxian account of exploitation could be turned against Marxists and welfare state socialists themselves. Once we understand that exploitation must involve the theft of property, they thought, we will realize that even mild forms of socialism are necessarily exploitative, since redistributive taxation steals property from the well-off in order to supply welfare to the needy. Even some Marxists - notably Gerald Cohen - have been attracted to this line of reasoning. In fact, Cohen still maintains that Marx’s idea of exploitation turns on ‘something like’ the thesis of self-ownership: Marxists claim that capitalists steal labour time from working people. But you can steal from someone only that which properly belongs to them. The Marxist critique of capitalist injustice therefore implies that the worker is the proper owner of his labour time: he, no one else, has the right to decide what will be done with it. But he could hardly have that right without having the right to decide what to do with his own capacity to work, his labour power. The claim that capitalists steal labour time implies that the worker is the proper owner of his own power ... Hence the Marxist contention that the capitalist exploits the worker depends on the proposition that people are the rightful owners of their powers. That proposition is the thesis of self-ownership, and I claim that (some¬ thing like it) undergirds the Marxist case for the proposition that the capitalist relationship is inherently exploitative.55

To my mind, this claim about Marx was always implausible. It implies that Marx would have had no objection to individuals voluntarily signing capitalist-like labour contracts when not forced to do so by a coercive capitalist environment which leaves them no other options but penury and destitution. But I find it deeply implausible that Marx would have defended their right to make such a decision, even though that is presumably what his alleged endorsement of the self-ownership thesis would entail. Indeed, I suspect Marx would have regarded such a 55 G. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, p. 146; To justify this attribution, Cohen repeatedly refers to the famous passage in the German Ideology about shepherds and critical critics. He interprets Marx’s claim there that under communism each individual conducts himself ‘just as he has a mind’ as evidence for the view that Marx was committed to the view that individuals are comprehensive self-owners; ibid., pp. 16, 159. Cohen’s inference from the text seems to me tenuous at best.

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decision as fundamentally deluded and pathological. Marx deplored the capitalist system precisely because it forces individuals to make the kinds of decision which would otherwise be symptoms of pathological self-abuse. The normative ideal animating this objection to capitalist exploitation is not the thesis of self-ownership-6 but instead something closer to the Kantian strategy (i) we have discussed extensively above. In that sense, we can agree with Cohen that Marxism shares a critical ideal with the libertarians; but it is not the thesis of self-ownership, but instead the thesis of individual inviolability. Marx was committed to the idea that the dignity or worth of humanity consisted in its capacity for self-realization through labour. For Marx, individuals are exploited when anyone (including themselves) jeopardizes or precludes the exercise of this vital human capacity. That capacity is not owned or even ownable: rather its importance is to be acknowledged by all as the sine qua non for a meaningful, uncoerced, emancipated existence. The bedrock Marxist indictment of capitalism is that it is a product of human artifice which systematically betrays these possibilities. Far from being the standard whereby exploitation is detected, self-ownership must be, for Marx, the very essence of capitalist exploitation. For self-ownership implies the right to veto in one’s own case any obligations one owes to oneself, including presumably the obligation not to allow one’s essential capacities to become ‘the plaything of alien powers’ and to realize oneself through one’s labour. For Marx, capitalism is a system which requires whole classes of individuals to exercise that veto regularly and systematically:57 the ideology of self-ownership effectively legitimates that veto power, and so justifies the forms of exploitation which were Marx’s primary target. To my mind, Cohen’s suggestion that Marx was himself committed to the thesis of self-ownership is deeply misguided for these reasons. 56 Why, after all, is self-ownership violated when the capitalist extracts surplus value? Marx is at pains to point out that the workers voluntarily agree to the capitalists’s terms. Does not self-ownership imply that workers are simply acting within their rights in agreeing to the terms offered by the capitalist? In which case, it is not obvious that any exploitation is revealed by appealing to self-ownership. Perhaps Cohen means that the the crucial equivocation about the length of the working day which is the ‘secret’ of capitalist profit violates self-ownership because workers do not possess complete information about the agreements they enter. But this argument assumes that workers do not know that they are exploited. While that condition may have held before Marx wrote, Marxists surely cannot claim that once they have grasped the arguments of Capital, workers are no longer exploited. The ‘objective conditions’ which force workers to accept the capitalist’s terms still exist. 57 Marx writes that in civil society the individual is ‘active as a private individual, treats other men as means, reduces himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers’; emphasis mine. R. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton), p. 34.

6

The myth of liberal individualism

Some studies in political theory present a proposal or recommend a programme of action. Others try to criticize well-known proposals or to establish their limitations. This book falls into the latter category. In keeping with the critical aspiration of the project as a whole, this concluding chapter does not offer any particular recommendations or proposals. Instead, it has three more modest aims. First, it tries to restate some of the main conclusions of a complicated and many-sided dis¬ cussion. Second, it tries to defend those conclusions against some obvious objections. Third, it explores some of the implications of my argument for the ‘liberal individualist’ tradition which seem to me to be worth further investigation. Throughout the study, I have referred repeatedly to two obvious and striking trends within the liberal tradition over the past quarter of a century. The first is the widespread disillusionment with the welfare state, and the associated success of political movements dedicated to its dismantlement or curtailment. The second is the growth of a body of theoretical work reviving classical liberal and libertarian ideas. The significance of and practical currency of these connected trends is beyond doubt. But I believe that they have often been viewed from a distorted perspective: they have been viewed through the lenses of the supposed distinction between liberal individualism and collectivism. This has encouraged liberals and their critics to draw two kinds of conclusion about these recent historical trends. Liberals have often concluded that the strictly ‘individualistic’ tradi¬ tion of liberal theory, the side of the tradition that focuses exclusively on individual rights, the idea of private property, the free market, strict neutrality between individuals’ private concerns, and individual choice has been vindicated. In this view, Hayek’s warning that the effort to reconcile the liberal ideal with the planned economy or a welfare state is doomed has been shown to be on target: large-scale redistributive or welfarist political projects inevitably undermine the classical liberal commitment to individual liberty, privacy and free choice. It is this 180

The myth of liberal individualism

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conclusion which has encouraged the recent revival of interest in libertarian forms of liberalism. I am not claiming that this revival has swept the liberal board: as I conceded in chapter 1, many liberals, and certainly most academic liberals, remain opposed to the libertarian programme. But I do think that even they would agree that the revival of libertarianism has been a distinctive feature of post-Rawlsian liberal theory, and few of them would disagree with my characterization of them as representing the most purely ‘individualistic’ form of the genus. Meanwhile, critics concede that the internal logic of liberalism indeed displays an individualistic bias; to them it is unsurprising that the post¬ war liberal flirtation with social democracy and welfare state socialism proved to be unstable in the long term. This kind of critic says that the recent revival of classical liberalism in practice and in theory at least has the merit of clarifying for us the underlying ‘individualistic’ agenda of liberalism.1 It reveals once and for all that the liberal tradition proclaims the separation of the self from its collective context, and legitimates an alienated society of self-absorbed strangers. It perpetuates a social and political order corrosive of essential and long-lost ideals of community and human association. If we are to escape the clutches of such a pernicious modernity, we must reject that individualism and the package of liberal values allied to it, and turn instead to our social and collective identities, for it is there and only there that deliverance from the evils of liberal barbarism is to be found.2 Clearly, not everyone who has written about the liberal tradition over the past twenty-five years falls neatly into one of these sharply drawn categories; moreover, there are many different variants of these positions. Nevertheless, anyone acquainted with recent debates within and about the liberal tradition will recognize these lines of argument. This study suggests, however, that both of these familiar views are incorrect, because they both rest on the assumption that liberalism is unified by a commitment to a single view of the relation between the individual and the collectivity called ‘individualism’. The arguments rehearsed here suggest that this assumption is groundless; indeed, they go beyond this and raise the possibility that the kind of ‘liberalism’ which has been the subject of recent theoretical debate is not unified at all, and that its appeal to individualism only conceals this fact. There is a subversive sense, then, in which we can agree with David Johnston’s assessment that

1 M. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent, pp. 16-17. 2 See, for example, Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice; Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, chs. 7-9; Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, chs. 7 and 10; Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

‘liberal individualism’ is the ‘substance and strength of the liberal tradition’ as it is currently understood.3 I say subversive because, on my account, ‘individualism’ does not perform this role in yirtue of its merits as a theoretical doctrine. Rather, it is an ideological slogan that has successfully diverted attention away from certain structural imbalances at the heart of the individualist ideal. It is as such that it has been the ‘substance and strength’ of recent liberalism: but for its ideological appeal, the difficulties involved in integrating the liberal values I listed in chapter 1 would perhaps have been obvious long ago. Obviously, the claims I have been making have implications for both liberals and their critics. In what follows, I explore those implications and tentatively suggest some ways in which they might help us see beyond some of the most familiar and entrenched views about liberalism, its standing and its prospects. The secret of libertarianism The first and most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the arguments given above is that the ideal of a ‘liberal individualist’ theory along the lines I sketched in chapter 1 is, at best, conceptually unstable and, at worst, incoherent. Clearly, one could deny that the values I listed there genuinely define the notion of liberal individualism. There are of course ways of defining liberal individualism which would avoid the difficulties I have been trying to uncover, and (as I said in chapter 1) many thinkers who have called themselves liberals have proposed views which are not vulnerable to them. Nevertheless, I submit that my list does capture what that term has come to mean today, and explains why defenders of classical liberal and libertarian views have been regarded (and have regarded themselves) as the puritans of liberal individualism and have been so influential in recent years. This pure ideal of liberal individualism associated with contemporary libertarianism is in many ways an attractive one. It is an effort to reconcile two ideals: first, the idea that individuals possess a morally privileged status that should be enshrined in and protected by certain inviolable rights against exploitation and coercion; second, the idea that individuals’ rights reflect their comprehensive self-ownership. The point of the former was to introduce the idea that rightness was not a function of the value of certain outcomes to agents, but a property of interactive processes in which a ‘side-constraint’ against violations of individual rights was systematically and rigidly observed. The function of the latter 3 David Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory, p. 191.

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was to allow for a doctrine of voluntarism according to which indi¬ viduals’ private activities are entirely their own concern. For that reason, public principles ought to remain neutral about the worth of their purely personal projects. If possible, individuals should not be expected to assent to public principles which would commit them to a view about how they should act or not act in their private lives. At any rate, those public principles should not license non-consensual interference in selfregarding activities. The central claim of late-twentieth-century libertarianism is that the market is the only procedure able to meet these two requirements. On the one hand, it seems to be a procedure compatible with the idea of self¬ ownership, in that a free market will permit individuals to dispose of themselves and their own as they see fit, as long as the similar property rights of others are respected. On the other, it is easy to portray it as a system in which rightness consists in the procedural observance of sideconstraints (i.e. others’ property rights), and not in the value of any particular distributive outcome. The coercive redistribution of wealth, on this view, necessarily preempts citizens’ personal decisions about how they and their own ought to be disposed of and so violates sideconstraints against infringements of self-ownership. The role of the state must then be restricted to policing the market. The result of associating these ideas with each other was to give rise to a theory which cut back the legitimate powers of the state on grounds of neutrality with respect to individuals’ personal values and which legitimated the market as a procedure for allocating property and distributive shares. There is no doubting the powerful appeal of this view; it has persuaded both philosophers and statesmen (and at least one stateswoman) to query the legitimacy of the welfare state, often in ways which have had all too real an impact on the public life of the Western democracies. But the argument of chapter 5 suggests that the apparent coherence of this view may be a delusion; there may simply be no stable theoretical ground at this conceptual location. If so, we just cannot have a theory which makes inviolability a function of property-rights in oneself. There may be no way for a set of public principles to remain neutral about how one ought (not) to act towards oneself and for them to embody a claim about the moral inviolability of individuals strong enough to underwrite the ideal of inviolable libertarian rights. It is for this reason that the idea of liberal individualism should be regarded as a myth. It follows that we do not need to rely on any of the familiar complaints about the erosion of community and fellow-feeling under market capitalism in order to criticize the liberal individualist ideal. This does not necessarily mean that that those complaints about modern capitalist society are invalid;

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

but it does free us from the obligation of having to make them in order to reject liberal individualism. As I will be suggesting below, that seems to me to be an advantage, but one does not have to agree with me about that in order to see the reason why we could in principle do without them. We can do without them because libertarianism fails on its own terms; the effort to make a coherent doctrine from its components is doomed at the outset. The failure to realize this has also encouraged the belief that what is fundamentally at stake in the debate about liberalism is the question of the legitimacy of redistributive policies. As I suggested in the intro¬ duction, the opposition between individualism and collectivism has always been thought to coincide with one between the nightwatchman state and the welfare state. This has been so ever since the end of the nineteenth century, and has gone largely unquestioned in the writings of recent communitarian critics of ‘liberal individualism’. But my argument implies that the truth of the matter is more complex. As I have argued, libertarianism is an unstable compound of two conflicting accounts of the political community. Both of those concep¬ tions of politics allow for redistribution, but each of them justifies it in a different way. The aggregative asymmetrical account I associated with Mill and Lomasky cannot rule out redistribution in order to optimize the liberties and rights which are assumed in that conception to be funda¬ mentally valuable to individuals. That is why I suggested that such theories are unable to account for the characteristic inviolablity of libertarian rights: there is no reason to doubt that the violation of individual rights might itself be justified on the grounds that it would improve the distribution of liberty itself, which is understood as a consequentialist good, of equal value to each individual. The symmetrical associative view I associated with Kant, Rousseau and Marx does not rule out redistribution either, because there is nothing in this account to connect individuals’ inviolable capacities with a right to unlimited accumulation of income. Obviously, everything here depends on which human capacity is taken to be specially deserving of respect and develop¬ ment. But are there any plausible candidate capacities (capacity for moral autonomy, capacity for meaningful self-realization through labour, capacity for critical self-reflection etc.) such that a progressive income tax would always preclude their exercise or otherwise violate or disrespect them? This seems very unlikely. The secret of contemporary libertarianism, then, lies in its effort to superimpose two different views, each of which readily licenses redis¬ tribution taken by itself, but in a way which creates the illusion that redistribution is ethically suspect. Once we see that these two views

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cannot be assimilated so readily, however, we will realize that libertarian doubts about redistribution are really a kind of ideological phantom. That phantom appears, rather like certain kinds of optical illusion, when our minds are deceived about what we are perceiving; in my argument, it is the slogan of ‘liberal individualism’ that has encouraged us to see in the various elements of contemporary libertarianism a harmonious and self-supporting unity. Many have thus been deceived into believing that there is an unproblematic connection between a theory which demands that individuals ought to be free to act as they wish in what concerns only themselves and a theory which claims that individuals possess a special property of inviolability and that they ought never to be violated for that reason. With this assumption in place it is easier to persuade oneself that allowing individuals maximal control over how their income and personal resources are disposed of necessarily amounts to an assertion of their inviolability. The argument given here shows that this inference is invalid, whatever unreflective predispositions the idea of ‘liberal individualism’ has falsely encouraged. Broader implications In questioning redistributive policies, the libertarians are addressing a more fundamental set of issues raised in all liberal individualist theories: on what terms should a public agent leave private individuals to their own devices, and on what grounds (implied by these terms) might public interventions be justified? They suggest that a truly individualist answer to this question must make individuals and their rights inviolable, and at the same time secure to individuals a sphere of action within which they are entirely free to act as they wish. But if the arguments given here are correct, this is a problematic, perhaps ultimately unintelligible, answer. Other liberal individualists have of course rejected the libertarians’ intransigent conclusions about redistribution, but that does not mean that they do not confront the same basic difficulty in other areas, nor that they give us any clear guidance as to how to deal with it. My argument implies that any theory that aspires to combine a commitment to the inviolable or special value of individual agents with a commitment to the idea that individuals should be entirely at the mercy of their own values within a publicly protected sphere of private activity will face an analogous problem. It is easy to show that liberals have offered confusing claims about their commitments to these two ideals. When it is a question of defending a private sphere, for example, we encounter the argument that rights and liberties are ‘basic means’ that allow individuals ‘to pursue almost any

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

values they might want to pursue’.4 In this view, ‘an account of the bases of social criticism should focus on the means available to people to pursue their projects and values, assigning responsibility for formulating these projects to the individuals whose projects and values they are and not ranking these projects and values for their worthiness’.5 Duties to self are discounted in the context of justifications for basic social principles,6 and ‘nothing is “set for us”, nothing is authoritative before our judge¬ ment of its value’.7 Relatedly, liberals sometimes celebrate a form of neutrality that claims that ‘an essentially just society can neither ban nor require capitalist acts among consenting adults’.8 And even when they are prepared to abandon the doctrine of strict neutrality, their commit¬ ment to the idea of a private sphere overrides even strongly negative evaluations of others’ ways of life: ‘if adults fail to avail themselves of fair opportunities for development, or if they knowingly choose to forgo some aspect of their publicly defined good, that does not ... warrant interference in the lives of such individuals’.9 These sorts of views are plainly within the orbit of a Millian form of liberalism, fundamentally asymmetrical in its conception of public agency. On this - by now familiar - view, the function of legitimate public agency is to manipulate behaviour and institutions so as to ensure that as many individuals as possible are in a position to realize, or at least to live in accordance with, their values. Public agency is taken essentially as a service which the state provides to individuals with certain values and projects. It is a service which can be provided more or less effectively, and the purpose of a liberal theory, on this view, is to specify general principles which tell us how this is to be done (e.g., by distributing rights and liberties in certain ways). On this view, basic rights and liberties should be thought of as all-purpose, value-independent basic means for individuals to pursue whatever projects they might wish to pursue. The job of the public agent is simply to provide these services. It is then up to individuals themselves, not the public agent, how they make use of them. But when liberal individualists urge us to take the inviolable moral status of individuals seriously, a rather different picture emerges. Rights and liberties are no longer regarded as mere instruments in the service of individual projects, they suddenly become constitutive of agents’ moral and political identity. Individuals are ‘valuable qua agents’ such that ‘a 4 ibid., p. 177. 5 ibid., p. 151: cf. Lomasky, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, pp. 35-6 122 252-3. 6 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 248. 7 W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, p. 51. 8 D. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, p. 341. 9 W. Galston, Liberal Purposes, p. 179.

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human’s sacrifice of her liberty or basic rights is virtually equivalent to her sacrifice of her life. A sacrifice of this nature is a kind of death, the death of the person as an effective agent.’10 Thus basic rights are taken to be ‘inalienable’,11 and express ‘our nature and free and equal moral persons’.12 Principles specifying the appropriate ideals of justice do not simply supply individuals with certain goods, but are the basis for citizens’ self-esteem and self-respect. We are told that the inability to express our nature as free and equal beings ‘will wound one’s self-respect with accompanying feelings of shame’.13 Moreover, becoming worthy of selfrespect and the respect of others need not be automatic: ‘Each and every human being is potentially an end-in-himself, but to actually be an end-inhimself, the individual must take the appropriate actions ... In effect, a person must earn this status.’14 Thus the theory may require that individuals owe duties to themselves in order to make themselves respect¬ able.13 Those - like drug addicts - who compromise such duties ‘commit a kind of treason against the sovereignty of [their] own practical reason’.16 Claims such as these presuppose something like a Kantian and associative conception of the collectivity. On this view, the political community is understood to be composed of beings each of whom is taken to be of value, in virtue of their possession of some morally privileged capacity. The rules which the public agent enforces then become those rules necessary to reproduce the polity as a community ‘tied together by bonds of mutual respect’17 that reflect each other’s dignity and special value, and the duties that such agents can rightfully command from their associates. In this kind of expressivist view, public agency does not merely provide value-independent services; it also acts to construct and reproduce a kind of political community through which individuals’ special moral status and dignity is expressed. But this social ideal can often entail strong views about how individuals are bound to act in their personal sphere of activity. It is not surprising, then, that contemporary perfectionists have been urging us to shed our liberal scruples about remaining neutral about how individuals ought to act in what concerns only themselves. What we have here, I believe, are the fragments of (at least) two conflicting social ideals, not a single ‘individualist’ one. Liberals have 10 David Johnston, The Idea of a Liberal Theory, pp. 24, 177. 11 J. Rawls, ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods’, in B. A. O. Williams and A. K. Sen, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond, p. 171 n. 11. 12 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 445. 13 ibid. 14 D. B. Rasmussen and D. J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature, p. 73. 15 J. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994), pp. 38-40. 16 J. Reiman, Critical Moral Realism, p. 83. 17 W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, p. 254.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

offered little guidance about how they are supposed to relate to each other, how the competing demands each makes are supposed to mesh. It needs to be stressed that the issue here is not merely that liberals have left a number of important loose ends untied. It is rather that it is unclear how the loose ends can all be tied up into a single knot without some loss. Consider, for example, the claim that those who ‘commit a kind of treason against the sovereignty of [their] practical reason’ nevertheless ought to have a right to do so.18 The immediately puzzling nature of these sorts of claim is by itself not the real problem. The real problem arises when one investigates the overall theoretical consequences of this kind of position. If the ‘sovereignty of one’s practical reason’ must never be regarded as a decisive consideration for individuals in their relations with themselves, why should it be so in their relations with their fellows? Why should ‘morally privileged’ human capacities be permissibly over¬ ridden at will when they are attached to oneself and yet suddenly acquire overwhelming moral significance when attached to another, including to myself in relation to my fellows? If I am under no special obligation to acknowledge the inviolable significance of my own privileged capacities, can I honestly invoke their presence in me as the grounds for an inviolable entitlement to certain kinds of respectful treatment from others and public institutions? And if their presence in me is being taken as the basis for a permanent and inviolable side-constraint on the actions of all other human beings, and indeed for one on my own transactions with them, how can it be that any parallel duties to ourselves (rather than to each other) are subject to an unqualified and absolute veto? To my mind, liberal individualists have dodged these (difficult) ques¬ tions by falling back on an entirely different form of argument. This argument says that individuals share a basic interest in freedoms that allow them to do whatever they want within the constraints specified by the provision of similar freedoms for everyone else. On this voluntarist view, the reason why I ought to respect your right to do something of which I disapprove is essentially that I would not like it if you sought to interfere with my life because you disapproved of my tastes and proclivities. It is undeniable that this kind of reciprocity expresses a genuinely liberal intuition, one that a number of theorists have developed with considerable sophistication.19 But if liberals opt for this strategy, the 18 J. Reiman, Critical Moral Realism, p. 83. 19 This is an interpretation of the Golden Rule: ‘Do not do unto others what you would not want them to do to you’. But note that the alternative, expressivist, view has its own different interpretation of the Golden Rule: ‘Do not do unto others what ought not be done to yourself (by anyone, including yourself).’ See I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 37 n. 23.

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appeal to the special value of certain human capacities threatens to become incidental. The important issue becomes the effective delivery of a certain kind of service - an enforced scheme of mutual non¬ interference. The talk about the special and overriding value of ‘the individual may then seem a largely empty gesture, an arguably disingen¬ uous attempt to elevate an otherwise rather menial conception of the political task into something that it is not. But more importantly, the idea of efficiently providing services carries welfarist and consequentialist connotations that often run counter to the spirit of the appeal to inviolable human rights as trumps against the pursuit of consequentialist goals. In this analysis, the provision of rights and liberties is part of a consequentialist, goal-based, argument, not an independent counter¬ weight to such forms of consequentialism. In the end it is not clear that liberals’ opposition to such forms of social optimization can carry conviction in the absence of an honest acknowledgement that if (instead) the state expects me to respect you because you are possessed of a special moral status it ought also to expect you to act in ways that are worthy of that status. In failing to address these sorts of issue, liberals have failed to confront the possible constraints on the individualist project imposed by the economy of rights uncovered in the last chapter. So the problem is not merely that liberals have been vague and equivocal about these commitments. The problem is that they cannot afford to be so, because the various claims they characteristically endorse point to very different views of the terms on which individuals ought to be left to their own devices, and that issue is of cardinal significance for any liberal theory. The economy of rights strikes at the heart of contemporary philosophical liberalism, for it suggests that there may be ineradicable trade-offs between preserving the indivisibility of the private sphere and protecting the inviolability of the individual and her rights. But the question of the violability of basic rights and that of the indivisibility of the private sphere are central, not peripheral, to con¬ temporary individualist ideals. These are not issues that honest liberals can sweep under the rug with plausible slogans about the value and priority of ‘the individual’. It makes a difference whether we are to respect others because we accept a view about what makes them worthy of our consideration and respect, or whether we are to respect their values because a world in which we are all forced to do so is the most efficient way for all of us to get on with our own lives. Liberal individualists must explain which of these approaches is primary. And if they favour some hybrid conception, they need to explain how and where they fit together, and to trace out the implications of their views for public policy.

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

It is also important to stress that the relevant public policy issues are not just going to be the marginal ones like the legal status of suicide and voluntary slavery that have occasionally come up in our theoretical discussions here. Apart from the question of the justification of welfare redistribution, a whole range of pressing questions arise at the intersec¬ tion of the two sets of values that I am claiming are elided in the formula ‘liberal individualism’. Pornography, the legalization of drugs and prosti¬ tution, euthanasia, abortion, capital punishment, civic education, the problem of religious cults, tolerance of illiberal cultural and ethnic groups and rights to privacy all raise questions about the terms on which individuals and their activities and choices are owed ‘respect’ by the state and by other citizens. Our attitudes to these issues will be profoundly affected by the kind of respect that is at issue, and the sorts of thing that are the primary objects of the relevant kind of respect. But the specifica¬ tion of ‘respect’ is exactly what is in dispute between the service and expressivist conceptions of politics sketched above. The arguments of this book, then, do not merely touch libertarianism; they are also likely to exacerbate the emerging split within philosophical liberalism between its neutralist and perfectionist protagonists more generally. This book suggests that we should not look upon ‘political’ and ‘comprehensive’ liberalism as simply two variations on a single individualist theme, but rather as hinting at two fundamentally different social ideals that are likely to drift apart gradually as issues of the sort listed above are argued through in the coming decades. The effort to claim that there is a single, all-purpose, individualist theory of society that can and does unite them is (at the very least) strained, and is perhaps useful only to those critics of liberalism who find it important to reject ‘individualism’ as a whole in the name of some supposedly ‘commu¬ nitarian’ alternative. But, as we shall see, it may well be that by taking the idea of individualism for granted, these sorts of critics have aided, not retarded, the liberal cause. If the arguments of this book make sense, it may well be time to ask whether a coherent notion of liberal individualism can survive this century, or is worth keeping in the next. It might be helpful to lay out some of the connections and divisions I have been drawing in the following tabular form: AGGREGATIVE ASYMMETRICAL

ASSOCIATIVE SYMMETRICAL

- Service conception of public agency - Rightness a property of outcomes (have services been delivered properly to the right

- Expressivist conception of public agency - Rightness a property of processes (was this a process (inter or intrapersonal) in which the

people?) - Self-ownership

value of individuals was respected?) - Self-command

- Violable and alienable rights

- Inviolable and inalienable rights

The myth of liberal individualism - Value to individuals primary - Neutral b/w personal values - Public morality restricted to interpersonal affairs - Strategy (ii)

191

- Value o/individuals primary - Non-neutral b/w personal values - Public morality continuous with intrapersonal morality - Strategy (i)

It is important to stress that I am not claiming the two conceptions of collectivity represented in the table to be the only imaginable examples of aggregative asymmetrical and associative symmetrical conceptions of collectivity. The claim is rather that liberal individualism involves a set of values which tend to presuppose two different conceptions of collectivity: the function of the aggregative/associative, symmetrical/asymmetrical rubric is simply to pick out the features in virtue of which these specific conceptions of collectivity differ, and to explain how this makes the values connected with them difficult to reconcile. So there is no suggestion that these two views of the collectivity are exhaustive either of all possible conceptions of the collectivity, or indeed of the two categories themselves. The critical point is that they are exclusive at many points, and that different individualist values fall either side of the divide between them. I have argued that liberal individualism’, in either its extreme liber¬ tarian or more moderate forms, is a myth because it represents a doomed effort to assimilate the two incompatible doctrines captured in the table above. What liberal individualists are left with, then, is a choice between these two lists of values and commitments. As I have said already, this is not, as the libertarians have claimed, a choice about whether to redis¬ tribute. It is a choice between two conceptions of the political commun¬ ity, and two corresponding conceptions of public agency. Under each of these two views redistributive policies can be justified, but for different reasons. Below, I try to explain in more detail what this alternative is a choice between. To bring out the contrast, I want to spell out in more detail what I take to be at issue in the difference that emerged from our earlier discussion, the difference between a liberal service conception of public agency and the associative or expressivist view of public agency. The service conception I begin with the liberal service conception of public agency which I believe is implied by the aggregative asymmetrical conception of collec¬ tivity which I have been exploring over the last two chapters. In this view, the public agent assumes that the collectivity is an aggregate of individuals each of whom has certain values. These values can be of many kinds: they might be preferences for goods or commodities, needs for certain forms of welfare or evaluative views about what is morally

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

good, holy, sinful or taboo. The central ethical category in such a conception is that of individuals having these various values realized or respected. It is from this perspective that the service conception of public agency develops: the public agent takes as its proper function the provision of whatever services will tend to allow as many individuals as possible to have access to, to enjoy or to live in accordance with, their values. One might think that this conception directly implies that the services provided by the state are essentially policing or monitoring services. In such a view, which has a genuine liberal pedigree, public agency leaves individuals as far as possible to themselves, intervening only when they get in each other’s way. But this is a mistake. In itself, the aggregative account of collectivity actually implies a maximizing conception of public agency inherited from its utilitarian origins. As I noted above, once we think in aggregative terms the natural criterion of evaluation is an optimization standard. In principle there is nothing in the service conception to rule out a form of public agency which assumes total responsibility for determining individuals’ values on their behalf and then setting out to realize them maximally: and this obviously implies a conception of public agency which goes far beyond the mere provision of policing services. In fact it could imply the nightmare vision of utilitar¬ ianism suggested by Rawls - a public agency taking the collectivity to be a uniform subject of utility and ignoring the separateness of persons entirely. Such a view would approximate symmetry in that by aiming to service the values of individuals comprehensively, the public agent would effectively be maximizing the values of a single collective self, along the sort of lines followed by individual utility maximizers. However, as a matter of history and common sense, two powerful considerations have militated against such an extreme interpretation of the aggregative conception, and pushed it firmly in the direction of a strongly asymmet¬ rical conception in which public agency restricts itself to the provision of services which simply police the interaction between individuals acting upon their own assessments of what has value. The first consideration involves the notorious epistemic problems involved in trying to provide a workable metric by which a public agent could compare and aggregate the values of separate individuals. Russell Hardin has noted that ‘if we had a cardinal, interpersonally aggregative value theory, we could speak of the efficiency of a group or society in terms analogous to those we use for an individual’.20 But the notorious 20 Russell Hardin, ‘Efficiency’, in R. Goodin and P. Pettit, eds., A Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 464.

Companion to

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epistemic difficulties involved in satisfying this condition naturally suggest that the public agency must operate with a very general set of principles which are not analogous to the kinds of principle applied by individuals. In chapter 3 I suggested that the Pareto Principle is a principle of this kind; it is a general principle of efficiency for use by a public agent, but is not intended to be in any sense analogous to the principles by which individuals determine their own utility functions: individuals will do that on the basis of their own values, proclivities and tastes. It is in any case quite implausible to see these individual decisions as somehow reducible to an intrapersonal Pareto Principle of some sort.21 The second consideration was the Millian intuition that efforts to determine and realize individuals’ values from outside are counter¬ productive and prohibitively costly (in terms of welfare) since, as a matter of fact, individuals have an overriding interest in discovering and trying to pursue their personal values on their own terms, not on the terms laid down by outsiders, or by allegedly infallible public institutions. There are then other reasons for deferring to individuals’ own assess¬ ments of what has value for them, for (whether or not individuals are aware of it) their happiness turns essentially on their ability to make their own mistakes and enjoy their own triumphs, whatever they may be. Quite apart from their historical influence, both of these two argu¬ ments offer plausible grounds for moderating a utilitarian service concep¬ tion in a recognizably liberal direction. They are also substantially different, since Mill’s argument must presuppose that the problems raised by the first consideration concerning interpersonal comparisons of utility have been - at least to some extent - overcome. Nevertheless, they overlap and have similar theoretical effects. In particular, they both suggest that a public agent should avoid defining what counts as a ‘service’ independently of individuals’ own assessments of what is valuable to them. In that sense, the public agent’s definition of a ‘service’ will tend to be neutral as to the inherent worth of individuals’ private activities. If a citizen believes he is pursuing the right values, and his activities do not unreasonably hinder anyone else’s ability to pursue theirs, it is inappropriate for the public agency to get involved. A public agent may often be tempted to intervene, but, as Mill puts it, it is likely to intervene in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. Public agency should then be restricted to a less ambitious role: it should seek to provide only those services which allow individuals to pursue their own 21 But see Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 226-41.

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values without unduly getting in each other’s way. Its proper domain of activity lies in the interaction between individuals and the private systems of value that animate their lives and hopes. From thisy, we are led to the kind of asymmetrical police conception of public agency I have associ¬ ated with Mill and Lomasky. The point of effective liberal public agency is, on this view, to secure the conditions under which individuals' own values are most likely to be secured and realized. I want to make two comments about the service conception, as I have presented it. First, even though these moderated asymmetrical forms of the service conception move far away from a crass utilitarianism, they retain the consequentialist and maximizing bias of the underlying aggregative view. That is why I have argued that this kind of conception, even though it is tacitly invoked by many libertarians, cannot provide the basis for the idea of inviolable rights. The fundamental normative point of view involved in this conception of public agency presupposes that what is at stake is the effective provision of services. On this kind of view, the liberal rule of law, a system of legally binding rights, a set of coercive institutions intended to guarantee individuals’ security are themselves treated as services. Their provision will be justified by the fact that they are most likely to secure the conditions under which individuals can obtain what is of value to them. But it follows that if we know that specific violations of such rights will ultimately improve the overall distribution of these opportunities and goods, we have every reason to do so. It is this fact, which the service conception inherits from its aggregative, utilitarian origins, which undermines the idea of inviolable rights, as I argued in the last chapter. Second, my argument raises interesting and important questions about the relation between the recent turn away from the welfare state at the level of public policy and the renewed philosophical discussion of classical liberalism and libertarianism which has accompanied this shift. In particular, it seems to me to raise the question of whether we should think of the debate about the welfare state as essentially one within or about the liberal service conception. This is an important question because, in appealing to Kant, and to an earlier, Lockean, natural rights tradition, libertarians like Nozick and Lomasky have created the impres¬ sion that a move away from welfare to nightwatchman liberalism involves a systematic repudiation of the quasi-utilitarian service concep¬ tion which evokes planning and technocracy. But my argument suggests that this impression might be seriously misleading: renouncing the Keynesian welfare state might not imply a renunciation of the idea that the essential function of the state is to

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service individuals’ values (whatever they may be) in the most efficient way possible. It might instead imply that an earlier optimism about reconciling a certain kind of state intervention in the economy with the efficient provision of liberal services (i.e. allowing individuals to realize their own values) was mistaken. Having tried it, and found that these measures were ultimately inefficient and counterproductive by liberal standards, we would then be inclined to be more cautious about that project, and to suppose that the services supplied by the government should be cut back to a more basic level - the provision of basic rights and liberties, personal security, allowing the market to take care of the distribution of other goods. It seems to me that this is essentially the trajectory that recent public policy arguments about the legitimacy of the welfare state have followed, at least among those who have seen themselves as liberals. But at no point need this line of development question Keynes’s own premiss, which I take to be a classic statement of service liberalism: We must aim at separating those services which are technically social from those which are technically individual. The most important Agenda of the State relate not to those activities which private individuals are already fulfilling, but to those functions which fall outside the sphere of the individual, to those decisions which are made by no one if the state does not make them. The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.22

Liberal opponents of the Keynesian welfare state do not have to dispute this principle. They may just be more optimistic than was Keynes about the ability of an unregulated market to provide some services which he thought that only the state could supply. I am suggesting, then, that the underlying idea of service liberalism, that public agency consists ulti¬ mately in planning and efficiently delivering those services which will allow individuals to live out their own values, would not necessarily be impugned by a return to a more classical, nightwatchman liberalism at the public policy level. I now summarize the two main claims I have made about the service conception: (1) It is wrong to think that the service conception necessarily involves a minimal, nightwatchman, policing operation. (2) But it is also wrong to suppose that to advocate a minimal, nightwatchman political economy is necessarily to repudiate the service conception in favour of some other conception. The attempt to recruit 22 J. M. Keynes, ‘The End of Laissez-faire’, in Laissez-faire and Communism (New York: The New Republic, 1926), pp. 66-7.

o

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

Kantian or Lockean rights arguments to the cause of nightwatchman liberalism is highly questionable: it is much more plausible to see both Keynesian or welfare liberalism and nightwatchman liberalism as varia¬ tions of the service conception which I have just sketched. Kantian and neo-Lockean arguments about individual inviolability and non-exploita¬ tion are conceptually alien to this discourse, and so may have had merely rhetorical significance in the recent debates within the liberal tradition about the status of the welfare state. This second claim, I believe, looks even more plausible when we consider the conception of the political community which lies behind those neo-Kantian and neo-Lockean arguments. As the table above illustrates, the notions of inviolability and non-exploitation that have found their way into contemporary ‘liberal individualism’ via Locke, Kant and others depend on an associative symmetrical conception of collectivity which departs from the ‘service’ conception. As I have just suggested, that associative conception implies an ‘expressivist’ rather than a ‘service’ conception of public agency, and I turn now to sketching some salient features of this kind of view. The expressivist conception In this sort of view, the public agent is taken as a co-participant, with each individual, in a set of processes through which (ideally) the value of the individual is respected, reproduced and realized in the appropriate way. This departs from the service conception in at least two major respects. First, the value of the individual, and the value of whatever special capacities and forms of agency underlie this, are given indepen¬ dently of what individuals actually value. That is, these properties or capacities do not have value because individuals in fact approve of them; rather their value ought to be acknowledged by individuals indepen¬ dently of whatever views they might happen to have about what has value. Second, in this conception rightness is a property of processes, not outcomes. Whereas the service conception asks whether, at a given time, a particular policy or practice efficiently services individuals’ actual values, the expressivist conception asks whether processes involving human agency have suitably respected, or would suitably respect, the value of the individual, in whatever the theory holds it to consist. In this view, the public agent does not merely service whatever values individuals happen to have, or might be expected to have. It is also concerned to ensure that any processes involving human agency which it oversees and in which it participates do not preclude the exercise of those human capacities essential to the realization of individuals’ independent value.

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Any effort to specify and develop an expressivist theory of public agency along these lines will have to explain exactly how ‘processes involving human agency’ can and do sometimes preclude the exercise of the relevant human capacities. That is, the expressivist will have to specify just what these ‘processes’ are and must explain exactly the nature of the ethical constraints that are to be placed on them. The details of this will presumably vary under different versions of the expressivist view, and I cannot explore these possibilities in any detail here. However, the discussion given here, as well as the examples of Kant and Marx, offer some hints as to how such arguments will typically function, and a few general remarks are worth making. One feature in particular emerges as especially important: in focusing on the rightness of processes involving human agency expressivist views are concerned to protect the process of individuals’ human agency itself. For it is, after all, in that process that individuals’ capacities will be appropriately or inappropriately exercised, and their value successfully or unsuccessfully realized. There is then no reason to suppose that an expressivist view will be concerned merely with those processes which involve interpersonal activity. Rather, expressivist views will regard the process whereby individual agents conduct their own lives as itself included (and indeed paramount) within the category of processes subject to the restrictions imposed by the theory. As agents make choices and respond to the experiences they confront in the course of their lives, they participate in a process which is in principle subject to abuse and distortion: individuals may sometimes act in ways that harm or damage the capacities on which the appropriate exercise of their own agency depends. The expressivist must presumably identify the likely sources of this distortion and will urge (at a minimum) that a deliberative vigilance within agents themselves about these likely sources is an essential condition for the legitimate exercise of their agency. Because they stress the importance of different human capacities, different expressivist theories will identify different threats to them. For Kant, for example, the major threat to the capacity for moral autonomy is the presumption of determinism - a threat which is radically indepen¬ dent of any particular social, institutional or economic context. For Marx, on the other hand, the major threats were precisely social and economic. In his view, the major problem of capitalism is that it generates forms of interaction under which enormous numbers of individuals will be encouraged to make decisions (e.g. agreeing to the capitalists’ terms) incompatible with the proper exercise of their essential human capacities (i.e. the capacity for meaningful, self-directed, labour). But whether - as in Marx - they describe social or - as in Kant - purely

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epistemic predicaments, these threats to the exercise of the relevant human capacities are ultimately experienced within, not between, the lives of individual agents. For the expressivist, then, vthe crucial battle¬ ground on which the struggle to protect the appropriate human capa¬ cities takes place is located within the individual and his conscious activity; it is a struggle to protect the process by which individuals consciously direct their lives from forces which might threaten it. It is in this sense that the theory is ‘expressivist’: if that process functions properly, individuals express and confirm - in the course of their conscious activity - their status as both subjects and objects of the relevant form of value. There is an important contrast here with Nozick’s appeal to historical rather than end-state principles of justice which I discussed in the previous chapter. As I have suggested, this appeal can be thought of as an effort to exploit an expressivist notion of inviolability in a specific way: it is an effort to make inviolability a function of individuals’ comprehensive self-ownership. On this view, individuals’ self-ownership (and the other property rights which derive from this) take the place of the specially inviolable human capacity which an expressivist conception will instruct processes to respect. Individuals will then possess inviolable, agent-relative rights which will include a right to veto any considerations alleging duties to themselves. But in this conception, the only processes which are subject to possible constraint by the public agent are interpersonal transactions. But the argument of the last chapter reveals that, for this very reason, this is an unstable use of the expressivist intuition. The instability results from the fact that comprehensive self-ownership recognizes no binding duties to oneself, and so allows that the special importance of a critical human capacity can legitimately be ignored by individuals in their private or self-regarding conduct. But this then undermines the kind of inviolability that is required by the libertarian position. In order for the possession of a morally privileged capacity to generate the requisite kind of inviol¬ ability, that capacity would have to have the kind of moral pull which would render it a decisive consideration for individuals in the conduct of their own lives. Not only would individuals have to respect that capacity in others, they would also have to respect it in themselves. The thesis of self-ownership rules this out. The only threats that Nozick’s historical principles will detect and forbid are those which involve an outsider acting against another without the latter’s consent; self-ownership is not threatened as long as the consent of all relevant parties has been secured. But from the point of view of a genuine expressivist conception, the fact of consent arrives on the scene too late.

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For the consent to a particular course of action is the outcome of an individual’s deliberative process. But for the expressivist, this does not give us enough information to decide the legitimacy of the choice. What we also need to know is whether an individual’s deliberative process met, or could have met, the relevant conditions for the legitimate exercise of their agency. Only then can we be assured that the agent was properly vigilant against threats (determinism, capitalist ideology) to the proper exercise of his critically important capacities. This is necessary in order to verify that the capacity for agency has emerged unscathed in the process whereby individuals reflect on and respond to their life experiences. Assessment of these intrapersonal transactions falls, on the expressivist view, squarely within the legitimate ambit of public agency, even if there are inevitably practical and ethical limits on how far a public agent can realistically intervene in this. It is just this feature of the expressivist view which will make it inherently suspicious of the liberal service conception. For, as I have argued, the chief merit of the latter conception, from a liberal point of view, is that it can restrict the domain of public agency to the inter¬ personal arena. Whereas the expressivist view sees the legitimate exercise of public agency as continuous with an account of legitimate human agency tout court, the liberal service conception sketched above keeps the two separate. It is no interest of the state, on the latter view, to presume to know how individuals ought (not) to use their agency, and the freedoms they enjoy under a liberal state, beyond ruling out actions which affect the liberties of others. But an expressivist view is likely to find this complacent: for in this conception public agency takes no interest in specifying the conditions under which individuals’ agency is appropriately exercised. Instead, the expressivist view will insist that - to the extent that non-counterproductive measures are available - public agency does legitimately act to prevent individuals from acting so as to preclude the exercise of the relevant human capacities. Just what this requires in practice will vary with the content of the expressivist theory, but in principle, any such view will find the service conception system¬ atically inadequate for its failure to attend to a critical arena of ethical concern: the intrapersonal arena within which individuals realize, or impugn, their special moral status.23 23 If all this seems reminiscent of Marx’s criticism of the liberal state in On the Jewish Question, that is not an accident: I take him to be making exactly this kind of objection in that essay. See Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 35, 45-6; Marx’s persistent use of the word ‘egoism’ in that essay is apt to mislead the reader into thinking that his fundamental objection to civil society concerns the ruthless and competitive selfinterest of bourgeois individuals. That is of course part of his point; but the main objection is broader and deeper. For Marx does not just criticize those who receive a

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The Myth of Liberal Individualism

This suggests that the associative and expressivist framework which lies behind the strong notion of inviolability offers an intuitively propi¬ tious critical counterweight to the liberal service conception of public agency. It is unfortunate, then, that recent liberal individualist theories should have succeeded, no doubt inadvertently, in connecting an essen¬ tially expressivist ideal - the idea of non-exploitation and of individual inviolability as side-constraints imposed upon processes involving human agency - with the commitment to the voluntaristic neutrality implied by the appeal to self-ownership. That connection has been further reinforced by uncritical acceptance of the idea that ‘liberal individualism’ represents a coherent combination of values. This assumption has tended to tar the expressivist aspects of recent ‘liberal individualist’ theory with a serviceliberal brush, and to make them unacceptable to those critics of ‘liberal individualism’ whose real critical target is (I suspect) the dismal technoc¬ racy of service-liberalism. But my argument suggests that it might be more plausible to think of recent ‘liberal individualism’, especially in its libertarian form, as essentially a service conception (within which self¬ ownership will be at home) masquerading as a neo-Kantian expressivist view. If my argument works, we might be able to retrieve the (essentially nineteenth-century) expressivist project from under the ‘liberal individu¬ alist’ shadow and exploit its critical potential once again. This seems to me to be a worthwhile enterprise, for reasons which I sketch below, though it is beyond the scope of the present study to vindicate that idea completely. But before I explore this, I want to note, in passing, two final points about the expressivist view. First, I want to stress that there is absolutely no reason to suppose that expressivist views of the sort just sketched are necessarily the thin end of a totalitarian wedge. No doubt these views might prompt the kinds of fears about paternalism expressed by Berlin in Two Concepts of Liberty.24 It is undeniable that, like the positive libertarian views he was concerned to attack in that essay, the expressivist conception is prepared to use public agency to correct for failings of individual agency, and for parallel reasons. But now that the cold war has subsided, we can surely licence to behave in that way through the institution of freedom of contract. He also criticizes (for example) freedom of worship. Presumably Marx is aware that ‘worship¬ pers’ of most religious denominations are rarely ruthless, self-interested bourgeois. But I do not believe that this would alter his attitude to freedom of worship at all. He would continue to say that individuals who sublimate their self-expression through a religious worldview are not fully emancipated because they succumb to forms of thinking which dominate them rather than vice versa. To my mind, Marx’s views about religious and ethical beliefs are far too simple. But what matters for present purposes is the form of the argument, not the ludicrously crude way in which Marx develops it. 24 I. Berlin, Four Essays, pp. 145-54.

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stop pretending that this similarity is enough to establish the ‘totalitarian’ tendencies of such views. In any case, as perfectionist liberals point out, public agency of this kind seems inherently self-limiting: for there will always be a point at which the involvement of public agency in the decisions of the individual will itself disrespect that individual’s own agency.25 When that process itself submerges individuals’ own capacities for legitimate agency by completely dictating individuals’ decisions for them it will have itself gone beyond the limits specified by the theory: for the whole point is precisely to make room for individuals to exercise their agency in the appropriate way. This of course does not guarantee that an expressivist public agent could never make this mistake in practice: but it does guarantee that when this occurs, there is no serious question of its being legitimate by the lights of the expressivist theory which determines the public agency’s raison d'etre in the first place. Indeed, if anything it is the service conception sketched above which has potentially totalitarian implications, for that view does not seem to be inherently self-limiting in this sense. As I suggested above, the service conception could, in principle, be extended into the nightmare forms of utilitarianism envisaged by Rawls. That it has not been so extended, and that it seems implausible to do so, is a result of exogenous considerations of the kind mentioned above being brought to bear upon the underlying aggregative theory. But these considerations are not necessary to the service conception - they are contingent features of an historically specific and familiar liberal form of that conception. And, after all, Mill might simply be wrong about the value to individuals of an auton¬ omous life, and it might turn out that interpersonal comparisons of utility are available for a public agent in certain cases. A public agency that managed to persuade itself of this, and which launched a protototalitarian, centrally planned, scheme to realize individuals’ values on that basis would then not necessarily be violating the essential spirit of the service conception. If he turned out to be right about Mill’s view or about interpersonal comparisons, a proponent of the aggregative service conception would presumably be left without any objection to such a scheme. These last remarks find an interesting echo in a remarkable passage from Eugene Zamiatin’s famous anti-utopian novel, We. This novel is a classic depiction of the horrors of what liberals would today describe as totalitarian collectivism, crushing the individual and his freedom beneath the grinding wheels of the collective juggernaut. Obviously, the book was 25 L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism and Other Writings, p. 69; J. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, pp. 8-9.

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conceived in the first instance as a satire of the totalitarian direction of Soviet communism; but it is striking how often utilitarianism finds itself in the cross-hairs of Zamiatin’s critique: v I have had opportunity to read and hear many improbable things about those times when human beings still lived in the state of freedom, that is, in an unorganized primitive state ... True, their minds were rather limited in those days. Yet they should have understood, should they not, that such a life was wholesale murder, although slow murder, day after day? The state (humanitarianism) forbade in those days the murder of one person, but it did not forbid the killing of millions slowly and by inches. To kill one person, that is, to reduce the individual span of human life by fifty years, was considered criminal, but to reduce the general sum of human life by fifty million years was not considered criminal! Is not it droll? Today this simple mathematical moral problem could be solved in half a minute’s time by any ten-year-old Number, yet they could not do it. All their Immanuel Kants together could not do it! It did not enter the heads of all their Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics based on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.26

The second point is intimately related to this last issue. It concerns the relation between expressivism and the much maligned idea of planning. To make the point, I want to consider a recent argument of G. A. Cohen’s which seems to me to be profoundly, but illuminatingly, wrong. Cohen suggests - and here he is agreeing with David Miller - that the traditional Marxian and socialist call for a society which is consciously and collectively self-directing is one which critics of capitalism and liberal democracy ought to drop. ‘Individual self-direction’, he writes, ‘may have value per se, but collective self-direction does not.’ Cohen claims socialists should drop this idea because he thinks it appeals to the kind of planning attacked by liberals like von Mises and Hayek. Because he agrees with them that planning of this kind is unrealistic and flawed, he thinks that the traditional objection that capitalism is incompatible with conscious collective self-direction is an embarrassment to the socialist cause. According to Cohen, that traditional objection says that massive unplanned outcomes [generated by the market] are deplorable ... just because they are unplanned, since the fact that they are not planned means that society is not in control of its own destiny. Marx and Engels did not favour planning solely because of the particular advantageous economic consequences 26 E. Zamiatin, We (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924), pp. 13-14. Zamiatin’s vision of a ‘crystal palace’ utopia, in which individuals’ lives are always open to observation and surveillance is, of course, a radical extrapolation of Dostoevsky’s reaction to his visit to Paxton’s Crystal Palace in 1862. Dostoevsky was horrified by the rationalization of economic life in the West, and saw the Crystal Palace as a symbol of this rationalization. The anti-utilitarian aspects of Zamiatin’s novel are less surprising viewed against this background. For a helpful discussion, see A. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), pp. 310-15.

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that they thought it would have, but also because of the significance of planning as a realization of the idea, derived no doubt from the Hegelian legacy under which they laboured, of humanity rising to consciousness of and control over itself. The advent of the planned society was seen as ‘the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom ... Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over nature, his own master - free.’ In my view this idea is entirely misplaced.27

Cohen is right that Marx and Engels (and expressivists more generally) are committed to the idea that society ought to be ‘in control of its own destiny’. But does this necessarily imply a commitment to the kind of planning rejected by Hayek and von Mises? Surely not: an expressivist can give sense to the requirement that society be self-directing without being committed to the view that the economy must be centrally planned so as to realize specific distributive outcomes. That is, an expressivist Marxist (for example) will say that any ‘society’ is self-directing when public agency ensures that the processes that characterize civil society are not structured so as systematically to preclude the exercise of individuals’ capacity to realize themselves through their own self-directed labour. I am not here trying to establish what Marx and Engels themselves actually thought, though I think it is striking that the passage from Engels included in Cohen’s claim cited above does not mention economic control, rather it speaks of ‘mastership’ over a ‘form of social organiza¬ tion’. The key point is that the expressivist notion of social self-direction emphatically need not involve the idea of an elite of state technocrats formulating a five-year plan for economic prosperity. Rather, it implies a society which is collectively self-directing in a specific sense: the collective interactive processes which go on within it are compatible with indi¬ viduals’ living self-directed lives. A society in which those interactive processes systematically induce (e.g. through ideological delusion, economic coercion etc.) individuals to choose non-self-directed lives is not a self-directed society. Presumably nothing would stop a society with a centrally planned economy from falling within this category; in no way, then, is a centrally planned economy a necessary condition for the kind of collective self-direction demanded by the expressivist. He can reject central planning of this kind without abandoning his commitment to the idea of collective self-direction and its value. Cohen seems to imply that the (supposed) vindication of the Hayek-von Mises argument against planning forces one to abandon the call for a self-directed society. But this non sequitur throws out the baby with the bathwater; arguably, Cohen is led to this mistake because he is unable to see beyond a service

27 G. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality, p. 260.

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conception of public agency which, ironically, I take to be Marx’s real target. Moreover, it seems to me that it is the service CQnception, not the expressivist view, which points towards the idea of central economic planning. Is not the argument for a centrally planned economy that it provides citizens with a service? And, presumably, the conclusion of the Hayek-von Mises argument is that it is not true that central planning provides a service: actually it is a disservice. In fact the relevant services will be provided more efficiently when we leave the market to work its magic by itself. As I suggested above, this whole argument remains firmly within the service conception of public agency. That there is an alter¬ native to this whole approach implicit within the supposedly univocal message of ‘liberal individualism’ is the central claim that I hope the argument of this study establishes. Beyond communitarianism In this last section I discuss some of the ways in which assuming the coherence and unity of ‘liberal individualism’ has cramped the whole effort to get a critical purchase on the liberal project. Finally, I suggest how the arguments given here might point in more fruitful directions. As I mentioned earlier, those critics who take liberalism to be essentially ‘individualistic’ have been led to assume that alternatives to it must appeal to various supposedly non-individualistic conceptions. This is what explains the continuing obsession within anti-liberal circles with notions of community, with the claim that the self is essentially socially consti¬ tuted, with issues about our collective identities and so on.28 It is not part of my intention to deny that community is important, or that the self is always somehow socially constituted, nor do I say that our collective identities are unimportant. But I do think that if critics of liberalism are forced on to (and restricted to) this terrain by an uncritical attitude to the very idea of ‘liberal individualism’ their attack will be systematically weakened. Assuming that non- or anti-liberal positions must be ‘non-individualistic’ has encouraged critics of liberalism to present themselves as partisans of some specific ‘collective’ identity or to try to define the elusive ideal of community in a broader way. Notoriously, no communitarian has yet made good on the latter project. The problem with the former approach is that it necessarily excludes those who do not belong to the For example, see John Kultgen, Autonomy and Intervention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 10-15.

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relevant group, including (embarrassingly) partisans of other collective identities. These considerations seem to me to be extremely important in explaining why liberalism so often seems to end up winning by default in the now familiar debates about ‘liberal individualism’ and communitarianism. Consider - in this regard - the following rather revealing passage from Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action. Von Mises writes: all varieties of collectivist creeds are united in their implacable hostility to the fundamental political institutions of the liberal system: majority rule, tolerance of dissenting views, freedom of thought, speech and the press, equality of all men under the law. This collaboration of collectivist creeds in their attempts to destroy freedom has brought about the mistaken belief that the issue in present day political antagonisms is individualism versus collectivism. In fact it is a struggle between individualism on the one hand and a multitude of collectivist sects on the other hand whose mutual hatred and hostility is no less ferocious than their abomination of the liberal system ... A substitution of collectivism for liberalism would result in endless bloody fighting.29

This passage presupposes many of the hoary myths about individualism and collectivism which have been the major target of this study. Clearly, von Mises has in mind the more spectacular and virulent Fascist, nationalist and totalitarian forms of‘collectivism’ of the early and middle parts of this century. Nevertheless, it is not clear that contemporary communitarian critics of liberalism do not face the same problem. This is, of course, not to say that such critics advocate a return to the totalitarian collectivism of the Nazi or Soviet types; normally they explicitly and rightly distance themselves from these political models. Nonetheless, I take them to be recommending their own proposal that the self is an inherently social entity as a kind of via media between liberal individualism on the one hand and an overbearing collectivism on the other - a view which, far from escaping from the individualist/ collectivist dichotomy, trades upon it. The assumption that ‘individu¬ alism’ is the real enemy remains. As long as critics of liberalism make this assumption, they will be committed to the view that a non- or anti-liberal theory must be in some recognizable sense non-individualistic. The theory must put some concep¬ tion of the community, or group identity, first. But the next question is: which community? Which social identity? It comes as no surprise that on this point the critics provide no basis for agreement. Instead they have fragmented into a number of different camps representing competing collective ‘identities’, identities related to class, nation, race, gender or cultural traditions; they are united only by the claim that communal, 29 von Mises, Human Action, pp. 151-2; also, von Mises, Socialism, p. 56.

206

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

social, group-centred values are more important than individualistic ones. That is, after all, why they reject ‘liberal individualism’. But here their agreement ends. What is the basis for a modus viyendi among these various collective identities? Familiar liberal ideas about pluralism and toleration, suitably adapted to be sensitive to the requirements of cultural and ethnic diversity, offer the most obvious recourse. To my mind, von Mises’s comment indicates that this is the completely unsurprising result of taking the notion of ‘liberal individualism’ for granted. If its opponents are restricted to theories of ‘social identity’, ‘liberal individualism’ is likely to end up winning out by default, much as it seems to be doing in the contemporary debate. Such a view is of course grist for my mill: it supports the idea that the construction of liberal individualism inevitably tilts the issues in a liberal direction, and that a more penetrating criticism of liberal politics starts by questioning that construction itself. I want to stress a related reason why indiscriminate attacks on ‘liberal individualism’ as a whole are unlikely to get very far. As I have suggested, it is the focus on liberal individualism that has led to the sustained onslaught on the ‘atomistic’ assumptions about the individual and the collectivity allegedly associated with liberalism. Instead the critics argue that we should understand that the self is not an isolated atom, free to stand apart from and make independent choices about its collective context. Instead the self is essentially constituted by the concrete social relationships in which it moves. On this view, the fundamental defect of ‘liberal individualism’ is that it assumes that the self is made prior to social interaction; so, clearly, any viable alternative must claim that the self is made in the context of social interaction. To quote Daniel Bell: We ordinarily think of ourselves, Michael Sandel says, ‘as bearers of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons or daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic’, social attachments that more often than not are involuntarily picked up during the course of our upbringing, rational choice having played no choice whatsoever. I did not choose to love my mother and father, to care about the neighbourhood in which I grew up, to have special feelings for the people of my country, and it is difficult to understand why anyone would think that I have chosen those attachments, or that I ought to have done so.30

So communitarians like Bell and Sandel suggest that the good life consists in making peace (or war?)31 with our inescapable social identity: the problem with liberalism is that by emphasizing the importance of 30 D. Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, p. 4. 31 See A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 221.

The myth of liberal individualism

207

choice, it condemns citizens to a perpetual restlessness about their social identity, and so undermines the stability of genuine community on which authetic self-discovery depends. Such platitudes about the unchosen nature of our social identity and about its importance to us are apt to seem hopelessly naive, however. What is missing is any serious acknowledgement of the elementary fact that the character of social intervention in the construction of the self is radically Janus-faced. It is one thing to say that selves are formed in and through a social context, quite another to say that this is always a good thing. Social relations may well inevitably form the selves which move within them, but they can also deform them in various ways. No doubt Robespierre’s identity was given by his being a ‘son of the French Revolution’. But perhaps a reflective Robespierre would - with hindsight - deeply regret that the social forces of the revolution intervened in the formation of his identity in the way they did. He might reflect that being a son of the French Revolution turned him into a monster and made his existence shameful.32 The remarkable silence of communitarian critics of liberal individu¬ alism on this obvious and fundamental point has made it easy for liberals to respond that communitarians have not taken sufficient account of the potentially totalitarian implications of a communitarian conception of politics. So the argument ends up reinstating the familiar dichotomy between liberal individualism and various communal or social alterna¬ tives which threaten to disintegrate into a totalitarian collectivism. Stated in these terms, this is an argument which the liberal individualist seems fated to win. How might my attack on the very idea of ‘liberal individualism’ itself allow us to escape this all too familiar stand-off? One of the striking features of the communitarian attack on liberal individualism is a criticism of the ‘voluntarist’ conception of agency. Thus Sandel criticizes Rawls, and the ‘deontological liberal’ tradition as a whole, for depicting human agency in a partial and limited way. That is, the ‘deontological liberal’ depicts the identity of the agent as given in advance and then sees the activity of human agency as a set of low-grade decisions about what one wants,33 This model he associates with ‘liberal individualism’.34 Sandel thinks this closes off a richer conception of human agency, one whereby an agent ‘participates in the constitution of its own identity’.35 That conception is of course the one that he, and other communitarians, 32 The same point is made forcefully by Will Kymlicka in his critical appendix to Bell’s book: see Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics, pp. 21 Off. 33 M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 59. 34 ibid., pp. 59-65, 103, 147-51. 35 ibid., pp. 152, 153, 159.

208

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

see as being uniquely available in a constitutive community. In such a community, agency is ‘cognitive’ rather than voluntarist, since in such a community one can attain a form of self-understandijig about who one is: by acting out and reflecting upon the identity that our collective context bestows upon us, we come to understand who we really are by participating in the social process which generates this identity.36 But the argument given here suggests that this choice is a false alternative. We can attack the voluntarist account of human agency associated with some liberal theories without being driven to assert that one’s identity is essentially constituted by the community or social context to which one happens to belong. For, as I have suggested, the assumption about voluntarism affiliates with the service conception of public agency. But it is just this feature of the aggregative asymmetrical service conception which the expressivist alternative I have associated with Kantian forms of liberalism rejects. Moreover, that expressivist view generates a notion of agency which allows individuals to participate in the constitution and confirmation of their moral identity. For on that view, the value of individuals and their lives is expressed in and confirmed by their own exercise of the relevant capacities. Indeed, it seems to give communitarians everything they want, except for an unqualified commit¬ ment to the social construction of individuals’ identity. But since that is exactly what is problematic about the communitarian proposal this seems to be a significant advantage. As I suggested, in principle an expressivist view will be alive to the possibility that social and economic interaction can unleash forces which intrude upon and distort self¬ understanding and self-determination. There is surely ample scope for a criticism of both service liberalism and strongly communitarian proposals along just these lines. The irony is that communitarians have trained most of their critical artillery on precisely the ‘deontological liberal’ and Kantian arguments which my argument suggests provide a natural home for this kind of expressivism. That they have failed to recognize the proximity of that conception to their own critical project can only be explained by their unwillingness to criticize and jettison the notion of ‘liberal individualism’; as I have argued, this category is too coarse-grained to detect the difference between service liberalism and the expressivist conception. It should be said that Sandel himself shows sporadic awareness of this with respect to Kant’s views (which he rightly distinguishes from Rawls’s).37 But in the end he, too, seems less interested in exploring these possibilities than in treating deontological liberalism generally as the 36 ibid., pp. 173-4.

37 ibid., pp. 63-4, 166.

The myth of liberal individualism

209

latest incarnation of the malign doctrine of ‘liberal individualism’. This may have certain rhetorical advantages, but in so doing he has unwit¬ tingly perpetuated a set of views which systematically tend to weaken the critical resources available to him and other communitarian critics of liberalism. There are signs that the kind of expressivist theory I have been sketching is once again taking root.38 Joseph Raz’s perfectionism is a case in point. Although he still describes himself as a liberal, Raz’s recent writings present a view containing many of the essential features of the expressivist conception. For example, he shows little interest in any form ot utilitarianism. He treats individual well-being as instantiated in the process of human activity: ‘the core idea,’ he says, ‘is controlling one’s conduct, being in charge’.39 For Raz, human beings have the capacity to engage ‘wholeheartedly’ in the ‘successful pursuit’ of ‘valuable activ¬ ities’.40 I take him to be claiming that public agency consists in ensuring that the institutions and practices of society which the public agent oversees and participates in are only justifiable to the extent that they allow or enable individuals to exercise that capacity. Moreover, Raz explicitly connects this claim about well-being with claims about duties to ourselves, duties which he says arise independently of our will. Raz writes, all who can should meet the conditions which entitle them to self-respect. They should respect their own capacity for rational agency, and should endeavour to exercise it responsibly ... those who are responsible agents and are therefore 38 Arguably, the revival of republicanism reflects this. See, for example, Q. Skinner, The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in G. Bock, Q. Skinner, and M. Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp. 293-309; P. Pettit, The Common Mind, pp. 302-38; A. Oldfield, Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modem World (New York: Routledge, 1990). However, these contributions rarely make explicit that the republican argument must involve a certain ideal of agency and of selfhood which cuts across the standard division of self- and other-regarding spheres. This implication makes the republican case much more controversial (but also more radical and interesting). An exception to this coyness about duties to self is D. Selbourne, who openly recognizes that the notion of a duty to self must be a central part of a republican conception of politics. See D. Selbourne, The Principle of Duty (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), pp. 55-6, 149-53, 157, 233-43. Radical critics of liberalism are likely to be put off, rightly in my view, by Selbourne’s list of duties to self: they will see them as overly conservative and traditional. But as I said in the case of Marx above, the fact that we find the details of a particular interpretation of the expressivist idea unappealing does not imply that the form of argument is misguided. Attracta Ingram’s recent study, A Political Theory of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), reaches very similar conclusions to mine, although she presents them in a rather different idiom, and I am unpersuaded by her appeal to dialogic norms of rationality. But her conclusion that autonomy and self-ownership conflict echoes mine in many ways. 39 J. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 4. 40 ibid., pp. 3 and ff.

210

The Myth of Liberal Individualism

entitled to respect themselves should do so ... A person’s well-being is the successful pursuit of worthwhile goals. Self-respect is earned by the endeavour to live a life of such pursuits. Self-respect, therefore, is a condition of individual well-being. Only those who deservedly respect themselves can have a successful life. Failing to respect oneself, or to be entitled to such respect, is perhaps the most fundamental way of failing in one’s life.41

Finally, although Raz has been called a ‘communitarian liberal’,42 it is clear that he sees principles of the kind mentioned in the above passage as valuable independently of their contribution to the preservation of particular communities or culturally valued practices: ‘No one should be denied access to valuable options on the ground that to allow access would lead to the transformation or the disappearance of a muchcherished existing form of a valuable activity or relationship.’43 Here Raz implies that his view suggests a strong, agent-relative side-constraint against any form of activity which deprives an individual of the opportu¬ nities he needs for the successful exercise of the capacities necessary for his well-being. This is a restriction which would presumably trump claims of utility, efficiency and community. It is not my intention to signal agreement with Raz’s views about specific political issues, nor with his account of what well-being consists in; there is, happily, plenty to dispute in the details of his argument, and a detailed (sympathetic) critique of his proposals seems to me to be already overdue. Rather, the main point is that Raz’s recent work seems to me to suggest rather eloquently how the expressivist view might be brought out from under the long shadow that ‘liberal individualism’ has cast over recent debates in political theory. For Raz, the point of politics is not just to service individuals’ values, nor indeed to uphold the values of a community or social identity blindly, but to fight for individuals’ capacity for well-being against the many threats - social, economic, ideological and political - which it faces. We may well disagree with his account of well-being, and of the human capacities that are central to it. But we can do so while agreeing that the main aim of public agency should be to identify and remedy major social threats to the legitimate and proper exercise of individuals’ own capacities. And we can at the same time consider the possibility that the ideology of service liberalism, and the technocratic conception of public agency it has sponsored, might be just such a threat. If that expressivist project were to be taken seriously, some leading elements of contemporary philosophical ‘liberalism’ might eventually 41 ibid., p. 39. 42 R. Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society, pp. 240-8. 43 J. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 24.

The myth of liberal individualism

211

evolve into the kind of critical social theory of which liberals have sometimes been deeply suspicious. Such a theory would be free of scruples about the public evaluation and correction of self-regarding faults; it would be a theory that dropped the idea of neutrality and abjured a static, technocratic consequentialism; it would be a theory that brought the dynamic processes of human development and interaction into the foreground as matters of common, public attention; it would be prepared to consider the possibility that an exclusive focus on non¬ interference could be inimical to, not supportive of, self-development; and it could do all of these things without at any point having to invoke problematic claims about the social construction of one’s moral identity. Such a theory would certainly contain many elements to which one might apply the label ‘liberal’. But because it would provide a vantage-point from which we could both celebrate the undeniable achievements of liberal civilization and identify some of its most serious shortcomings, such a theory would merely tend to confirm the obsolescence of that label and of the ideal towards which it gestures. For ideals and their labels become obsolete, not merely when they fall out of fashion or are deemed passe, but because they no longer discriminate between success and failure, or between fulfilment and betrayal.

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Index

abstract order 78-80 Ackerman, Bruce 156 Addelson, Kathryn Pyne 17 analogies between state and the individual, see symmetrical conceptions of public agency anarchism 29 Arblaster, Anthony 13,37,59 Aristotle 17 Arneson, Richard 147 atomism 42,44, 47, 64 autonomy 104, 109, 112-14, 133-8, 155, 169-71, 174-5, 197 Avineri, Shlomo 18, 21 Baier, Annette 17 Barry, Norman 39,71 Bell, Daniel 60,206 Bellamy, Richard 16, 133, 210 Benn, Stanley 88 Bentham, Jeremy 50, 66, 87, 94, 102, 125, 126, 136, 137, 165 Berlin, Sir Isaiah 7, 53, 99-107, 111, 113-19, 122-4, 133, 137, 200 Boaz, David 168 Bristow, Edward 10 Brittan, Samuel 43-5, 47, 62 Brock, Dan 102 Buchanan, James E., 6, 13, 14, 57 capitalism 1, 145, 178-9, 183-5, 195, 197, 202-4 categorical imperative 113, 122, 169, 170 coercion 53, 99, 106, 115-22, 142-5, 169-70, 173, 182, 203 Cohen, Gerald 143, 144, 146, 147, 166, 178, 179, 202, 203 cold war liberals 7-13, 16, 18, 13, 15,44, 45, 47, 56, 84, 94 collective identities 5, 60, 67, 92, 204-8 210,211 collectivism 1-4, 8-19, 25-6, 41, 44,

218

46-8, 52, 56-7, 80, 83-4, 94, 96, 97, 102-5, 140, 180, 184, 201, 205, 207 Collini, Stefan 10 common good 17, 18, 66, 77-8, 104, 148 communitarianism 1,4, 16, 23, 46, 47, 49, 56, 66-7, 78, 79, 94, 184, 190, 204-10 and libertarianism 19, 39 and theories of the self 60, 206 and voluntarist conception of agency 207-8 takes liberal individualism for granted 36 see also irreducibly social values; liberalcommunitarian debate conceptions of collectivity 1-2, 25-6, 84-6, 96, 101, 104-6, 181,206 aggregative 86-7, 88-9, 94, 122-4, 131, 137, 161-2, 173, 184, 190-1 associative 87-90, 94, 107, 109, 113, 122, 135, 137-8, 140, 145, 162-3, 184, 187, 190-1, 196, 199 consent 57, 111, 141, 148, 160, 171-2, 176, 186, 198-9 consequentialism 102,153,211 see also utilitarianism Crittenden, Jack 14 Dahl, Robert 58 Dallmayr, Fred 17 Dasgupta, Partha 81 De-Shalit, A. 18,121 Delaney, C. F. 17 Den Otter, Sandra 10 Den Uyl, Douglas 139, 167-9, 173 Dent, Nicholas 109 Descombes, Vincent 59 Dicey, A. V. 13 Difference Principle 17 Distribution of Liberty Principle 31, 97-105 Kant’s version of 103,113 Mill’s version of 103,128-9

Index Doctrine of Right 169-74 Dodge, Guy 105 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 202 drug policy 175 duties to self 138,162,198 enforcement of 171-2, 175-6, 200-1 in Kant 160-1,170-4 in Mill 135 Dworkin, Ronald 16,21,36,38 economy of rights 159, 161, 165, 189 egoism 5, 199 electorate 87 Elster, Jon 94-5 Engels, Frederick 202-3 equal consideration 112 as basic liberal commitment 72 as irreducibly social value 78 and liberty 31 exploitation 141, 146, 164, 178-9 expressivism 187, 190-201, 202, 208 external states, see individuals fascism 10, 15, 102 Finnis, John 173 foundationalism 22, 86 Freeden, Michael 10 freedom 6, 13, 15, 24, 26, 37-8, 43, 44, 46, 53, 55, 61, 74, 91, 97-133, 139, 144, 157, 170, 172-3, 180, 184, 187, 188, 199, 201,202, 203,205 and coercion 114-22 and liberal individualism 29-34 in Mill 124-37 as moral autonomy 109, 112-14, 137-8 as opportunity vs. exercise concept 117-18,132-3 and privacy 32-4 and rights 137,158-9 in Rousseau and Kant 105-14 worth of 123,131 see also Distribution of Liberty Principle; negative liberty; positive liberty; rights Galston, William 21, 72, 186 Gamble, Andrew 39, 58 Gauthier, David 139,186 General Will 14,18,105-14 Gilbert, Margaret 59, 63 Golden Rule 97,107,188 Gordon, Scott 16 Gould, Carol 40, 45 Gray, John 17,131 Green, T. EL, 37 Greenleaf, William 9 gun control 151

219 Gutmann, Amy

18, 57

Habermann, Gerd 14 Hardin, Russell 192 Harm Principle 126,128,129,133-5 Harrington, James 54 Hart, H. L. A., 30 Hayek, F. A., 7-13,35,39,44,51,57, 60-1, 79-81, 91, 180, 202-4 Hegel, G. W. F. 8, 11, 14,43,61, 115,202 Hobbes, Thomas 9, 54, 57, 63, 64, 66, 90, 125-7, 129 Hobhouse, L. T., 37, 77 Hobson, J. A., 37 Holden, Barry 14 holism 12,14,44 humanism 49 Hurley, Susan 193 ideology 20, 38, 47, 55, 179, 199, 210 immanent critique argument 20-4 impersonal standards of value 31-2, 154-5 and self-ownership 149-50,153 individualism 30, 39-41, 139, 153, 166, 180-2, 183, 185 and collectivism 1,4, 9, 14-15, 93-6, 101, 104, 184 and critics of liberalism 17-19,21-2, 36-7, 190, 204-7 as defining commitment of liberalism 3, 27-8,41 and egoism 5 and laissez-faire 9, 13, 37 methodological 9-10, 11,41, 52, 55-8 ontological 57-8,59-65 as political ideal 27-8, 34-6, 46, 77-8, 103 and social independence 4-5, 60 as a theory 6, 13-14, 43-4, 46-7, 83-4 value-individualism 57-8,65-82 individuals internal and external states of 70, 71-3 inviolability of 16, 31-2, 100-1, 105, 113-14, 124, 141-2 moral status of 107, 109, 112, 135, 199 their relations to society and state see conceptions of collectivity; symmetrical conceptions of public agency and rights 137,158-9 as self-owners see self-ownership values of 149-50, 165-6, 191-4 Ingram, Attracta 209 interferences 92, 113, 116-22, 123, 125, 128, 129, 133, 142, 151 internal states see individuals

220

Index

inviolability 15, 24, 30, 185, 196, 198, 200 of individuals 15-16,24, 31-2, 39,40, 100-1, 105, 113-14, 124, 141-2 of rights 24,149,183,189 and self-ownership 147-8,149-52, 198-9 invisible hand 51,80 irreducibly social values 51, 64, 68-9 in communitarian theory 64-7 in liberal theory 72-3, 74-5, 78-9 Johnston, David 1, 28-30, 166, 181-2, 185-6, 186-7 justice 20, 30-1, 50, 74-8, 90, 99, 100-2, 107-9, 125-6, 160, 171-2, 187, 198 end-state vs. historical principles of 142, 163-4 justification 49, 52-3, 57, 58, 66, 68-71, 83, 146, 149-55, 168-9 Kant, Immanuel 100-1, 102-5, 107, 109, 110-14, 115, 121-2, 132-3, 155-6, 160, 165, 169-74, 175, 184, 188, 194,

202

on duties to self 110-11,134-5,136, 137-8, 171-3 as expressivist 197-8,208 on the General Will 111-13 on self-ownership 160-1 Kantian political theories 100-1, 102, 134-5, 160-1, 162-3, 169-70 as associative and symmetrical 113-14, 135 in contemporary liberalism 16, 30-3, 124, 187, 194, 195-6 and libertarianism 40, 103-4, 122, 124, 138, 140, 145-6, 155, 159, 170-4 Katznelson, Ira 92, 93, 133 Kekes, John 21 Keynes, J. M. 195 Kingdom, J. E. 14 Kley, Ronald 39 Kukathas, Chandran 39 Kultgen, John 205 Kymlicka, Will 18, 21, 77, 79, 130, 186, 187, 207 laissez-faire 9, 10, 13, 39, 44 Larmore, Charles 133,136 Le Corbusier 79 Levine, Andrew 108 liberal-communitarian debate 56, 60, 66-7, 78-9, 94, 204, 206-9 influenced by cold war assumptions 17-19, 47, 64, 82, 104, 205

liberals fated to win 207 makes wrong kind of issue out of individualism 36-7 liberal individualism v coherence of 2,23-4,34-7,39,41,82, 96, 104, 140, 164-6, 183-4, 187-9 and communitarian critics see liberalcommunitarian debate evolution of 7-19 and freedom 29-34, 97-9, 114-24, 137-8 and the idea of an inviolable private sphere 35,77 as ideological phantom 185 and immanent critique 19-24 Johnston’s account of inadequate 28-30 libertarianism as puritan version of 40, 41, 103, 139, 140, 181 and neutrality 32-3, 92-3, 144, 154, 165,167-9, 180, 186, 191 and paternalism 30, 98, 99-100, 102, 124, 132-6, 140, 170, 174-6 and utilitarianism 9, 16, 31-2, 74-5, 94, 95-6, 98-9, 100-1, 102-3, 123-4, 125-6, 129-31, 152-3, 192-4, 201-3 and Western political discourse 4-5, 20, 130 liberalism amorphousness of 3, 211 classical vs. welfare 37-9 ‘deontological’ 208-9 disagreement within 27-8, 37-42 and distribution of liberty 31-2,97-8 dominance in contemporary political theory 3,21 expressivist conceptions of 187, 196-204 individualism often qualified in 27-8, 37, 185 libertarian see libertarianism and liberty see freedom and neutrality see neutrality and perfectionism 133-4,187,190, 209-11 political vs. comprehensive 190 service conceptions of 186,188-9, 191-6 see also liberal individualism libertarianism 14-17, 19, 26, 27, 34, 38-41, 120-2, 139-40, 182-5 and inviolable rights 141-2,147-61 and neutrality 40,144,154-5,167-9 as puritan form of liberal individualism 40, 41, 103, 132, 139, 140, 182

Index and rights 137,158-9 and self-ownership 34, 142-6, 147-55, 159, 176-7, 198-9 theoretical coherence of 164-6,183-4 and utilitarianism 124,141-2 liberty, see freedom Lloyd Thomas, David 34 Locke, John 66, 156, 163, 196 Lomasky, Loren 33-5, 132, 141, 145, 150-4, 161, 162, 165, 174-5, 184, 194 Long, Douglas 125 Lukes, Steven 4, 6 Lyons, David 92 Machan, Tibor 94,139 Macintyre, Alasdair 92, 93 Marx, Karl 11,29,49,57,156,165, 178-9, 199, 202-4, 209 Marxism 8, 49, 146, 164, 178-9, 202-3 Merkl, Peter 14 methodological individualism, see individualism Mill, J. S. 10, 29, 87, 91, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111, 114, 124-38, 140, 161, 162, 165, 184, 193, 195,201 Miller, David 202 Mises, Ludwig von 7, 9, 11, 56-64, 202-4, 205-6 Mont Pelerin Society 11 moral autonomy 109,111-14,132-3, 169-71 moral status, see individuals Mulhall, Steven 21 Murray, Charles 98, 139, 145, 158 Narveson, Jan 34, 98, 117, 166 negative liberty aggregative implications of 122-4 and anti-paternalism 99-100,103, 132-3, 135-6 basic concept vs. political interpretation of 114-15,119 and coercion 114,115,116,118 and consequentialist welfarism 131-2 and liberal objection to Rousseau 106-7 in libertarian theories 120-2 and Mill’s harm principle 126-7, 128-9 and security 124-5 worth of 123,126 neutrality and freedom 33 implies asymmetrical conceptions of public agency 92-3,145 in libertarian theories 167-9 and self-ownership 144

221 violating self-ownership rights compatible with 154-5 see also private sphere; Right and the Good Nietzsche, Friedrich 79 Nino, Carlos 14, 52 Nozick, Robert 16, 17, 18, 20, 26, 32, 38, 40, 102, 116, 124, 132, 141, 144, 145, 149, 150, 153, 160, 163, 194, 198 Oakeshott, Michael 80 Offe, Claus 17 Oldfield, Andrew 209 ontology 45, 46, 64 of the self 60 ‘social’ 17,64,72,85 see also individualism, ontological opportunities 97, 123, 124, 126-9, 131, 133, 136, 137, 186, 194,210 see also negative liberty optimization 98-104, 124, 131, 132, 189, 192 see also rights; utilitarianism organic theories of the state 53-5 Pareto Principle 96,193 Parfit, Derek 16,43,96 paternalism 29-30,98-104, 132-3, 140, 142, 158, 162, 171, 175,200 perfectionism 132-3,209 Perry, R. B. 53, 62 Peters, Richard 88 Pettit, Philip 45, 67-8 planning, economic 10, 47, 94, 95, 194-5, 202-4 Plant, Raymond 115 Plantinga, Alvin 130 Plato 12,43,88,90,94-5 pluralism 15,92,206 Popper, Karl 7-13, 44, 51, 53, 55, 57, 94 positive liberty and coercion 100, 106 as collectivist 15-16 and duties to self 110-11 and individuals’moral status 109 in Kant 113 and paternalism 99 in Rousseau 108-9 and symmetrical conceptions of public agency 113-14 positivism 44-5 priority of the individual 41, 43-9, 50, 51, 55, 59, 65, 79, 104, 140 of liberty 30

222

Index

of Right over the Good 33, 50, 83-4 private sphere 145-6,165 as element in individualist ideals 32-3, 34,35 and Mill 136 and paternalism 32, 98 and self-ownership 144 project pursuit 91, 151, 174-5 property rights 29, 34, 38, 142-6, 164-6, 178, 180, 183 coverage of 147-8 in oneself see self-ownership and redistributive taxation 40-1, 176-7 violability of 148-55 prostitution 128, 190, 171, 174, 175 public agency 83-6, 89-93, 95, 110, 113, 114, 122-3, 134-6, 137-8, 145, 148-58, 161-4, 186, 187, 190, 192-204 defined 52-3,88 and equal consideration 77-8, 79 and symmetry 90-3 see also neutrality; symmetrical conceptions of public agency public interest, 14, 50, 51, 74, 83 see also public agency Rasmussen, Douglas 139, 167-9, 173 Rawls, John 15-17, 27, 30-1, 37,40, 50, 74-7, 81, 91, 95, 99-105, 124, 129-32, 136-7, 139, 148, 153, 186, 187, 192, 201,207-8 Raz, Joseph 65,68-71,116,133-4, 209-10 redistribution 40, 121, 147, 152, 183, 184, 185, 190 Reiman, Jeffrey 21, 33, 187, 188 republicanism 65,209 respect 31, 35, 55, 77, 108-14, 122, 124, 135-8, 141-2, 155-61, 162-4, 170-6, 184-5, 187-8, 189-90, 196-99, 201, 208-11 see also neutrality; private sphere, rights Right and the Good 33, 50 rights in Mill 125-7 and neutrality 154-5 and privacy 34-5 and security 125-6,137,173-4 and self-ownership 148-52 to do wrong 159,167 as 'trumps’ 60, 98-9 utilitarianism of 131,132,141-2, 150-2, 157 violability of 152 Robespierre, Maximilien 207

Root, Michael 71,77 Rosen, Alan 122,171-2 Rothbard, Murray 43-4, 57 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 12, 102, 104, 105-14, 133, 135, 137, 143, 165, 184 Ruben, David Hillel 85 Ryan, Alan 126 Sandel, Michael 5, 17-18, 20, 206-8 Scheffler, Samuel 102, 150-1, 162 security 104, 128-9, 130, 136, 161, 194 and liberty 125-7,137-8 Selbourne, David 209 self- and other-regarding conduct, see duties to self self-development 127-30, 131, 132-3, 135, 136 self-ownership 33-4, 142-5, 147-55, 158-62, 164, 165, 167, 176, 178, 182, 183, 190, 200 as capitalist ideology 179 compatible with consequentialist theories 152-3, 161-2 comprehensive 143-5, 158, 177 and duties to self 156-7, 198 and paternalism 32-4,140,144-5 and redistributive taxation 38, 40, 147, 152,176-7 rejected by Kant 160-1 violability of 148-55 self-respect 135,187,209 Service Conception 186, 190, 191-6, 199, 200, 201-2, 204, 208,210 side-constraints 40, 124, 141, 162, 163, 164, 174, 182, 183, 188,200,210 Sidgwick, Henry 13 Skidelsky, Robert 35,51,61 Skinner, Quentin 209 slavery 73-4, 76, 134 Smith, G. W. 132 social contract theory 57 socialism 2, 7, 10, 19, 21, 49, 178, 181, 202-3 Spencer, Herbert 9, 10, 12, 60-1 spontaneous order 51-2 see also invisible hand; planning Spragens, Thomas A. 37 suicide 156, 167, 169, 171, 174, 190 Swift, Adam 21 Sylvan, Richard 15 symmetrical conceptions of public agency 54-5, 81, 90-3, 94-6, 140-1, 145, 165, 184, 190, 192, 196 avoided by Mill 135-8 and duties to self 158, 162-3 in Hobbes 90-1

Index and neutrality 92-3 in Plato 90, 94-5 in Rousseau and Kant 134-5

223

110, 113-14,

Talmon, J. L., 7,8,10,11 taxation 152, 177 libertarian objections to 40, 142, 176-7, 178 and negative liberty 120-1 Taylor, Charles 19, 64, 66-7, 78, 117 Thatcher, Margaret 15,82 Tocqueville, Alexis de 4 tolerance 32, 190, 205 totalitarianism 7-11, 18, 44, 46, 47, 67, 80, 99, 101, 102, 106, 140 Tully, James 59,140 utilitarianism 87, 89-90, 94, 124, 130-1, 136, 153, 162 as collectivist theory 16, 101, 192,

201-2

and problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility 96, 192-3

Rawlsian objection to 16, 74-5, 95-6, 100-1,129-30 and rights 98, 125-7, 131, 152, 161 value-individualism see individualism Veatch, Henry 167, 173 Vincent, Andrew 14 Viroli, Maurizio 110, 209 virtues of citizenship 108-9 volenti non fit iniuria 160, 171, 172 voluntarism 32, 67, 159, 160, 183, 208 Waldron, Jeremy 16 Walicki, A. 202 Warren, Mark 45 Weldon, T. D. 7, 12, 53 welfare state 8, 10-11, 15-18,47, 139, 178, 180, 181, 183, 184, 194-6 Wolfe, Alan 15 Wolff, Jonathan 144 Young, Iris Marion Zamiatin, Eugene

45 201-2