Tuesday, February 28, 2023

A New Feudalism?: Reflections on a Near & Distant Future

 In a previous essay, I conceptualized that we are currently undergoing a return to the early modern world of the Renaissance. By this I meant that there will be a colorful array of reorganization, state-like and state-adjacent corporate groupings carrying out functions of the state, the growing power of well-guided micro-states capable of harnessing new information technologies, and, what may seem most absurd, is an opening to a variety of new and creative ideas derived from past worlds. None of this has quite happened yet, but you can begin to see the seeds of it begin to sprout. We are still stuck in the Post World Order, the Pax Americana, a modified and distorted vision of what Britain had achieved in the 19th century. And like the Pax Britanica, American liberalism (very different in policy and vision, though equally ideological and flowery) reigns through a velvet fist. However the coming crack-up of global power will not be on account of the rapid corporatized state-building of rivals, such as how Germany, the United States, and Japan began to flank Great Britain (along with a rising threat from Russia). Instead, it will be a process, in some places imperceptible, of dispersal and decentralization. This process does not eliminate control. On the contrary, it allows a more effective harnessing of power through new information, travel, and cooperative technologies.

Thus, there will be a fracturing, an opening, into which a variety of new spirits will pour. One day Hitler and Nazis will be as distantly archaic as Napoleon and Bonapartists. And just as British Liberals fretted over a Lincoln or a Bismarck as a reactionary-revolutionary (despite neither of them reflecting much in the way of the Corsican), so too accusations of Fascism (simultaneously backwards and novel) fly against those who begin to break-down this order (at home and abroad). The good and the bad of these orders will make themselves apparent in the future. However, the qualification I want to add is that this new Renaissance will be something of a camara-obscura. Whereas the Renaissance gave way to state-building and centralization, technological capabilities reflect the opposite. It will be a great rejuvenation of politics, but in a way in which sees the state increasingly marginalized, or fitted in a network of institutions and organizations that break free from its grasp and gain their own momentum. It will be akin to how great Roman landlords imperceptibly transformed over hundreds of years into feudal nobility as the state withered. I believe this emerging world may become something of a new Middle Ages.

I don't adopt this term polemically. And I am also aware that there are too many cheap complaints about "feudalism", under which we new serfs will labor at our gig or wage jobs under the pseudo-benevolence of Bill Gates. However, inanity aside, one must not turn his gaze away from the Shield of Achilles. There is a reemergent pattern that even the jumbled may sense in an incoherent way.

What constitutes a new "Middle Ages"? A primary concept, which will become increasingly important, is "feudalism". It is well known among historians that this conceit is primarily heuristic, at best, if not a misleading slur. However, I will not abandon it, but rather tinker with it. The importance of feudalism was that social bonds depended on non-state and unequal pledges of fidelity. The lesser served the greater and the greater provided for the lesser. These contracts between patron and client were enforced through either states that were the personal property of a family, usually cloaked in the ruins of Rome, or with extra-state institutions that had taken over responsibilities. As the Roman Empire withered, the Church utilized its judicial privileges increasingly to maintain order between feuding landowners. Like the world of today, where borders are increasingly shattered, the flood of semi-civilized immigrants looking for food and land will strain the coherence of any former state-body. There will be lamentations for what was, staring at the ruins of greatness (or perhaps misremembered as such). There will be pragmatic efforts to harness this new energy in various deals. And there will be, to some degree or another, the effort to appropriate old mantles for new purposes. Various barbarian chiefs appeared as regal consuls, the bishops operated as procurators, the ambitious deigned to wear the name Caesar. Obviously a shock, like 476, marked the "end" of the Roman Empire, but that was not obvious then, nor was the century or so prior clear that the Roman state would all but vanish. It is only in the eye of the historian that any of these things, in fact, occurred, even as turmoil was felt by all.

This dispersal and fragmentation will require new kinds of arrangements where citizenship will be increasingly meaningless. As it has already begun, citizenship is being redefined as a kind of shareholdership, which entitles one to benefits from the state-qua-business. But as corporate businesses are increasingly the means of life (funds, entitlements, benefits, insurance) and, at the same time, spread out geographically, these will be more important than the increasingly abstract definitions of citizenship. Equality will degrade as the mechanisms of the state are either abandoned through non-use or increasingly privatized. One example of this phenomenon may be public schools, which are increasingly abandoned and may dissolve into charter programs and outright privatization. Like the "neoliberal" shift in the 1970s, these efforts are less ideological than strategic. People will really consider the USSR, PRC, and Communism to be the source of ideological discomfort, when they pursued similar aims. The conservative cliche about wanting a businessman to run the government, with a focus on the economy, reflects less an ideological twist (pace cookie-cutter leftists) than exhaustion. Kojeve noted that history's end came with the loss of all politics. The economy simply is the political. But if the state can no longer provide this biological and material comfort, and such is its only legitimacy, then it must become more efficient. Administrative bloat and managerial incompetence will increasingly wear away the sheen of trust in the government. In Europe this process may take a very different shape, whereas in the US it's already underway. China, by contrast, has been able to regain the initiative of trust, but only through effective decentralization. You can find parallel videos of Chinese success and Chinese barbarism, but this reflects, I argue, the party's policy. Let a thousand flowers bloom, as each province pursues its own ends. But is this enough? Of course not. I don't foresee dozens of Chinese states reentering a War of Three Kingdoms phase. Rather, they under the party-state, will be forced to integrate with extra-state bodies. The SCO, OBOR, these kinds of confederations will become increasingly important, with China fittingly seated as eldest brother.

This is, effectively, the scaling of a feudal political economy. It's not as if the state did not exist (if it can be spoken of somewhat anachronistically) in Medieval Europe. Rather, it was enmeshed in wider and wider non-state networks. An economic union like the EU will never become "the state", but it will exert discipline and control over its constituent members. NATO may very well blend into a kind of preferred nation status, blending into something like NAFTA. Russia's preeminence among post-Soviet states has already led to joint economic-military partnership. This may seem like a return to empire, but I see the contrary. These larger units of government will depend on an array of various partnerships between betters and lessers, whether these are private corporations, states, NGOs, or contractors. The dreams of a massively centralized state, which animated Fascism or Communism or the New Liberals, reflected technological capabilities. Spatial concentration is no longer necessary, and virtuality is increasingly the default. Nation-states may splinter apart, when pressed, because larger networks of legitimacy may absorb constituent parts. The ultimate delusion of talk about a "national divorce" in the United States, or even anti-EU sentiment, is that there is not really an alternative. Do red-state voters want the fragments of their country absorbed into a geopolitical alliance with China? Do those who want out of the European Union have an alternative? Do they want to be direct vassals of the US or Russia? The age of nation-states is rapidly coming to a close.

This phenomenon will happen across the world. The entirely fictional nation-states of Africa are already often governed as private property for a family or tribe. The way "out" for many Africans will simply to turn to foreign corporations to provide a sense of stability and authority. Whether American, British, French, or Chinese, these means provide a stronger form of legitimacy. Pretending that the warlord who sends his nephew to the UN is legitimate is only to prop up the currently stuck world-order. South America is equally fictive in its chaotic politics. Parties or landlords will provide a new hierarchy in which to receive goods and offer deference. The various backwards and broken states of Asia already find themselves under the aegis of larger transnational organizations, which will allow the fiction of the state to dissolve into a small power within a wider organization.

I don't see this "new feudalism" as necessarily bad or good. It will open up new opportunities to restructure politics beyond the various liberal fetishes which have failed to fulfill their promises or are revealed as bankrupt. Equality before the law and equity will never be strictly abandoned, even if they're absurd in practice and used as a weapon. Instead the agencies that offered hierarchies of membership, access, privilege, and so on will become more populated, and the egalitarian institutions will wither. Again, it will not be because of some ideological push, it will instead reflect success. Divisions of belonging may fall along ethnic, religious, or economic lines, but, as in the Middle Ages, these will likely blend. Race and language may be a powerful determinant of belonging. Actual religion, or certain ideological cults (such as Diversity&Inclusion, or modern Maoism), will also be a bond. Simply having resources may buy you access. But these will become increasingly important and the state will seem increasingly diffuse. As demonstrated in recent controversies, the power of the CIA or NSA will be less important than the conglomerated partnership with Alphabet or Twitter. The compact will increasingly be less about individuals (as atomized citizens in a Mass Democracy) than your enrollment in larger bodies that act for you. Just as a lord may negotiate a settlement from the king, so too will a tech board improve its members by extracting a concession from the government. Elon buying Twitter is a lord receiving his grant to inherit the land populated with serfs. But don't forget: serfs are not slaves. Serfs have rights. And just as the Medieval world was fractious world of competing claims, so too will the modern world reflect these adjustments. There will be modern versions of bishoprics, monasteries, guilds, nobles, free-cities, and so on, that will have the same pull. They will have a kind of independence beyond the state which they pledge loyalty, but may in fact subvert, ignore, or deprecate. This is the world that Philip Bobbitt has noted over a decade ago coming increasingly to fruition.

But the most important point I want to consider is how this covenantal hierarchy will rely on some kind of altar. I don't think every people necessarily are religious in all times and places, but there is always a religion. There is alway something that orients the process of fidelity, as greaters and lessers exercise trust in the contract that binds them. What shimmer of the eternal will bind together these unwieldy confederacies and allow all the constituent parties and members to participate within it? Christendom and Dar al Islam were both forms of this unity, as well as the animistic emperor-cult of Heaven in China. However now, unlike the past, the unity can be experienced in a way far more diffusively. An AI peering at you through data-crawls and a camera will not inspire reverence, even as some dream of cybernetic gods. I believe the church will persevere through all of this, though I don't know in what role. A Russian-led Eurasian confederacy will not be able to rely on Orthodoxy, even as some Russophiles draw on the esoteric gruel of Duginist fusion of Christianity & Islam. The cult of the red emperor may be some form of unity for a Chinese-led bloc. Gay transhumanism may provide some glue in the Western world. But these are all just fictional at this point. There is no institutional unity, yet, to provide the basis of order, to legitimate the process under which all agree (at least formally).

I'm not sure yet what will come, but as Athena's owl begins to flap her wings, we may begin to imagine what we may do.

Thursday, February 2, 2023

A Return to the Renaissance: A Reflection on a Past Future

While all evidence is primarily circumstantial, I believe that the world is likely on its path to an older mode of existence. The conditions of the world that constituted the Renaissance may rapidly be upon us, transforming the nature of politics, religion, economics, and so on. The modern world has eclipsed and we live in what conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck has called sattelzeit, or a transitional time. This is why all the collective efforts at categorization seem wholly inadequate, if not inane. Morons will continue to discuss the threat of "fascism" or "communism", but these concepts are dead and buried. They are constantly reanimated because no one quite knows how to describe the phenomena that seem to govern the world. There are no corporatists who worship the state as the means to build the nation (in light of grave economic catastrophe in Europe). There are no vanguards leading the industrial wage-earners to create a dictatorship and own the means of production. At the very least there *are* communist parties in existence, though they have often adjusted in light of world-changes. Leninism, Titoism, Stalinism, Maoism, Dengism, and so on are real world efforts to adjust in light of the limits (if not failures) of Marx's political economy. But even many of these are phantoms. So what are we left with?

The age of mass mobilization has come to an end. The age of industrial economies has come to an end. Despite the propaganda parades of the Chinese troops, there will never be a mass invasion of Taiwan or any other part of Asia, except in the fever dreams of the Pentagon. The PRC will reclaim Taiwan, that's beyond a doubt, but in the way they regained Hong Kong. It will be a modest and subtle process of funding pro-unification politicians, and waiting them out. China has a far stronger grip on its allies than Russia, and I doubt the US would have the means to pull off a color-revolution if Taiwan elected more pro-Chinese politicians. Industrial economies will not reflect the latter nineteenth century with its drive towards centralization and consolidation. There will not be a US Steel or Krupps again. Instead industrial production, like most of the economy, is becoming increasingly diffuse. Information technology allows corporate models to disperse their operations in a way where the giant monoliths of factory production or corporate governance will not be needed. A giant office tower or steel stack is not necessary, and in fact would be vain aesthetics. Thus, as much as Trump gained working-class support when he promised to bring back jobs, these were shreds of a rusted form of government. It was probably just a campaign slogan, even if it was a valiant idea for men who desire a return to work at a good paying job. Nevertheless, these centers of massive production will not return.

Instead, what will replace these will be highly specialized elite divisions. Militarily, combat will be small professional units who are integrated with drones, satellites, and far-away command centers. Economically, production will happen to very specialized firms that coordinate with each other for large jobs. The internet allows fast exchange of information over a large space, not conceivable when the telegraph was the only means of communicating. Through video-calls members of a staff can be present from all corners of the world. Additionally, since centralized military organization will become increasingly defunct (except as a symbol of power), specialized military operations will increasingly fall under the purview of mercenaries. I do not consider the existence of military contractors like Blackwater or Wagner PMC to be inherently sinister, though it's a favorite liberal whipping boy (as if national militaries are not prone to similar abuses?). When the company formerly known as Blackwater's Eric Prince admired the East India Company, I think he correctly sees the future. It will not be clumsy and massive governments, drowning under their own parliamentary procedures (which are often simply voided or ignored by members of executive bureaucracy), which will effectively carry out national projects. A royally chartered company like the East India Company could handle affairs entirely on its own (even as the British parliament was wary of its pretensions, as well as the moral corruption of quasi-Mughals like Warren Hastings raised). The importance of dispersing, not centralizing, government powers will only intensify. 

The Modern Era was the era of centralization and integration. This began in the nineteenth century, witnessing the behemoth corporate structures in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. It was the mass mobilized struggles of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. It was mass deployment and industrial production for both World Wars. This order came to an end by the 1970s, that era of malaise when the US slipped from manufacturing dominance. The heady years of material prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. The great convergence of labor and management (first skillfully welded together in Bismarck's Germany, and then pieced together in the New Deal) left both too bloated to adjust. The AFL-CIO is a shadow of its former self. Unionization, as other forms of consolidation, is not only weakly political, but often not preferred. Leftist criticisms of the "gig economy", as opposed to the old wage method, are often half-aware at best. Again, the old paradigms of unionization, labor politics, and class consciousness fail to make sense. The gig-economies do not now exist because some cigar-chomping shareholder came up with a new devilish scheme to strip the working-class. Rather, it reflects the greater push towards decentralization. The worker is now, in a manner, a part-owner. This is precisely what the World Economic Forum envisions with a stakeholders capitalism. The Uber driver is his own businessmen (which, from some anecdotal experience, is preferred to a wage job because at least you can choose when you want to work).

The great executive bureaucracy, in places like the US, will continue to fragment. That does not mean disconnection, but rather a more widespread and dispersed form of interconnectivity. Many elementary conspiracy researchers often confuse the heuristic for the reality, believing organizations like the CIA or FBI are solid entities. Even in the middle of the twentieth century, at the zenith of centralized and consolidated corporate governance, these organizations were subdivided into certain networks and channels that nearly operated autonomously. These will continue to break apart and be "privatized", operating as the government even as the government reorganizes. This is a different form of "big government", but leftists who want a new New Deal, or right-wingers who crudely consider Joe Biden mere socialism (it is a form of socialism, but this term too is defunct), will not understand what seems like larger government and privatization at the same time. It will not be the NSA spying on people, but Alphabet and Facebook and other forms of social-media and telecommunications. Government agencies will dissolve, but not disappear. The CIA has been increasingly winnowed as a serious power, with perhaps the last major public appearance in the Plame dust-up (where a faction in the Bush II government bullied the CIA into supporting a war in Iraq).

Conceptually, what may be used to describe this reality? We do not have capitalism or socialism, there is no communism or fascism. Even nationalism, in an age of globalization and open borders, has become increasingly impossible to define (though it still has some vitality). Near empty signifiers like "neo liberalism"  or "post modern" are a sign of intellectual exhaustion and incoherence. It's no surprise, however, that these terms continue to circulate. The post-war order in 1945 is Year Zero for the Anglo-American world-order. Anti-fascism and anti-communism are two ideological pills to enflame the masses for action. Brown scares and red scares are part of the founding myth, along with other events like the Holocaust, JFK assassination/Vietnam, Fall of the USSR, 9/11, and, perhaps, 1/6. These reaffirm a certain narrative of "making the world safe for democracy" through maintaining free-trade, parliamentary government formality, and multiculturalism. Therefore these empty concepts will be deployed to shore up this order according to a crude moral compass. Roosevelt, Churchill, MLK, Reagan -- Good. Hitler, Stalin, George Wallace -- Bad. Figures like Nixon straddle the compass, but still operates within it as a believer in the post-war consensus (and as a statesman, like his lieutenant Kissinger, he committed himself to future leaders, meeting with Clinton). It is very difficult to think outside this box.

I think, on the contrary, that in reality that the world is headed towards something that resemble, more & more, the Renaissance. We are not there yet, however there are a few things that may quite nearly create something simultaneously revitalizing and destructive. **Of course this presumes that Christ will not yet return** However, the mental exhaustion seems to have reached a head. If space becomes a new frontier, just as the Americas did, then there may be a creative expansion of the imagination. Like the Renaissance, diffusion will become increasingly the norm. The Holy Roman Empire, as the premier power in Europe, had already begun to severely decay and fracture. Imperial free-holding cities, Italian city-state republics, new confederations among the Swiss and the Dutch, small but voracious kingdoms, all of these could replicate what would happen if the current world-order would start to shudder. The Renaissance began at the same time as the shake-up of Christendom, with a time of three popes and the conciliar movement. The Byzantines were on the verge of collapse, ending a millennium of Roman Empire. Small armies, paid by princes and councils, conducted small warfare. New technology in travel (seafaring), information (printing-press), and war (guns) began to transform the nature of warfare. Bottling up in a castle was no longer possible. Soldiers no longer wore plate for different uniforms, and organizing accordingly.

While it's hard to say what new concepts will be developed to describe new realities increasingly cut off from the all-encompassing shadow of the twentieth century. Politically and economically it will be unclear. Theologically I have some hope. The old forms of Christian organization will wither away and perhaps reveal something new. Confessional wars have basically died and the Reformation is effectively over. The denomination system is increasingly incoherent and broken, especially as another Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy may show the weakness of these systems. Parachurch organization will continue to spread. The Catholic Church may formally appear the same, but if Francis succeeds than it will be entirely unlike its past forms. What it will mean to be Catholic or Protestant, or even Orthodox, is unclear. Will Evangelical gain more significance as a term, or will its fairly empty significance only continue to decay? This is not to say that the Truth will change, or has changed, or that the Church will change. However, new social contexts will breed new organizations. One sees this in efforts of the Renaissance to create new religious societies, both lay and clerical. There were new ideas afoot that would eventually reform the Tridentine Roman church, as well as influence Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, and Eurasian efforts at transformation. Christianity has lots its potency, but nevertheless it remains in the shadows in the US at least, even if it's dead in Western Europe. Who knows what forms it may take in various countries of the Southern Hemisphere. Nevertheless new religious forms will continue to sprout in relation to the meaninglessness of life that will pervade the North Atlantic.

I am quite hopeful for what will come, even if this creativity will involve destruction. One will finally know the Modern age has ended when the Holocaust is listed among other slaughters and Hitler is simply grouped with other conquerors (Ghengis Khan, Napoleon) in a history of warfare and nations. Light will continue to shine, even as darkness swirls. For those who can see, clarity will be available as Athena's owl takes flight. Soon, at least, one may think afresh.

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

The Fracture of Liberalism: A Working Theory

 The term "liberal" has become all but meaningless. Unlike the useless slur of "fascist", there are still some people who identify with the concept of "liberal", even as it has become more common for younger leftists to decry this concept along with its more nebulous offspring "neoliberalism". Often, the modern liberal is someone who believes in multiculturalism and a large (if not entirely robust) government able to tackle the various social ailments that afflict countries. There are outliers (such as Australia's center-right party being the Liberals), but generally a liberal supports widened welfare programs, public-private partnerships with an emphasis on the public, and higher taxes to support these measures. There's an emphasis on the sentimental and the compassionate within government, to right public evils through public means.

Obviously, to anyone with even a dim view of political history, this description sounds nothing like traditional liberalism. The concept "libertarian" was invented (by Hayak, if I recall rightly) to reclaim the term's original meaning. The classical liberal was concerned about arbitrary and tyrannical government. They believed in limiting government, perhaps even closing off some sections or spheres of society from government intervention. Like a night-watchman, the government kept away foreign invasions and settled internal disputes over property. That was all. In fact, the only purpose of government was to defend the rights of property. Economic management was deplored as an interference in natural market relations, which an "invisible hand" governed according to rational laws of nature.

How can these two seemingly contradictory terms interrelate? Most analysis is short-sighted and generally ignorant. Sometimes there's some sort of genealogy derived (often beginning with Scotus or Ockham) about the origin of liberalism as the origin of individualism. But given modern liberalism's fairly obsessive concern with regulating group dynamics and righting phantom "systemic" oppressions, it is obscene and nearly braindead that this originates from some kind of obsession about the individual. While it's true that identity politics seems concerned to allow every person to confect particularities about themselves, this form of branding depends on belonging to a wider community. Like the popularity of Enneagram voodoo, the idea is not to be a-typical, but to have a set of preset characteristics modeled through an ur-paradigm. The appeal of Harry Potter style sorting-hat (having some arbiter tell you who you really are) do not really smack of individual. Nominalism rejected the notion of universal categorization for varying forms of resemblance. It's hard to say this epistemology explains the almost Platonic concept of gender identity that defies even biology. Perhaps, as David Nicholls had argued, that the individualism of the 80s in Reagan and Thatcher (a phenomenon mediated through corporate advertisement) was the flip-side of totalizing collectivization. However, this means individualism has little to do with an individual.

One option is that simply there is no real connection. Turn-of-the-century reformers took upon themselves the mantle of Liberalism, even as they proceeded to gut it of all its earlier distinctions. Modern liberals turned classical liberalism into a skin-suit to advance their own objectives of socialism-lite under the mantle of a revered tradition. Such was in contrast to the Marxist idea that Liberalism was a necessary revolutionary precursor, wiping out the Ancien Regime of throne and altar. Before liberalism's attack on all traditional boundaries (as threats to property ownership), it would create the conditions of class-ware, before the working masses overcame the victorious burghers who had claimed government for themselves. Nevertheless, this neither fits modern Third-World Socialists (who often decry liberalism) or the modern liberals themselves, who believe they are in continuity with this tradition (warning that without changing liberalism that socialism would inevitably win). Was this just a cynical and polemical use of a concept, a subtle operation of the Fabian-like mind? Or was this mutation a sincere effort to continue or save the liberal tradition?

I will argue the latter. While I do not deny the importance of polemic in transforming the use of a term, the classical liberal tradition was already in decline by the time liberalism began to rapidly transform. A key conceptual point in discussing the history of ideas is to note that it is better to conceptualize an idea more as a constellation than a solid-set Platonic form. An idea is made up of various sub-point that hold together with logical coherence, but they may be forced apart in response to outside influences and needs. Thus Second Temple Judaism may be spoken coherently as an idea, it was a constellation torn apart by the advent of Jesus and the Roman destruction of the Temple. Christianity emerged as one radical reformulation of some ideas, while Rabbinic Judaism emerged as an equally radical reformulation of this concept as it passed away. And just as we will see with liberalism, only one of these factions claimed the nomenclature of the past ('Judaism' was first coined in 2 Maccabees), giving the illusion that it alone possessed continuity (a lie that has existed in scholarship for centuries until fairly recently).

What was this constellation of Liberalism? Perhaps one of the best places to see the internal tension, visible retrospectively, is the canonical work of Adam Smith. Often considered the theoretical father of "Capitalism" (a title that often ignores Medieval theorists on market relations, the Salamanca school, and French physiocrats), Smith is well known for his argument about an "invisible hand" regulating market relations. Thus the government (in his case, the imperial Parliament of Britain) did not need to maintain royal corporate monopolies on trade and sales. This mercantilist thought (a heuristic, but one visible in the Navigation Acts) was a hindrance to the full productive efficacy of the people. If left to their own, the butcher, the baker and candlestick maker would pursue an enlightened self-interest that would benefit all. Additionally, Smith excoriated high taxes and subsidies, which were efforts to manipulate trade, often to the disadvantage of economic progress. Free trade is essential to breakdown artifice and allow natural success to flourish:

"Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided, would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire. As among the different provinces of a great empire, the freedom of the inland trade appears, both from reason and experience, not only the best palliative of a dearth, but the most effectual preventive of a famine; so would the freedom of the exportation and importation trade be among the different states into which a great continent was divided." (Wealth of Nations, IV.5)

Thus, a trade free from interference and hindrance will only profit all nations which participate. Government has limited duties, but these contain some seeds of contention:

"All systems, either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which, no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works, and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual, or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society." (IV.9)

In other words, the government's sole objective is 1) defend from invasion; 2) prevent internal oppressions (theft, murder, etc); 3) public works that would best facilitate the entire public in their pursuit of their own ends (e.g. roads, harbors, etc.). Obviously, therefore, is the defense of property and the natural inequalities that form within a society (defined according to changes in the 17th/18th c. as distinct from the state or the crown):

"Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate, that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate, continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary." (V.2)

So far, so good. This all sounds like classical liberalism, especially the necessity of government strictly for the means of defending property. Additionally, Smith advocates for a standing-army (not militias) to provide a sufficient protection against enemy encroachments. It should be noted that this point in Smith runs contrary to the Whiggish republican tradition (in both Britain and America) that feared standing-armies. The reasoning is not unlike that of Benjamin Constant, who disaggregates ancient and modern liberty: old republicans aspired to a much more comprehensive state of which all men must participate, whereas modern liberals want the freedom to pursue their own ends apart from a state. A standing-army was, perhaps perplexing to modern libertarians, necessary to prevent the totalizing effect (besides inefficiency) of compulsory military service for all citizens.

Now to tie in another place of ambiguity that Chomsky likes to repeat ad nauseam, Smith was not an advocate for an agnostic government when it came to its citizenry. The effects of this capital economy, freed to pursue technical and commercial perfection, could lead to severe degradation. I'll quote the passage in full: 

"In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard, with abhorrence, the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment, than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."

As Chomsky likes to note, Smith is working in the tradition of political economy which reached its completion in Karl Marx. Eventually Smith and political economists will be opposed by historic economists (notably Frederich List, who influenced Henry Clay's American System). Without weighing into the merit of these criticisms, or whether Marx/Marxism was the telos of political economy, it is clear that Smith was not in favor of a strictly night-watchman state or a government only interested in defense of property. And of course, there's no reason to expect Smith (just as later liberals like Constant) believed in the good or necessity of democracy. As de Toqueville noted as a good liberal, [representative] democracy creates expensive, corrupt, and very flight government, which is especially damning in foreign affairs. Nevertheless, the idea in a liberal government was to promote free-economy, sound weights&measures, limited government, and the unleashing of commercial-manufacturing to produce better quality products at cheaper prices.

It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. (I.1)

In 19th c. Europe, liberals were generally triumphant as a steady progress of erosion. Whiggery in Britain came to divide into what would be more aristocratic and agricultural-commercial as Conservatives, as defenders of burghers and their manufacturing-commerce formed the liberals, with a wavering peasant/prol movement forming around the Radicals-Chartists (who demanded the full fruits of liberalism for themselves). In the United States, lacking any Ancien Regime, liberalism reigned in both parties in somewhat different ways (Whig emphases on internal improvements matched Democratic emphasis on anti-tariff free-trade). The brief period of restoration in France gave way to the July Monarchy, which boasted a liberal aristocracy. Liberal movements spread across Europe, threatening monarchical and ecclesiastical privileges. 1848 was the great explosive moment of liberal revolution, a coalescence of burgher and proletariat hostility to legal inequalities. Its broad failure began a period of reactionary repression, which often betrayed weakness than confidence. There are other, and better, accounts of how Napoleon III, Bismarck, and Cavour brought about a form of liberal revolution steadily under different means. However, it was also quite clear that the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century liberalism was not sustainable.

The beginning of the crisis is most clear in that fount of liberalism, Great Britain. During the 1870s, the great source of liberal pride (free-trade, gold-standard, limited government, manufacturing excellence) began to decline. The industrial wage class had increasingly drifted from any interest in inclusive liberalism. Radicals had temporarily banded with the new National Conservatism of Disraeli, which began a process of paternalized liberalism that was richly caked-over with the aesthetics of nobility, empire, and church. Nevertheless, these working masses were also attracted to a Liberal party that was increasingly responsive to their plight, as well as forming a Labour Party out of their efforts to organize and unionize. Manufacturing began to decline and belief in the Empire had also become shaken. What was the point of another African adventure when white Britons continued to suffer against cheap production in other parts of the Empire. This mobilized the campaign of Joseph Chamberlain as a radical Tory, which saw northern industrialists turn towards Conservatives when London commercial-finance began to detach from native industry. Instead of turning to a highly protective Dominion (CANZUK), mirroring the successes of the United States under the Republican Party and Bismarck's reorganization of imperial Prussia-Germany, Britain tried to stay the course. Free-trade and a gold-standard was essential to the financial wealth of the City, whereas manufacturing was but one element. The free flow of capital must remain, thus influencing and guiding potential allied industrial economies. However, what if the necessities of free-trade and technological innovation (viz division of labor) conflict with the rights of property? What if old machinery, old methods of organization, and old prejudices about the movement of capital prevented the free-expansion of the economy? As Adam Smith noted, it was only the attachment to hearth and home that prevented the English investor from pulling his stakes out of his native land and moving elsewhere.

In the United States, liberalism had a similar shake-up. The Democrat's concern for free-trade (often in support of raw production of corn and cotton) eventually turned the party towards an assault on sound-money, willing to flood the economy with silver to inflate the currency in favor of farmers. Republicans defended the gold-standard (though with efforts to prevent currency flow abroad to London), but in conjunction with high taxes on foreign goods. Increasingly both parties had members who, in the name of Liberalism, began to question certain key aspects of it. The Progressives were concerned that a more active and robust government was necessary to secure the benefits of free-trade, corporate development, and equality before the law. The division between a Theodore Roosevelt and a Woodrow Wilson was on which of these solutions was preferable. While Britain began to produce "New Liberals", the United States embraced (temporarily) the Democrats' New Freedom. While the 1920s saw a rejection of this paradigm for the far more subdued old Republican policies of Harding and Coolidge, there were still many who were concerned that liberalism must change in order to be preserved. This was the basic idea of theorist-journalist Walter Lippmann, who had begun his political career as a Socialist. Lippmann (sometimes exaggerated in his influence) believed that there was no other way to deal with an increasingly complex and interconnected world than more active government to uplift the impoverished wage class. Free-trade was not so free, and it perhaps required supra-national organization to secure it. If Communism was to be prevented, melting down all things in a revolt from below, then the government must regulate excesses. Wall Street generally agreed, offering support to the Wilsonian vision.

This new liberalism triumphed with the election of Franklin Roosevelt (with Hoover's more limited paternal adjustments as a precursor). Thus began the New Deal, and the radical transformation of the Federal government. Liberals continued to divide in Britain, ultimately with a rump pouring into the Conservative party, whereas Liberals were absorbed and eclipsed by the rapidly growing Labour Party. Across Europe, most liberal equally divided between rejoining what was left of the Ancien Regime, or allying to some Socialist party (usually the more parliamentary parties, like Social Democrats). The transformation was complete: the old liberalism had died.

But what exactly divided? How did a good classical liberal like H.L. Mencken, as he noted, all of a sudden wake up on the right? What brought men like him beside Al Smith and the (DuPont-sponsored) Liberty League to restrain, if not defeat, the radical innovations of Franklin Roosevelt? How did the party of Jefferson and Jackson become the party of Roosevelt?

My contention, as can be seen above in the quotations from Smith, was a stark split between the liberal concern for limited government, sound-money, and the inviolable rights of property away from division of labor, free-trade, and public services. I will give my brief assessment on each of these pairs, though there is more to say. Take this discussion as a heuristic for understanding divisions, though there were obviously people who tried to formulate different combinations. Obviously, Libertarians have and will defend free-trade, though they will contest modern definitions. The father of Libertarians, von Mises, was willing to offer support for Dollfuss as a stop-gap against the growing communist hordes. Therefore, read carefully and take what is most useful in grasping the crack up:

-For most Libertarians today, sound-money (gold standard) goes hand-in-hand with free-trade. Yet the Washington Consensus (since Roosevelt) has always claimed the mantle of free-trade. Are they dishonest? Not exactly. When Ron Paul defends free-trade, it's within a context that he denounced NAFTA and the WTO. At the turn-of-the-century, it had become increasingly clear that the only way to establish free-trade was to create international agencies that would bind all global powers. What had allowed free-trade in the past was the uncontested, and fairly restrained, British naval power that prevented piracy. American advocates of free-trade (often in Jefferson's camp) were at least economically Anglophile. While the largest plantation owners considered the fate of an American national economy, the small-planter joined the party of Jackson to prevent special benefits. Theoretical awareness that trade with Britain required a strong Britain did not determine a fully-fleshed out policy. With the rise of comparable navies, offering different (or opposed) trade agreements, the idea of an open sea became difficult to sustain. Thus, to keep up the British model of free-trade required a global organization of enforceable agreements. While NAFTA may rob the United States of its strict determinations in trade, it places open borders beyond the political. Instead, it is a given (the "state-of-nature") which must be guarded and adjusted according to professional economists. Free trade requires a wider state-intervention, and one capable of restraining governments from interference in these bodies (or, more truthfully, an active government able to enforce these bodies' rulings).

At the same time, this trade must continue according to standardized and balanced currency exchanges. The gold-standard, as a form of sound-money, seemed normative and regular when its purveyors controlled its supplies. Often this could only operate according to a paper-money system that did not allow gold to disappear from the market through hoarding. The vast majority of gold could sit in London, or New York, and yet the exchange of paper notes continue. The strength of the British Pound helped maintain normative exchange rates. While some core Jacksonians were staunch advocates for hard money, the vast majority of Democratic politicians who destroyed the Bank of the United States did so in favor of their smaller state banks. This facilitated free-trade, as London currency markets were most capable of stabilizing (and not threatened by a rival institution). However as Britain buckled, and the claws of London were visible on maintaining this system, Democrats began to veer away towards inflationary silver. Anglophile Democrats lost control of this process, often depending on certain Republicans, but eventually gold became less important than the monetary system itself. If gold threatened to destabilize what the UK and US built in the aftermath of World War 2, than it too must be dispensed with. Artificially pegging the US Dollar allowed the dollar to backstop the currencies of Europe (the way the Pound often did). However, by the 1970s, when the US underwent similar manufacturing shocks, the interest of finance meant uncoupling the Dollar from gold (and preventing any rapid de-dollarization by cashing out the foreign currency for gold, which DeGaulle had intended to do). Sound money was thus ejected for stable money for the purposes of free-trade. The monetary system which used gold now abandoned gold. The new Liberals from the 70s onward made their peace with this change of affairs (despite a mirage of action in Reagan's rainbow dollar program).

-Limited government and public works could easily go hand-in-hand in the heydays of liberalism. In the US, the fight between Whigs/Republicans and Democrats was whether the federal government (and not the states) should engage in public works (when these would seem to only benefit one region of the country). It was understood by both Democrats and Republicans that public school should be provided to have an effective and acculturated workforce, with divisions primarily over how overtly confessional or Christian these schools should be. Port security, roads, railroads, harbor improvements, these were all debated about, but usually in terms of which level of government should repair them. The concern was whether the federal government was usurping too much power to itself, creating artificial inequalities and expanding beyond the Constitution, or not. However, even the advocates of the American System never believed in an unlimited mandate to solve many or all social ills. The most vocal reformers in the Whig-Republican Party advocated for voluntary societies, churches, and others organizations capable of meeting the challenges of contemporary life.

However, as greater challenges to more complex forms of social organization (especially in light of the rapid explosion of urban centers and, at least in the United States, massive immigration), new efforts were made to deal with these problems. In Britain, Germany and the United States, the question was debated whether the government should restrict working hours, grant some form of insurance, regulate urban construction, and expand broader measures towards public health. All of these were not out of arbitrary desire for a greater state, but ad hoc in response to principle concern to defend the public of civil society. If it was necessary to tax to build large roads to facilitate trade, then it may be necessary to fund limited work-hours to keep a healthy/efficient work-force (as well as forestall proletariat radicalism).  Concerns to limit government must increasingly be put away as the public need must continue to increase. And as the old republican concern of an active citizen had already passed as outdated whiggery, so too must the responsibility for these issues fall to the elected representatives. It was not a private citizen's concern or burden to deal with questions that involved hundreds of thousands of people, variegated properties, and the complex processes of mass industrial production. Thus it's no surprise that Wilson and Lloyd-George were quite similar on questions of domestic intervention, with the Liberals vanishing into Labour and Roosevelt's conquest of the Democratic Party a decade or so later. Recall that Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom was predicated on an active government intervention and regulation to prevent corporate consolidation. It was in the name of the public right to start and maintain a business that the federal government could dissolve corporations and strangle any business that seemed to influence the market. It thus became the norm that the federal government must take an expanding role, with Republicans and Democrats debating about how much and where. The old liberals found themselves allied inextricably to the Republican Party, which offered the only means to limit further expansion (even if it often did no such thing). Similarly, old liberals throughout Europe found themselves allied to conservatives, even as their power had evaporated in parliament and were reduced to a rump. The Night-Watchman state was now reserved to the "kooks" that tried to elect Barry Goldwater, and their future descendants.

-The division between property rights and division of labor reflect the growing demands of the economy. It's often misunderstood that Locke's inviolable defense of property was as a Whiggish republican, not a Liberal (pace Macpherson). Locke's philosophy on epistemology and language was eccentric, but his political views were not out of line with Sidney, Trenchard, Gordon, Hoadly, et al., who remained the Whig vanguards of the Glorious Revolution (inspiring American Patriots like John Adams and Patrick Henry). Property became an essential aspect to liberalism because, as the Smith quote above demonstrates, economic freedom was eviscerated if the property-owner feared that he would be robbed. The need to defend your land and possessions would hinder easy and free trade, and thus Smith advocated for a strong professional army and navy. Nature must take its course against its perverts. And, being part of the Scottish Enlightenment, it would be no surprise that this legal emphasis derived from general psychological comfort. Thomas Reid's Common Sense Realism was less a metaphysic than an epistemic reverse-engineering of the average man knows, learns, and experiences. Thus the defense of property was not for itself, but part of a free economy and a free country. Early liberals in both the United States and United Kingdom were vocal supporters of a professional police force. The Peelers, by their visible presence of authority, would help restrain and prevent crime (not, as today, in solving it).

This defense of property and the freedom of movement would allow the rapid development of technology capable of creating better and cheaper products. The division of labor was necessary to improve industrial production. And so it was. With the advent of capital investment in novel inventions, Britain's textile industries exploded. Every revolution has its losers, and while some former handicraftsmen turned towards economic terrorism with the Luddites, many saw that they must adjust to this new economy. It did not take ten years to produce an expert craftsman who could make only a few hundred textiles a year, but now a machine that effectively any could operate immediately that would produce a hundred-fold what the mere artisan could produce. Most people, barring the snobs and ideologues, are quite happy receiving high quality and cheap products. However, the question is whether ownership, in itself, could ever hinder this process? Obvious exceptions, like Eminent Domain, exist in legal constitutions to deal with this question, but necessity does not necessarily imply economic efficiency. Over most of the nineteenth century, these two concepts could exist simultaneously. However, with the rise of capital flight to new areas of the world to produce, what was to stop the misuse of lands? To turn back to Locke, improvement was a sure guarantor of ownership when previous occupants allowed fertile lands to waste away. If this was expanded to a broader question of technological development, than what good were property rights? As organized labor became more vocal in its confrontation with management, liberal governments began to turn away from indifference to mediation. Factory owners did not have a right to simply fire their workers or drag out a strike indefinitely. Roosevelt made mediation national policy, forcing management and labor to get along. Truman and Kennedy both threatened nationalization to get industry back on course. Today, an internal CIA presentation reflects contemporary fears that the Chinese will surpass the US if it cannot dump its "legacy systems" (eg paper-money, individual home-ownership, individual car ownership), which are impediments towards development. Increasingly rootless labor, connected to free movement and trade, thus services increasing division of labor, property rights notwithstanding.

What about neo-liberalism? Don't we live in the doldrums of a capitalist conspiracy running the world? What about rightwing criticisms? Were the Birchers completely insane to believe that we live in a socialist captivity? I think a proper parsing of terms, even as limited and broad as this essay has been, would show that both can be said to be correct. It is true that we do live in a capitalist world-order, but the term capitalist has nothing to do with what was meant two centuries ago. Do we live in socialism? Certainly if we understand how new liberals ruptured their constellation of values to better defend and protect the core of what they believed was the liberal vision. The progressive parliamentary management of affairs that Democratic Socialists advocated a century ago seem to have taken place, but not in any specifically class-oriented way. Leftists are correct that "class analysis" is often lacking in public discussions, but that's because old Marxist terminology has basically become meaningless to describe the economy of the latter half of the twentieth century (a realization made both in the old USSR and PRC). There is not much in the way of a proletariat in the Western world. The new liberals were successful in guiding their way towards their goals, picking up Socialist policies and tactics along the way. Hence many academic leftists are indistinguishable from old-fashioned liberals in politics: their goals are basically the same. Yet the World Economic Forum does not discuss Socialism, but share-holders Capitalism and ethical Capitalism. These are concepts related to marketing terms like Compassionate Conservatism, The Big Society, and Build Back Better.

And this new liberalism will continue to adjust, traceable genealogically. Just as the Anglocentric liberals of the late nineteenth century began to branch out to reconceptualize a form of global liberalism without the British Empire, post-1970s liberals have began to reorganize their thoughts. With the decline of the US manufacturing economy, financialization has become the norm. With war in Ukraine, it seems the US has bought some temporary legitimacy as the champion of this Global order. But how long that lasts is another question. Will US fortunes and standing decline where it too is sloughed off for better grounds? Will liberalism once against alter policies to eject another core set of its principles? Will equality before the law give way to the grievance politics of majority-of-minorities? The future is yet to be written for this term. On the other hand, the old liberals who left for the right have additional difficult questions. Will a stronger state be necessary to promote/defend sound-money (which may have a future as Russia, China, and possibly Brazil hammer out a new gold-standard)? Will private property, and the inequalities it naturally generates, require legal defense of inequality? Hopefully this essay will provide some elementary context for future analysis.