The Market, Liberalism, and Anti-liberalism
The end of the twentieth century saw the market economy celebrated and vituperated by turns. Around 1980, it triumphed; after two centuries of suspicions and denunciations, it was finally recognized as an unsurpassable mechanism for the regulation of complex systems. The very meaning of the socialist project came to be completely upset, notably after the twilight of communism finally retired the principles of the command economy and collective ownership of the means of production. But then, in the late 1990s, the tensions born of globalization and a financial and monetary crisis nourished a diffuse movement of opinion against neoliberalism, suspected once more of causing all evils. A vast debate over the conditions of mastering and governing the international economy resurfaced precisely among those who too quickly prophesied that modernity had entered into a new, stable and radiant economic future.
A short-term history of the final years of the twentieth century could limit itself to describing these developments and oscillations as if they were meaningful only if related to factual illusions or ideological dogmas. It could also leave the impression that it was all really just a matter of an almost technical controversy over the most effective forms of economic regulation. But it is not hard to see that the stakes and the problems are actually much deeper. It is, more profoundly, a whole model of society and its relationship to political will that have been under debate. If the market is seductive and worrisome by turns, it is in fact because more than a simple mechanism of management and regulation is at stake. The market appears as the agent of a far vaster ambition to organize civil society through decentralization and anonymity, presenting itself as the implicit competitor of the democratic project of artificially constituting the political realm.
Market Society
To clarify the great debate of the present, therefore, one must explore the long history of this notion of the market in its largest possible dimensions. For it suffices to plunge just a little into the economic literature of eighteenth century to see that it is not simply “technical.” Instead, it is rooted in a deeper implicit debate about the regulation of society and politics in their totality. The study of intellectual history whose results I summarize here confirms this intuition. The birth of economic liberalism occurred not simply as a theory—or an ideology—accompanying the development of the forces of production and the empowerment of the bourgeoisie as a dominant class. It did not simply defend or translate a prior emancipation of economic activity from morality either. It has to be understood, first of all, as a response to problems left unresolved by the political theorists of the social contract; it is in this perspective that one must try to understand the concept of the market as it arose in the eighteenth century. It has an essentially sociological or political meaning and is opposed to that of the contractualist philosophy; it is therefore no “technical” concept (defining a mode of regulating economic activity through a system of competitive pricing). The affirmation of economic liberalism is the sign of a more profound aspiration for a civil society immediate to itself—one that would be entirely self-regulated. This perspective, apolitical in a strong sense, makes market society the archetype of a new representation of the social: it will be the market and not the contract, economics and not politics, that will be the true regulator of society. And not simply the economy.
To this extent, the concept of the market has to be placed in the intellectual history of modernity as a whole. Modern political thought, beginning in the seventeenth century, has been centered on the notion of the social contract: it is this concept that is understood to furnish the very foundation of society. The great problem of political philosophy has been to conceptualize the autonomous institution of society, without reference to any external guarantee (notably one of religious derivation). But all of the theories of the social contract, from Hobbes to Rousseau, ran up against several theoretical difficulties that proved quite weighty. Two are especially important. The first related to the fact that if social contract theories grounded the principle of social peace, they did not allow the problem of war and peace among nations to be treated. While the social contract presents the formation of society as a bargain in which everyone wins—gaining security and civil peace—the relations among nations continue to be understood as a zero-sum game (in which no one can win without others losing). The second difficulty is that the notion of the social pact, centered on explaining the institution of society, is not directed at the problem of its regulation.
The representation of civil society as a market would furnish a response to these two difficulties left behind by the representation of society as a political body. The theory of exchange makes it possible to believe that, in contrast to military relationships, economic relationships among nations can transcend the zero-sum game. Further, it makes possible the treatment of the institution and the regulation of society at the same time and in a coherent manner: in civil society, need and interest govern by themselves the relations among men. The formation of this representation of society as a market occurred most prominently in the Scottish Enlightenment, especially in Adam Smith’s thought. The essential consequence of such a conception consisted in a global refusal of the political. It is no longer politics that should govern society but the market instead. The latter is thus not the limited technical instrument that organizes economic activity, but has a much more radical sociological and political meaning. Reread from this perspective, Adam Smith is not so much the founding father of modern economics as the theorist of the withering away of politics. He is not an economist who does philosophy, but a philosopher who becomes an economist as a continuation of his philosophy. For this reason, Smith is the anti-Rousseau par excellence.
The praise of the commercial society that one finds in numerous authors of the eighteenth century has to be understood from this starting point. It does not represent a strictly mercantile perspective and the Industrial Revolution had in any case produced no real effects up to this point. The concept of the market really counted at the time as a kind of alternative political model. To all formal and hierarchical figures of authority and subordination, the market opposes the possibility of a kind of organization and direction that largely dispenses with all forms of authority: it makes its adjustments automatically, and allows for transfer and redistribution to occur without needing the will of individuals in general and of elites in particular to play any role. The expanded meaning of “commerce” in the eighteenth century testifies to this generalization. The term came to cover everything that gives coherence to the social bond independently of all forms of power and authority. It was frequent to oppose, in just this sense, the sweetness of commerce (le doux commerce) to the harshness of power relations. Montesquieu was among the first to develop this great liberal topos in The Spirit of the Laws (1748): commerce softens manners and encourages peace. For him, the rise of the market society portended a genuine transition of humanity. The era of dominating authorities was to be succeeded, it was hoped, by one of neutral mechanisms (beginning with exchange), and the period of the confrontation of great powers would disappear and give way to an era of the cooperation of commercial nations.
Thomas Paine would take this notion to its last conclusions when he proposed that the goal of revolutions was to accelerate this shift by replacing governments founded on violence with societies founded on the natural harmony of interests. Was this vision of the economy a utopia? Today we are naturally inclined to venture such a diagnosis, since the contrast of the putative virtues of le doux commerce compared to the vices of evil politics can seem naïve. But one should not forget that the publicists of the eighteenth century lived in a precapitalist world. The market, one could say, remained for them a brand new idea, with almost all of its tests before it. Is such still the case? I do not mean to respond to this question with a value judgment. For it is much more interesting to try to understand what was at work, what perhaps continues to be at work, in the attraction of this model of society as a market.
What explains an intellectual phenomenon that is genuinely close to seduction? The answer has been a major characteristic of modern society for three centuries: the aspiration to discover a way of dedramatizing the confrontation of individuals, to drain their relations of passion, to minimize the hidden violence of power relations. The market says it responds to these problems. It attempts to substitute the power of an invisible hand, neutral by nature since it is not personalized. It brings about an abstract model of social regulation: objective “laws” govern the transactions among men so that no relations of force or subordination need intervene. It is the equivalent of a kind of “hidden god.” In his book Free to Choose, Milton Friedman explains in precisely this manner why the market is politically superior to all other forms of social organization: “Adam Smith’s flash of genius was that the prices that emerged from voluntary transactions between buyers and sellers—for short, in a free market—could coordinate the activity of millions of people, each seeking his own interest, in such a way as to make everyone better off,” he writes. “The price system is the mechanism that fulfills this task without central direction, without requiring people to speak to one another or to like one another…. Economic order can emerge as the unintended consequence of the actions of many people, each seeking his own interest. The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.”1
In other words, the notion of the market fulfills a certain ideal of the autonomy of individuals by depersonalizing the social relation. The market figures as the archetype of an anti-hierarchical system of organization and of a model of direction in which no intention intervenes.2 Professional procedures and mechanisms are substituted for will-driven interventions. This displacement, which continues in contemporary society, also explains the emergence of a new relation to the notion of social change. In a purely procedural universe, one that is depersonalized and juridified, there is no room left for ancient revolutions, since there is no superintending authority to dismiss or to replace. There may not even be room, perhaps, for genuine revolts, as a certain passivity in the face of unemployment suggests. How to rise up, one might think, against what apparently results from neutral procedures and purely objective mechanisms? This is one of the major qualities that make it possible for our societies to be called liberal ones. One is very far, in summary, from simple and basic technical considerations for the regulation of modern economies. It is for this reason that I have labeled this phenomenon utopian capitalism, to designate what seems indissociably a temptation and an illusion.
One must, therefore, return to Adam Smith’s work, in order to follow the genesis and spread of this utopia of the market as a principle of social organization. Then one must chart its development, principally in the nineteenth century. For the picture of the self-regulated society would leave behind its original economic framework—the victorious world of capitalism obviously no longer able to be mistaken for the world of harmonious commerce—and transform into all of the grand visions of the withering away of politics and of the substitution of the reign of men with the administration of things. It is this sense that Marx is Smith’s natural heir. The liberal economic utopia of the eighteenth century and the socialist political utopia of the nineteenth century paradoxically are part of the same representation of society founded on the ideal of the abolition of politics. In spite of their obvious divergences, liberalism and socialism correspond to the same moment of maturation and examination of modern options. In this manner, it will be clear, intellectual history does not content itself with making sense of the past and the source of our vision of the world: it also informs our perspective on the present. For the aspiration for a self-regulating civil society, which the notion of the market has borne with it since the eighteenth century, has never ended its presence in the background of our economic and political thinking.
The Triple Utopia of Liberalism
This sketch, admittedly rapid, allows the problem of contemporary attitudes toward liberalism to be faced on a new basis. It is often marked by what appears to be a contradiction, or at least a tension, between a “political liberalism” grounded in the recognition of rights and the maintenance of pluralism, generally viewed positively, and an “economic liberalism” much more frequently held in suspicion. The way in which I have just proposed to think about liberalism allows the contrast to be framed in a different way. The market and the rule of law in effect participate in the same refusal: that of accepting a certain kind of institution of authority on individuals. In each domain, the same principle holds: that of individual autonomy, rooted in a denial of all absolute sovereignties. If there is a common plank that allows one to speak of liberalism in the singular, it is indeed this principle. There is thus no foundational difference between the philosophy of the rights of man, which drives political liberalism, and the belief found in economic liberalism in the organizing character of economic laws and constraints that order the market. In both cases, the presumption is that there is no great master of men and things, and no personal power of subjection is allowed to exist between individuals. The central site of power is called to remain empty by the refusal of all personal subordination and all collusion among men to restore unchosen obligations. “Representative government and the market,” Pierre Manent justly writes, “belong to one another and respond to one another. The individual does not win his liberty and emancipate himself from personalized rulers except by dividing his allegiance between these two impersonal authorities. In neither register does he obey anyone’s orders: the results of market allocation are not chosen by anyone, and the laws of the state are general laws that make no exceptions for anyone, and in any case thanks to political representation each person, along with everyone else, is their co-author.”3
The liberalism that arose in Europe beginning in the seventeenth century thus marks a new step in the relationship between the individual and authority. It furthered the process of political secularization and the affirmation of the preeminence of the individual that had been at work since the fourteenth century. It characterized a culture, in this sense, far more than it represented a specialized doctrine. Liberalism accompanied the entry of modern societies into a new era of representing the social bond, one grounded in utility and equality rather than the outmoded representation of society as a preexisting totality. Against the Rousseauean universe of the social contract, it is the expression of a criticism and subordination of the will. Liberalism, indissociably economic and political, made the depersonalization of the world the condition of progress and liberty. In his Political Essays, Hume, the greatest liberal thinker of the eighteenth century, takes this sentiment so far that he can praise habit and custom. So that order can avoid grounding itself in the dependence of individuals vis-à-vis political or religious power, he explained, it is necessary for the conduct of society to be regulable by what is most impersonal, and least appropriable or manipulable by any party: tradition. The intellectual history of liberalism finds the unity of its object in this search for an alternative to inherited relations of power and dependence.
Still more generally, an unprecedented relationship to morality arose along with the principle of the sovereign autonomy of the individual considered complete master and possessor of himself. A single culture is therefore to be found at work in both the “economic liberalism” that appeals to the market, a “political liberalism” that appeals to the rights of man, and a “moral liberalism” that makes man the sole judge of his own actions. In separating power from opinion, state from society, the private from the public, individual morality from the rules of social life, and sin from crime, these “three liberalisms” contributed to redefining the forms of the social bond. It is this fact that allows one to speak of liberalism in the singular. Among Locke’s Letters on Toleration, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and Benjamin Constant’s Principles of Politics, there is thus a single project of emancipation at work. In these different books, a common task is shouldered.
This attempt at a new perspective, then, allows liberalism to be conceived in the singular and the difficulty in which one finds oneself confronted by a diversity of great texts from different fields to be surmounted. The proliferation and occasionally contradictory character of this literature, all called “liberal,” is an irritant only if one begins by thinking that it is a matter of understanding liberalism as a doctrine, that is, a coherent if differentiated body of judgments and analyses. For it is clear that there is no doctrinal unity to liberalism. But if it is not a doctrine, liberalism is a culture. From this comes both its unity and contradictions. Liberalism is the culture at work in the modern world that since the beginning of the seventeenth century has been attempting to win emancipation from both royal and religious authority. (Hence liberalism’s essential connection to the Reformation, which lies beyond the scope of these reflections.) Its unity is that of a problematic field, a work to accomplish, a sum of aspirations.
When placed in this general framework, the utopia of market society appears inseparable from two other liberal utopias. The first is that of a reign of law that might serve as a replacement for the political order of conflict and negotiation. It amounts to the other face of the utopia of regulation that also underpins the modern concept of the market. The second utopia is an anthropological utopia: that of a moral and social world made up of pure individuals, absolutely autonomous and sovereign masters of themselves. What one could dub absolute liberalism should logically include this figure of a tripartite utopia. Of course, it is not difficult to acknowledge that it only rarely appeared in this form, even if the Scottish philosophers of the eighteenth century and, especially, John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century approached it. The disciplinary specialization of different works goes a long way toward explaining the rarity of the advocacy of this “complete” liberalism, including market society, a regime of rights, and the radical individual. But there is also an intellectual difficulty. It flows from the fact that the utopian character of liberalism can be concealed if it is presented piece by piece (the market reduced to a technical mechanism, the regime of rights to a practical means of guaranteeing pluralism and protecting the individual). But it emerges with full clarity when seen whole.
Liberalism and Its Enemies
This approach to liberal utopia also helps make sense of the paradoxes of modern anti-liberalism. The most remarkable fact in this regard is that “radical” anti-liberals—those who reject market society, the reign of basic rights, and moral liberalism—have almost entirely ceased to exist. Only among traditionalist thinkers, like Louis de Bonald, or else in the totalitarianism of the twentieth century, is such a complete anti-liberalism made manifest in coherent and explicit form. Fascism and communism, for example, had in common the simultaneous rejection of the anthropological foundation of liberalism as well as the ways of constituting and regulating the society that were linked to it.4 The situation has now considerably changed. Anti-liberalism has become much more composite, dissociating the three liberal utopias from one another in order to accept part and reject part of the original triad. One can thus distinguish three principal anti-liberal formations active in the present. Moral anti-liberalism often coexists with a frank acceptance of market society and a cautious attitude toward rights; the “moral majority” in the United States, like the conservative right in Europe, illustrates this position. Economic antiliberalism joins in a good number of cases with a militant moral liberalism under the banner of human rights; more and more, such is the position of the new extreme left or of the radical left in France. Juridical anti-liberalism characterizes, finally, republican milieux worried that the rise of judges and other independent authorities menaces popular sovereignty; often associated with a critical attitude toward the market economy, this approach leaves room, however, for contrasting approaches to moral liberalism.
These three configurations constitute only ideal types, of course, and multiple composite arrangements are to be found in reality. But they at least aid in reflecting on the contradictory nature of contemporary anti-liberalism, which almost always shares in at least one aspect of modern liberal culture. In fact, as a result liberalism and anti-liberalism turn out be always blended together. This variety also helps explain the polysemy of the adjective “liberal,” which means in the United States what Europeans would consider “left-wing” positions while the same word has right-wing connotations in Europe.5 How to make sense of this strange confusion? Consider the following hypothesis: the contradictions of anti-liberalism suggest a critique of liberal utopia and a recognition of the irreversibility of the modern world that this utopia represents. The duality therefore is other than a simple incoherence.6 With due allowance for different sensibilities, it reflects a similar judgment. It also relates, in each of the anti-liberal configurations, to the expression of a counter-utopia: the utopia of a structuring human nature for moral anti-liberalism; the utopia of an organizing and rationalizing voluntarism for economic anti-liberalism; the utopia of the clearly reigning general will for juridical anti-liberalism. These three counter-utopias are not all of the same nature. The first could be called archaic. It expresses a reaction in the strong sense of the term, a refusal of modernity and a celebration of an older and putatively coherent age in which the community was prior to the individual. It rests also on the belief in the impossibility of the radical self-engendering of the individual. The other two forms of anti-liberalism are more political. They relate to the ideal of a society deliberately and voluntaristically instituted and governed. As a result, they participate in what could be called the democratic utopia (precisely that utopia that the utopia of the market was intended to replace).
Understood in this fashion, anti-liberalism contributes to a double tension. One is an anthropological tension between the old and the new, between the community and the individual. The other is a tension between the two rival utopias of modernity, the sacralization of the will on the one hand and the wish for impersonal regulation on the other. None of these contradictions can be ignored for anyone who wants to understand human emancipation, for each utopia is permanently destined to criticism from its opposite. One thing, however, seems impossible: advocating a plausible vision of the world rooted in a selective anti-liberalism. For it is after all modernity in all of its facets that one must try to grasp, as much in criticizing society as in considering its reform. That is, in the end, why parting ways with utopian liberalism cannot limit itself to targeting the market as a system of regulation. The challenge is more severe. It is a matter of imagining political society in its double difference both from the state and from civil society. The objective is first to free up and to particularize the political field rather than to dissolve it; to realize that democracy cannot develop except beginning with the recognition of the irreducibility of social conflict and division. Democracy need not involve the utopia of a unified people and a general will that it is simply a straightforward matter of recognizing and activating; instead, it has to be imagined as a combat that will never have finished with its difficulties or even with the search for its object, rather than as a transitory reality that will pass into something else. It is a matter, in a word, of coming back to the political. In this vision, it is also necessary to get beyond the utopia of the market, but not at the price of substituting for it an impossible communitarian ideal; the way ahead is through a reinstitution of individuals. Only on these conditions will we stop being the orphans of lost illusions, restored to continuing a struggle day after day for a present that will not simply be waiting or preparing for a great dream ahead.