Conclusion  

THE PRECEDING study has been an exercise in what the sociologist Robert Merton called “specified ignorance.”1 No attempt has been made to chart any supposedly inevitable future for the managerial state. Nowhere is it claimed that this regime is collapsing or that existing opposition to it will succeed in changing its structure significantly. The arbitrary definitions of liberalism and an intrusive pluralism notwithstanding, the Western managerial state and its defenders may well survive their encounters with populist challengers. As long as public administration is viewed as a material provider, its subjects may continue to acquiesce in its control of social matters. One should not mistake intellectual arrogance or a vulnerable ideology for political weakness.

All that is being contended is that the current dispensation is under attack because of the gap between its democratic and liberal self-description and its imposed social policies. The efforts to justify these policies with archaic terminology or human rights rhetoric no longer elicit widespread belief. A populist resistance in Europe and to a lesser extent in North America, moreover, may indicate that liberal democracy as a concept and public administration as its practice are in trouble. But being in trouble is different from being mortally ill or about to be superseded. It is a political stage comparable to the “paradigm crisis” that Thomas Kuhn discusses in his history of science. The conceptual challenge posed to a particular cosmology may render it less and less credible and eventually precipitate a crisis in thought. But this will not necessarily lead to a new cosmology. Other conditions must exist for that to happen, most particularly the formulation of an acceptable new paradigm.²

To some, my observations about liberal democracy may seem captious. It may be objected that I do not appreciate the quest for social equality and a nondiscriminatory society undertaken by liberal democratic pluralist administrations. To this there are several possible rejoinders. First, I myself have not seen the evidence of an improved moral climate in my own profession. Universities today are less intellectually tolerant than when I entered college in 1959, and the advocates of openness and of governmental policies to promote openness in American education have, from where I stand, contributed heavily to that result.³

Second, my own bourgeois modernist sympathies, which are easy to guess, have not led me into self-delusion. I do not perceive any possibility of moving backward historically, a point repeatedly stated in this study. Lacking are the social presuppositions and political will for such a restoration or even for a mere approximation of one. The Whiggish liberalism of the nineteenth century, which stressed individual moral responsibility in a politically unreconstructed social space, operated with the aid of ascribed statuses. The values that liberalism exalted did not float in a vacuum but were closely related to gender and social ranks in a still partly aristocratic world. Manners and constraints were dictated by the demands of gentlemanly and ladylike behavior, and religion, particularly Protestantism, played a continuing role in shaping bourgeois character. These by now commonplace observations must be kept in mind to understand the difficulty of returning to the moral world of high liberalism from a postbourgeois managerial society. One simply cannot recreate the cultural benefits of the past, as one might its architecture or cuisine, through public projects or ad hoc committees. Values-education in schools may have positive or negative effects, depending on the critic’s perspective, but is not likely to yield nineteenth-century ladies or gentlemen. Indeed, it is questionable whether value-traditionalists who speak of a decline in public morals desire to go back in any meaningful sense to the past. Rather, they seem interested in controlling predominantly underclass pathologies, such as teenage pregnancies, and getting adolescent boys to behave less riotously.

Third, those who may protest the acidic tone of my arguments should look more closely at the claims being made on the other side. Contemporary liberals are not applying old liberal doctrines by punishing homophobes and sexists or by trying to rearrange the income curve. They are pushing policies that cannot be traced to the bourgeois order that mass democracy and the managerial state helped to dislodge. Liberal-pluralist democrats may like their own politics better than the one embraced by an earlier generation of liberals. But their views and goals are different, and sometimes not even congruent, with what that generation understood as the social Good.

In a revealing but neglected essay for the New Republic in 1955, Deweyite Arthur Bestor admitted a great deal about the planning that he and his colleagues had done twenty years earlier. The philosophical approaches they had adopted, according to Bestor, were “social acids” intended to break down inherited belief systems: “The alliance between pragmation and liberalism was a fortuitous one, called forth by a particular historic situation. Pragmatism constituted in essence [a] sacred act of intellectual spoliation.”4 But it soon became apparent to Bestor and to other liberals that a pragmatism combining experimental methods with value-relativism is only a “dissolvant.” It does not teach enough that is positive and betrays a “fundamental inadequacy” when applied to fighting fascism. It is therefore necessary to propagate a militant democratic religion through public education, an ambitious policy that Bestor and others pursued vigorously thereafter.

Fourth, despite my critical comments about its hypocrisies, my study treats respectfully the managerial state as an instrument of power. By now the managerial state may be comparable to what the sovereign state was in the time of Thomas Hobbes: an overshadowing presence that has forged its own forms of human association. It is also ringed with its own priesthood, which calls for the further consigning of social activities to administrative judgment. These extended reflections on the managerial regime draw upon the work on the sovereign state by Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). A legal theorist who studied the European state system, Schmitt regarded this arrangement as a unique and singularly effective source of international order. Out of an alliance of national sovereigns and enterprising jurists, Schmitt traced the conception of the nation-state, an entity monopolizing force within its own borders while engaging outside of them in diplomatic and military encounters.

Schmitt believed that intense conflict defined “the political,” and the state that developed in early modern Europe had both channeled and subdued human contentiousness.⁵ Through its monopoly of force and control of religious struggles, the sovereign state was able to minimize discord within its own frontiers. It turned violence, in the form of standing armies, against neighboring states with which it had territorial disputes. But these armed conflicts were limited to military encounters that only minimally affected civilians. An international protocol was worked out in the eighteenth century that provided for the management of what Emmerich de Vattel, the Swiss jurist, called “la guerre en forme.” In Vattel’s Le droit des gens (1758), Schmitt found a delineation of how the European state system worked, or at least was supposed to. Vattel makes no moral judgment about war; he simply lays out the legal procedure that sovereign states should follow in beginning and ending it. Vattel assumed that armed conflicts would culminate in diplomatic negotiations. They would not be fueled by religious or ideological passions and would leave the belligerents with the same governments as they had had before.

Schmitt listed reasons in his magnum opus, Nomos der Ende im Völkerrecht des ius publicum europaeum (1950), why such a European order went from operating sporadically to breaking down. A politics of passion became increasingly prevalent from the French Revolution on, and by the nineteenth century Jacobinism nationalism and, finally, revolutionary socialism were significant political forces. Together with these destabilizing ideologies, technology also contributed to the undoing of an order of territorial states. Naval blockades, combat, and long-range weaponry made it difficult to spare civilians in warfare. They also made it hard to structure international relations around the discrete territorial units that had existed in the eighteenth century. Then too, modern nations, starting with revolutionary France, preferred total conflicts to old-fashioned orchestrated ones. These national struggles were typically fought under the banner of global ideals, and according to Schmitt, ideologically driven conscripted armies tended more and more to demonize their targets. Those who resisted the ideal embodied by one’s nation were no longer viewed as human in thinking or in fact. Whence the uniquely savage character of twentieth-century warfare, which combines large armies and advanced technology with calls for total war.6

Faced by the breakdown of the European system of nation states and by the American-Soviet “bipolarity” during the Cold War, Schmitt raised the question of whether a new political order would take the place of the decayed ius publicum europaeum. His own quest for the glimpse of one led to speculation about the possibility of a world divided into spheres and controlled by regional powers.⁷ Schmitt believed that American influence in the Western Hemisphere and postwar moves toward consolidating Europe economically and militarily were pointing in that direction. He did not foresee entirely, however, the liberal democratic managerial hegemony that reached full development in the postwar years and is now identified with “the end of history.”⁸ Under the rallying cry “free markets and democracy,” American journalists and American politicians of almost all stripes call for renewed missionary efforts on behalf of the American model. This mission to redeem the unconverted has been realized more thoroughly than even its partisans may recognize. In North America, Western Europe, and Australasia, the managerial pluralist democracy discussed in this book remains dominant, even in the face of populist opposition. Supporters of this regime hope to maintain control by applying material incentives and, occasionally, political threats. And though the abuses to which “human rights” advocates react are sometimes brutal, the arguments made for an American mission of rights throughout the world are also open-ended. They can be and have been invoked to promote the privileged rights of journalists and other intellectuals, for whom Western governments have not been sufficiently moral. The morality in question is that of the advocate but rarely deviates from the expansionist interests of the managerial state.

In Western Europe and North America, this state rests its power upon a multitiered following: an underclass and now middle-class welfariate, a self-assertive public sector, and a vanguard of media and journalistic public defenders. Upon the basis of this following, the regime and its apologists have been able to marginalize their opposition. This is apparent on, among other places, the now respectable or moderate Right. There a tolerated opposition offers tepid criticism of the administrative state while warning against populist extremism. The religious Right does not oppose the administrative state, but hopes to have it implement “family values.” What remains of an older Right, of mostly Catholic and Anglo-Catholic traditionalists, has even lost interest in the political causes for cultural changes. It has produced a vast literature on the spiritual and aesthetic crisis that has accompanied mass democracy, but treats the managerial state as incidental to a declining “moral imagination.” Those in this group who notice structures of power usually break ranks after being scolded as “naturalists.”9 Unlike neoconservatives, who talk about politics as reflecting culture and imagine that both are correctable through social policy, the old Right confines its political discourse to the “state of the soul” and the corruption of imagination. At the same time, administrative democracy no longer faces a hostile Left of a kind that once treated political administration as an ally of corporate capitalism. Today’s intellectual Left turns to public administrators in order to wage war on prejudice. Gay and gender issues and black and Hispanic self-esteem have replaced that focus on economic and political structures typical of the best leftist thought developed a generation ago. If the American intellectual Right has abandoned James Burnham and Robert Nisbet for William Bennett’s Book of Virtues, the intellectual Left has declined even more precipitously, moving from the structural and cultural analysis of C. Wright Mills, Christopher Lasch, and Eugene Genovese to rote invectives against gender and homophobic insensitivity.¹⁰

Different kinds of ends may be upon us, an end of history or the “end of ideology” that social democrats of the 1960s maintained was then taking place. Less certain is whether any of these predicted ends will favor recognizable self-government or nonauthorized political debate. A managed therapeutic politics will not likely engender either of these conditions. Still, there is no reason to assume that such controls will prove intolerable. People may soon forget older liberal and democratic legacies in a thoroughly administered society that brings material security together with the assurance of psychic normality. This social planning will also attract the idealistic, at least those interested in combating newly discovered prejudice and instilling sensitive behavior. Moral crusades will not be lacking in such an arranged therapeutic future.

The consolidation of the managerial state and the imposition of its pluralist ideology have been the defining features of contemporary Western life. These trends may continue into the distant future and result in a more solidified international managerial order. But that order may confront obstacles, now only partly glimpsed, that will bring about disintegration and ultimately contribute to a new political configuration. Decentralizing, populist protest movements may yet overtake pluralist administration and undo the work of generations of social planners. If that happens, as unlikely as it now seems, Schmitt’s quest for a political order to replace the Western system of nation states will reemerge as an unfinished task.

Whatever the future holds, Schmitt has been right in at least two of his interpretive assumptions. One is that liberalism and democracy belong to different epochs, one to the nineteenth century and the other to the twentieth. The putative merging of these ideas and movements into “liberal democracy” has brought forth not a true refinement of democratic practice but a garbling of political concepts. Once historically decontextualized, the terms “liberal” and “democratic” have surrendered a fixed conceptual meaning and any clear relation to what they signified a century ago.

Another Schmittian lesson that this book has tried to demonstrate is the recurrent “primacy of the political.” We have looked at questions of power and the role of political elites in determining friends and enemies within the framework of the managerial state. This study has stressed the point that this regime, more than its liberal predecessor, requires the downplaying of genuine political differences. Predictably, its actors and defenders have ascribed unwelcome dissent to psychic abnormality or to scientific imprecision. In any case those who rule have not abandoned the practice of restricting disagreeable speech but are carrying it forward in the name of openness and combatting discrimination. Meanwhile, the administrative regime renders obsolete any attempt to draw lines between consensual and imposed authorities. Governing goes on in a blurred zone, between consent and nonaccountable control.11 Unlike the Communist garrison-state or the Italian fascist “total state,” the managerial state succeeds by denying that it exercises power.12 Most fully developed in Northern Europe and North America, lands traditionally celebrating bourgeois liberties and Protestant individuality, managerial rule has consistently presented itself as collectively administered assistance. Rhetorically and propagandistically, it has been the helpmate of individuals set adrift in the industrial world, and administrators have claimed to enjoy “democratic” support because they have updated liberalism and infused it with social concern.

Behind this rhetoric, however, it is possible to discern other far-reaching projects, some of which this book has outlined. All of them have pertained to a specific form of rule and combined a public charge with generally ill-defined but expanding control. The administrative state, as it advances into its therapeutic phase, has refused to recognize its coercive reach or whatever advantages have accrued to it from those tasks it has gladly assumed. By concealing its operation in the language of caring, it has blinded us to the truths enunciated by Cicero, Hobbes, Weber, Schmitt and other past political analysts. Potestas, as Cicero explained, is given to increase one’s dignity; it allows one to punish wrongdoers and to exercise magisterial authority, while becoming a means for preserving and securing a greater sufficiency of its own resources (ad sua conservanda et alterius obtinenda idonearum rerum facultas).

Whether one takes these definitions or Hobbes’s view that power is the means “to obtain some future apparent good,” a discussion of government should be about control and the instruments available to its practitioners. It is understandable that the managerial state and its exponents should avoid discussing these themes in their formulations of social policy. The uninterrupted exercise of its power may depend upon not talking plainly about such unclean matters.¹³ Yet, it is worth the effort to look beyond euphemism to see how political power is exercised. Behind the mission to sensitize and teach “human rights” lies the largely unacknowledged right to shape and reshape people’s lives. Any serious appraisal of the managerial regime must consider first and foremost the extent of its control—and the relative powerlessness of its critics.