More complaining about contemporary politics

So then, some of the things which a political skeptic opposes include natural rights liberalism, contractarian conceptions of political obligation, utilitarian notions of value, and emancipatory projects of all sorts.

I have been asked quite often if there any positive content to such a disposition. Skepticism can inform almost any kind of small ‘c’ conservatism which prefers the known to the unknown (the bird in the hand, the devil I know, etc.), and is thus suspicious of those (like Mr. Obama during the campaign) who advocate major changes in the structure of political life. (About the only the change that I believe in is the movement from baseball to football to basketball seasons and back again.) In this sense of the term, a skeptical conservative in Sweden could support socialized medicine, while one in the US would likely be reluctant to change so radically an institution which works reasonably well (perhaps this claim is arguable, but I can already tell you from personal experience that socialized medicine in Canada is as poorly run and more expensive than its American counterpart).

However, I want to suggest that the traditions of European and especially Anglophone political communities in the modern world point to a more robust understanding of skeptical politics. Hegel correctly suggests that the primary achievements of modern Europeans consist in their development of a self-conscious individualism which is manifested not only in a proprietary attitude toward the law and the state but also in the creation of a civil society intermediate between the quasi-natural life of the family and the authoritative character of the political community. These two institutions, ethical individualism and the self-creative and subjective freedom of civil society, are not, however, autonomous, but presuppose a system of law which conditions both the relation between the individual and the state and the relation between individual members of the state.

According to Oakeshott (and there are striking similarities to Hayek, here), there are two ways of conceiving what kind of state is entailed in this presupposition. In the first, the state is understood to be a great and common enterprise in which citizens are conceived as comrades moving towards a single substantive goal and the government is understood as the manager of that goal. The state is a teleocracy, and all projects, purposes, and interests in it are subordinated to the grand and common telos of the people, whether it be full employment, the maximum exploitation of territorial resources measured as GNP, the equitable distribution of collective wealth, the creation of Soviet Man, the purification of the Aryan race, the tutelary guidance of a community of moral imbeciles, or the therapeutic care of a community of invalids.

Of course, the problem with viewing the state in this way is that it is both morally incoherent and epistemologically utopian. There is no common substantive purpose that modern individuals share with each other, and to be forced into an enterprise such as posited by the teleocratic view is a moral enormity insofar as it involves precisely the destruction of the individuality that is purportedly being protected. Further, and in brief, the notion that there is a common telos is questionable and the defense of any particular version is fraught with confusion. Why ought we to believe that the single purpose of human life is ultimately about economic growth, the ‘equitable’ distribution of material goods, racial purity, mental health, etc.?

Thus, a political skeptic would rightly oppose any and every attempt on the part of the government to convert itself into the teleocratic manager of the ‘common good’, because there is no such thing. For example, the notion that the US is a productivist enterprise and that government exists to manage the economy is an obvious, though somewhat benign version of this idea. Government bailouts of large enterprises based upon the assumption that the government is responsible for the smooth sailing of all economic enterprises are good examples of such actions. So are many forms of redistributionist tax policies, protectionist economic policies, nationalized public education (especially when teachers, subjects, and curricula are directly controlled by government), nationalized health care, corporate welfare, and moralizing or crusading foreign policy.

In the next few days, I’ll talk about what Oakeshott calls nomocracy and what implications it has for contemporary policy considerations.