Against Liberalism:
Society Is Not a Market,
Introduction, Part II

5,704 words

Part 2 of 3 (Introduction Part I here, Introduction Part III here)

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Now, for liberalism, man — far from being constituted as such by his bonds with others — must be thought of as an individual unbound by any constitutive form of belonging; i.e., outside any cultural or socio-historical context. Liberalism does not so much oppose liberty to constraint or domination as to the determination which would make the individual less than entirely free in his choices. Liberal freedom rejects all determination from the first, especially those forms which involve a historical anchoring or cultural belonging not voluntarily chosen. In this sense it rests on what Jacques Dewitte has called “the denial of what is already there.”[i] John Rawls, for example, explains that the choice of the form of justice to implement should be made behind a “veil of ignorance,” abstracting from all the contingent factors of individual identity (ethnocultural belonging, social situation, sex, etc.). The result is that what presents itself as a program of emancipation from all that might force us to be something culminates in reality in an explosion of subjectivities and a clash of egos. Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us that “from the standpoint of individualism, I am what I myself choose to be.”[ii] This is why it is so difficult to give any account in the language of moral individualism of the sense of obligation we may feel toward our family, our community, our country, our people, and so on. From a liberal point of view, these feelings, tied as they are to a form of belonging upstream from ourselves, are illusory; there is no occasion for them to exist, for they have no meaning.

Jean-Claude Michéa writes:

One of the philosophical problems with which a liberal state is necessarily confronted comes from its excluding by definition any concept of devotion to one’s community and, a fortiori, any idea of sacrifice (e.g., as by a member of the resistance). When “the country is in danger,” the liberal state cannot count on any of its citizens to assure its defense at the risk of his own life.[iii]

Michéa also notes that “the liberal watchword ‘no countries, no borders,’ the natural complement of ‘laissez faire, laissez passer,’ seems to have first appeared in 1777 in a book by the physiocrat Guillaume-François Le Trosne.[iv] Thus, liberalism has no fundamental objection to globalism, all the less so in that globalism is in harmony with liberalism’s intrinsic universalism (individuo-universalism) and contributes by definition to the limiting of national political sovereignty.

Ernest Renan used to say that “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.” For the very liberal Bertrand Lemennicier, a member of the Mont-Pèlerin Society and Vice President of ALEPS (Association pour la liberté économique et le progrès social), the nation is nothing but an “elusive political fetish,” a “concept with no counterpart in the real world,” and a “representation of something that does not exist.” He writes:

France is simply an aggregate of human beings. . . . What can the behavior of a group be if not the behavior of the members which compose it? How can a society have values or preferences independent of its members? It does not have any. . . . Nor should we be fooled by the sentiment of belonging. We do not belong to a nation, nor to a territory, not to state, none of which exist, unless we alienate our free will and our condition of human qua human [sic].

From that point, there can no longer be any question of the necessity in certain circumstances of dying for one’s country: “Our lives cannot be sacrificed to an abstraction that has no intrinsic existence.”[v] We note that the author does not ask himself for one second whether the inalienable rights he attributes to individuals are not also abstractions with no intrinsic existence. But at least he states matters clearly.

Also significant is the position of most liberals on the issue of immigration. Liberalism approaches this question from a purely economic point of view: Immigration amounts to an increase in the supply of labor and in the potential mass of consumers thanks to individuals who come from abroad, in which respect it is positive. It is also justified by the imperative of the free circulation of men, capital, and commodities, while allowing a downward pressure on native wages. A million non-Europeans coming to settle in Europe is simply a million individuals coming to add themselves to other millions of individuals. The receiving nation, itself a mere aggregate of individuals, gets a certain supplementary number of economic agents. The liberal reasons as if people were interchangeable — which they are, in fact, as long as we only take the economic and quantitative side of things into account — forgetting along the way, as the historian Gilles Richard reminds us, that “the enormous abyss of inequality on a planetary scale due to triumphant neo-liberalism is itself what is provoking migratory waves.”[vi]

For a liberal such as Joseph Carens, immigration above all must not be regulated, for that would amount to violating the liberal principal according to which one cannot allow the consideration of contingent aspects of individuals’ identities, starting with their origin or sociocultural belonging, in order to legitimize “inequality of treatment.” Since citizenship status itself is usually determined by contingent factors, it must be considered arbitrary.[vii] John Rawls also considers that each person must be left free to settle wherever he wants. This is also the position of the libertarians, of course (Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Tibor R. Machan), for whom any regulation of immigration infringes on individuals’ sovereignty.[viii]

Milton Friedman thinks the best way to put an end to immigration is to dismantle the welfare state completely, which would have the effect of drying up welfare payments. He only forgets that in such cases, the first victims will be the poorest classes of the native population! Moreover, he does not see that for most immigrants the most attractive element is not so much welfare payments as the difference in average salary between their country of origin and their destination.[ix] As for the liberal economist Gary Becker, he has found a solution in perfect conformity with his utilitarianism by proposing to have immigrants pay an entrance fee of an amount to be determined, which would have the advantage of admitting only the wealthiest, a measure of control by price which unavoidably reminds us of the “right to pollute” that certain economists propose granting the most successful multinational companies.[x]

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Communitarians, on the other hand, recognize that the state has the right (and sometimes the duty) to regulate, limit, or forbid immigration, because once it reaches a certain level it infringes on cultural habits, the ways of life — in short, the mores — of the receiving population. It risks threatening their identity or destabilizing their social cohesion, the latter largely based on the confidence members of the society have in each other, which is itself largely dependent on the ease with which they recognize themselves in their neighbors and identify with them.[xi]

Liberalism, as we have seen, rejects the idea that there are things or values that can be called intrinsically good even if some individuals do not accept them. The liberal state thus abstains as a matter of principal from any judgment concerning the way people choose to live. It has no business deciding between competing conceptions of morality; it must not contribute to giving a meaning to existence; it is not to encourage certain attitudes or discourage others — unless some of these contradict the rights of others. The government, as Robert Nozick emphasizes, must be “scrupulously neutral between its citizens.”[xii] Originally, liberalism hoped to pacify society and put an end to the wars of religion by attributing to the state a position of axiological neutrality based on the impersonal mechanisms of law and the market. The underlying idea was that passions and values could only divide society by fomenting conflict, whereas “peaceful trade,” fueled by rational egoism and the mere pursuit of private interests, was intrinsically pacifying. But we may imagine that at that time liberalism was still concerned not to damage the social fabric irremediably. It was not able to realize that public authority’s disengagement in matters of norms and morality would result in a much more concerning dissolution of bonds, for no society could maintain itself on the basis of legal contract and commercial exchange alone.

This neutrality, of course, was largely artificial, and cannot be assimilated to a pure relativism: Even if he considers them equally legitimate as opinions, no liberal can think that a liberal and an anti-liberal proposition have the same value. Moreover, liberalism would have plenty of difficulty in considering all values to be equal since it makes individual liberty a supreme value. When he is attacked, he does not hesitate to defend himself — and, on the pretext of exporting his opinions across the world, he does not even shrink from preventive wars. In this we see the limits of his “pluralism.” Contrary to appearances, neutrality does not favor pluralism, but the destruction of landmarks and the vanishing of the meaning we can give to collective life.

For Aristotle, justice consists in giving each person what he deserves (which involves determining who deserves what); for liberalism, it consists in making sure everyone enjoys equal rights. These are two different conceptions of justice, the former being oriented toward the good, while the second is indifferent regarding ends. The whole question, then, is whether the rights of which liberalism speaks can be justified by “justice” alone; i.e., without presupposing any conception of the good. On this point, as too often goes unnoticed, the liberal state, because of the very axiological neutrality it demands, cannot limit itself in any way:

It can only really be fulfilled as a right to have rights, extensible to infinity. . . . The question of how to accord rival freedoms in a world of individuals conceived as egoistical [then] becomes philosophically insoluble. This is why, under the liberal management of societies, the war of all against all is destined to continue forever.[xiii]

Political neutrality vis-à-vis different conceptions of the good is also at the heart of the logic of the market, which obviously passes no judgment on the preferences it satisfies, just as political neutrality is the legal basis of liberal doctrine. Now, the “neutrality” of the market is also merely apparent, for there are many circumstances where commercial exchange modifies the very nature of the good being exchanged (think, for example, of the sale of “rights to pollute” or the transformation of a particular good into an object of consumption). Moreover, it has the most serious consequences from the political, sociological, and anthropological point of view since it claims to abstract from all the ethical, philosophical, and religious convictions of the members of society, and by making the equality of individual freedoms the only legitimate basis of justice, it breaks with the traditional idea that public safety and the common good come about mainly by way of taking conceptions of the good into account in political debate. How can one be surprised, then, at the inability of liberal societies to legislate coherently on “social questions” (bio-ethics, assisted procreation, homosexual marriage, immigration, etc.) which inevitably involve a judgment in terms of substantive morality?

It is in light of the foregoing that one can understand the precise nature of capitalism which, far from being an economic system tied to private property in rents and capital, is a “total social fact” (in the words of Marcel Mauss) from which issues the fetishized form that social relations assume in liberal societies. The society of individuals is quite naturally a market society, for the limitlessness of desire and the inflation of rights are counterparts to the limitlessness which is the very principle of capital reproduction. “Economic” man aims to maximize his self-interest, just as Form-Capital aims to maximize profit: Both seek to increase themselves in the single category of having. They do not favor happiness, but make it more problematic, since they imply permanent dissatisfaction and the unleashing of mimetic rivalry. As Jean-Claude Michéa remarks:

A system based on mimetic rivalry and whose only obligation, as Marx said, is “to produce for the sake of producing and to accumulate for the sake of accumulation,” can only favor the war of all against all and thus lead to the dissolution of all collective foundations of individual happiness and the common good.[xiv]

For his part, Alberto Gómez-Muller writes: “Capitalism is not simply a mode of production, but also and above all a regime of enclosing the human within a purely instrumental and calculating rationality oriented toward the absolute finality of cumulative possession.”[xv] Capital is first of all a social relation which forms its own specific kind of imagination and involves ways of living in, but also of conceiving, the world. This is what those who think of it as a philosophically neutral system stubbornly fail to see, and which therefore can be reformed, corrected, or reconciled with radically opposed values.

Thus, the fundamental trait of capitalism is not merely the abusive exploitation of living labor. Its fundamental characteristic, as soon as one conceives it as founding a social order that is really only an established disorder, is its orientation toward endless accumulation in both senses of the term: a process that never stops, and which has no goal other than increasing the value of capital, a system in which every surplus is employed to reproduce and increase itself — what Marx called “capital as value which adds value to itself in the cycle of its existence.” The activity of the privative and accumulative appropriation of human and non-human reality, thus posited as the root of human behavior, presupposes a general representation of the world as an object susceptible of being appropriable, calculable, and rationalizable from one end to the other. The expansionist logic of capitalism hardly differs in its fundamentals from the process of the rationalization of the world that Heidegger calls the Gestell, or machination (Machenschaft). Perceived as an object without intrinsic meaning, the world is treated as fundamentally exploitable; it is called upon to become lucrative, a source of profit, in other words “value” in the economic sense of the term. It is this limitlessness in its aims as in its practice that makes capitalism a system resting on excess (hybris), the negation of any limit, and solely preoccupied with producing ever more value in order to increase capital ever further.

That the liberal philosophy implies the primacy of the economy, however, does not merely lead to the obsession with growth and the endless expansion of the market. It also feeds a directional and vectoral conception of history of a type fully comparable with that of the great historicist systems of the nineteenth century that were engendered by the philosophy of progress. As David Djaïz observes:

Political economy rests on the postulate of an indefinite process of production which brings with it growth, technical progress, and the perfecting of humanity. It favors linear and teleological representations of history.[xvi]

It also contributes to Western ethnocentrism, which tends to undermine the basis of traditional societies everywhere, since what today most characterizes the West “is capitalism qua impossibility of remaining within a border, qua passing beyond any border; it is capitalism as a system of production for which nothing is impossible except not being an end in itself.” [xvii]

Using the image of a Moebius strip, Jean-Claude Michéa has shown the profound unity of economic, political, cultural, and “social” liberalism. He sees in it a double entry chart, specifically “two parallel and (more importantly) complementary versions of a single historic and intellectual logic.”[xviii] Economic liberalism based on the market economy and universal competition is in fact structurally identical to political liberalism based on the rule of law and the reign of the individual, as well as to social liberalism (“libertarian liberalism”) based on value relativism and the liberation of mores. This, by the way, allows us to understand how the postmodern “counter-culture” of the years after 1970 was able to feed into a new discourse legitimating capitalism, beginning with its theme of the “struggle against all forms of discrimination” that aimed to emancipate all identities not recognized at the time of the Fordist compromise; and secondarily why the Left, by rallying to the market, definitively cut itself off from the people.

From this it follows that economic liberalism and “liberal-libertarian” liberalism are bound to meet. As Michéa adds, “A Right-wing economy can only function in a lasting manner with a ‘culture of the Left.’”[xix] Already in his book Impasse Adam Smith (2002), he had written:

To simplify greatly, we can say that the modern man said to be “on the Right” has a tendency to defend the premise (the absolutely competitive economy), but is still having difficulty admitting the conclusion (civil unions, crime, the fête de la musique, and Paris-Plages), while the modern man officially “on the Left” tends to make the converse choices.

Michéa has proven himself a good prophet, since it was when the financial crisis was constantly imposing austerity policies on societies headed toward pauperization, when industrial jobs had left the Western world, when sovereign debt had doubled since 2008, when income inequality was becoming enormous, when the share of salaries in the gross national product of Western nations fell to 57% as the income on capital continued to grow, when the disciplinary tutelage of the financial markets was daily furthering the dispossession of democratic sovereignty, when the national debt of France was on its way to passing 100% of the annual gross domestic product, when there were over three million unemployed and ten million poor, when 85% of employment contracts were for a limited term, when layoffs and “social plans” succeed one another in a cascade, when the popular classes were hit directly by recession while the middle classes were for the first time threatened with downward mobility — that the French government chose, under François Hollande, to abandon all welfare policy in favor of “social issues” — of which the tussles over “marriage for all” were the most striking example.

The Left’s rallying to the logic of the market and the mystique of growth has led it to believe that the arrival of a more just society would require tearing its members from their traditional forms of belonging (obstacles to the expansion of this market), uprooting them, abolishing borders, and forgetting the past. This conviction was already at the heart of the ideology of progress which the Left has never given up, but which has also received a new impulse from the demands for “efficiency” inherent in capitalist limitlessness. A high priority was then assigned to denouncing “ontological” inequalities linked to sexism, racism, religious fanaticism, etc., at the expense of all the concrete inequalities produced by social policies of liberal inspiration. Equality is henceforward assimilated to the critique of “stereotypes” and the “overcoming of taboos,” while economic exploitation is passed over in silence. Social deprivation is no longer interpreted in terms of class, but of the sociology of victimhood, individual setbacks, or identitarian categories associated with the critique of exclusion. The person whose identity has been “excluded” — the cultural or sexually marginal person — has replaced the worker, while celebrities [les people] replace the people [le peuple]. Justice is reduced to the struggle against all forms of discrimination and the extension in all directions of “for everybodyism.”

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“Progressivism” has rallied to the market all the more easily in that capitalism has at the same time taken up a culturally libertarian program. The liberal Right, for its part, has proceeded to the commercial recovery of critical thought by capitalizing on the decomposition of traditional social forms. In this way has been realized the great ideological osmosis of a financial Right which has betrayed the nation and a “permissive” Left which has betrayed the people. The two aspects of liberalism very naturally go together and, in the final analysis, liberalism has triumphed all along the line.

On the Right, the defense of liberalism has been carried out most especially by those milieus known as “national-liberal” or “conservative liberal,” which believed (and still believe) they can reclaim economic liberalism and even political liberalism without conceding anything more than they want to the extreme individualism that philosophical liberalism inspires. Unfortunately, this position is untenable. How can one claim to regulate immigration while adhering to a liberal economic order that rests on an ideal of mobility, flexibility, the opening of borders, and generalized nomadism (laissez faire, laissez passer: Let us build within a moving world!)? How can one rely upon the “efficiency of the market” without acknowledging that such efficiency requires treating as non-existent the boundaries which separate and thus distinguish the different cultures of humanity? How does one defend the identity of peoples or nations while considering these collectivities as nothing more than aggregates of separate individuals? How does one deplore the serial bankruptcies of small businesses while celebrating competition and the logic of free trade which causes them? How can one appeal to “morality” while simultaneously reasoning from a doctrine that legitimates forms of individual behavior (the maximization of particular interests) that all authentic morality has always condemned? How can one restore “traditional values” without questioning a capitalism that everywhere works to suppress them?

“Conservative liberals” refuse to see that “it is precisely the continual development of the market economy that erodes the anthropological basis of these traditional values a little more every day, even as it destroys the ecological conditions of human life.”[xx] They do not want to understand that the perpetual movement of capitalist hybris can only involve ruptures that make it incompatible with any genuine form of conservatism. They often defend the idea that conservatives should defend the market because it is based on a spontaneous order, “the same as tradition.” Now, the market is anything but spontaneous. We could even say in Hayekian terms that it results from a pure constructivism to which the state has not been alien.[xxi] As Laurent Fourquet has quite rightly said:

Whoever takes up the struggle against the universal deregulation of the family is only acting meaningfully if his struggle against the universal deregulation of the family is coupled with a struggle against the universal regulation of the world by commercial contract. The activist who fights “for the family” but enthusiastically preaches so-called ultra-liberalism as soon as the talk turns to economics is not merely inconsistent: He is useless.[xxii]

Liberalism has in fact no choice but to oppose conservatism, which it perceives as the heir to an old order to which the rise of capitalism put an end. Conservatism defends the existence of a certain number of anthropological constants which liberal individualism automatically deconstructs the moment it ceases to consider man a social and political being by nature. Roger Scruton, who wants to consider himself both conservative and liberal, implicitly recognizes this when he states, “It is important that in each society certain goods escape a commercial logic because they are considered sacred” — but he knows very well that it is impossible to adopt such a position starting from a liberal premise:

We see a certain paradox emerge here. Individual liberty requires that the individual be free to circulate and exchange, but the individual does not exist independently from a social body, and when economic liberties are exalted like a new form of religion, they increasingly threaten the social bonds and thereby the individual’s own existence.[xxiii]

This problem also occurs for believers. Christianity certainly shares responsibility for the historical emergence of liberal ideology, since it was Christianity which “invented” the individual and began the process of disenchanting the world. But at the same time, the Church has had the merit of always remaining faithful to the Aristotelian definition of man, as accepted by Thomas Aquinas, as a naturally political and social being. It also has the merit of having always condemned egoism, the search for profit at any cost (even if it has not always provided a good example of that itself).

Thomas Aquinas does not limit himself to condemning those forms of economic activity necessary to the development of modern capitalism (beginning with the credit system), but also takes a clearly holist position inherited from antiquity. For two centuries the Church’s teaching has not ceased to condemn the evils of cutthroat competition (Quadragesimo anno, 1931) and the shortcomings of free trade doctrine (Populorum progressio, 1967), to criticize the principal of state non-intervention, to reject the idea of absolute private property, and to reaffirm the primacy of the common good (“freedom of trade is only equitable if in accord with the demands of social justice”). The Church has also condemned the belief according to which what comes from spontaneous order (in Hayek’s sense) is better than what is socially organized and decided. John Paul II said that

there is a risk in the spread of a radical ideology of the capitalist type that rejects any consideration of human needs as such, affirming a priori that any attempt to face them directly is destined for failure, and that, on principle, awaits the solution from the free development of market forces. (Centesimus annus, 42)

This, he adds, is why “we cannot accept the statement that the defeat of so-called ‘real socialism’ leaves only the capitalist model of economic organization.” And it is well-known that Pope Francis has gone farther in this same direction, especially in his encyclical Laudato si’ (2015).[xxiv]

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Attempts to reconcile Christianity and liberalism have not been lacking, however, but they have never succeeded for the simple reason that any consistent liberalism goes back to an explicit or implicit philosophy incompatible with the imperatives inherent in any genuine ethics (effective egoistic behavior must be judged insofar as it is egoistic, not insofar as it is “effective”; i.e., not in a consequentialist fashion). This argument regularly recurs in the writings of Christian philosophers or theologians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, and William T. Cavanaugh, or essayists close to Radical Orthodoxy such as Rod Dreher, who forcefully criticize the liberal order and denounce the modern loss of the sense of community on the grounds that communities are also the locus of real forms of solidarity.[xxv]

But let us return to French politics. As Régis Debray has observed, the presidential election of 2017 caused an old class division to reappear that some had thought gone forever. On the one hand, those with high to very high incomes, those elites belonging to the Caste, the middle and upper levels of management, and the grande bourgeoisie, the “self-employed,” and the bobos; on the other hand, those with low to modest incomes, the unemployed, workers, and farmers, the lower middle class: everyone who no longer lives where jobs are created and wealth is accumulated. On the one hand, the inhabitants of the great metropolises; on the other, the “peripheral France” (in Christophe Guilluy’s phrase) of the mid-sized towns, the deindustrialized zones on the edges of cities, and the rural communes. On the one hand, the believers in a France “open to the world” (open space) and adapted to the demands of the global market, their hands on their wallets as they sing the “Marseillaise”; on the other, a people that wants to perpetuate its immaterial patrimony, conserve its specific forms of sociability, and retain sovereignty over the conditions of its own social reproduction: In short, the winners and losers of globalization, the “party of tomorrow” and the party of always.

But above all, the election of Emmanuel Macron has brought with it a complete reconfiguration of the political landscape and the forces in play. In working to gather liberals of all stripes into a “central bloc” over the ruins of the great institutional parties attached to the old Left-Right divide, Macron — whom Marcel Gauchet has called “the first true liberal in the proper philosophical sense of the term to arise on the political stage in France for a very long time” — has confirmed the emergence of another divide which will impose itself lastingly in the coming years, for it ultimately involves an ideological redefinition confronting all the parties today. This great divide of the near future, both in France and in Europe, is that between liberals and anti-liberals, which is also a divide between political universalism and the specific socio-cultural features of each people.

This represents a double challenge. It remains to be seen if the Left can go back on its commitment to the market society and return to its original socialist inspiration. The future of the Left lies in its ability to turn back from this commitment and reappropriate the original principles of the socialist critique of capitalism, which saw in the traditional forms of belonging not an archaic residue, but a powerful tool of solidarity and protections (the “bonds which protect”), and which also knew that one never arrives at the universal except by way of particular rootedness (what Hegel called the “concrete universal,” as opposed to abstract universalism). On the Right it remains to be seen if conservatives will be capable of regrouping to form a confederation between the popular classes and at least a part of the middle classes into a new “hegemonic bloc” by unambiguously repudiating the liberal doctrine championed by the dominant class and understanding once and for all that “national liberalism” and “conservative liberalism” are mere oxymorons.[xxvi]

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Notes

[i] “Le déni du déjà-là. Sur la posture constructiviste come manifestation de l’esprit du temps,” in Revue du MAUSS, no. 17, 2001, 393-409.

[ii] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 220.

[iii] Jean-Claude Michéa, Le complexe d’Orphée: La gauche, les gens ordinaires et la religion du progress (Paris: Climats, 2011), 285.

[iv] Jean-Claude Michéa, Notre ennemie, le capital: Notes sur la fin des jours tranquilles (Paris: Climats, 2017), 37. The expression “laissez faire, laissez passer” (or “laisser faire, laisser passer”) was coined in 1752 by the economist and international businessman Vincent de Gournay.

[v] “La nation, fétiche politique introuvable,” on the website www.contre-points.org, February 21, 2018. Lemennicier uses the same argument to respond to the Nobel prizewinning economist Jospeh Stiglitz, who stated that “market economies are incapable of regulating themselves,” viz., that “a market economy has no individual conscience and thus cannot lose its mind”! This clearly does not prevent him from speaking of “liberalism” as if it were a person.

[vi] Gilles Richard, Histoire des droites en France de 1815 à nos jours (Paris: Perrin, 2017).

[vii] Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[viii] Tibor R. Machan, “Immigration into a Free Society,” in Journal of Libertarian Studies, Summer 1998, 199-204.

[ix] Cf. George J. Borjas, Immigration Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

[x] Among the few liberals in favor of restricting immigration, we may cite Jean-Philippe Vincent, champion of an improbable alliance between conservatives and liberals (Qu’est-ce que le conservatism? Histoire intellectuelle d’une idée politique [Paris: Belles Lettres, 2016]). His main argument is that “classical” liberalism proclaims the moral equality of individuals, but not their political equality: “Moral equality does not stop at national boundaries; but boundaries create a previously non-existent situation which legitimizes apolitical treatment that differentiates between nationals and foreigners, including candidates for immigration” (Ethiques de l’immigration [Paris: Fondation pour l’innovation politique, 2018], 11). The whole question is whether (and to what extent) moral equality can be dissociated from political equality. We can also ask whether such a dissociation, which many liberals would not accept, can be considered a liberal principle. It should be noted that the President of the Foundation for Political Innovation’s Scientific Evaluation Council is Laurence Parisot, who loudly came out in favor of immigration while serving as President of the Movement of the Enterprises of France.

[xi] Cf. Russell Hardin, Trust (London: Polity Press, 2006); and Niklas Luhmann, La confiance: Un mécanisme de réduction de la complexité sociale [1968] (Paris: Economica, 2006). Other authors come to the same conclusion by arguing from state sovereignty or, like Christopher Heath Wellman, from its autonomy of decision (cf. Christopher Heath Wellman & Phillip Cole, Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? [Oxford University Press, 2014]). Wellman, who takes great care never to make use of the concept of sovereignty, also argues from freedom of association: If a country is free to choose with what other countries it wishes to associate or not, it is hard to see why it would not be free to do the same with this or that category of foreigners.

[xii] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, op. cit., 33.

[xiii] Jean-Claude Michéa, La double pensée: Retour sur la question libérale (Paris : Flammarion-Champs, 2008), 151, 154.

[xiv] “Solidaire et solitaire,” debate with François Jullien, in Philosophy Magazine, December 2014-January 2015, 70.

[xv] Alfredo Gómez-Muller, Nihilisme et capitalism (Paris: Kimé, 2017), 8-9.

[xvi] “Un ‘moment républicain’?”, in Le Débat, March-April 2018, 173.

[xvii] Pierre Clastres, article “Ethnocide” in Encyclopedia Universalis, online.

[xviii] La Double pensée, op. cit., 13-14.

[xix] Ibid., 65.

[xx] Jean-Claude Michéa, Le complexe d’Orphée, op. cit., 138.

[xxi] Cf. Wendy Brown, Les habits neufs de la politique mondiale (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2007), who does not hesitate to describe liberalism as a “constructivist project.”

[xxii] Le christianisme n’est pas un humanisme, op. cit., 279

[xxiii] Interview in Le Figaro Magazine, May 18, 2018, 36. Cf. also his interview with the journal Limite (January 2017): “There is a problem which has never been resolved: how to reconcile the free market with a controlled capitalism not based on the creation of new appetites and the replacement of spiritual values by material values” (22).

[xxiv] Cf. also the document published by the Roman Curia on May 17, 2018 under the title Economicae et pecuniae quaestiones (“Economic and Financial Questions”).

[xxv] Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990); John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, & Graham Ward (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999); William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids, Mich.): Eerdmans Publishing, 2008; and Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2017). According to Dreher, “liberalism and consumerism are the two words that weaken the West and render it vulnerable to Islam” (interview in La Nef, January 2018, 14).

[xxvi] On this subject, cf. Guillaume Bernard, La guerre à droite aura bien lieu: Le mouvement dextrogyre (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2016).