Against Liberalism:
Society Is Not a Market,
Chapter I, Part 3: What Is Liberalism?

The holistic society of the Middle Ages, as embodied in the “Three Orders of Mankind,” began to be broken down by the coming to prominence of the marketplace with the rise of nation-states.

4,142 words

Part 3 of 3 (Introduction Part 1 here, Chapter I Part 2 here)

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

This strictly economic representation of society has considerable consequences. Finishing off the process of secularization and “disenchantment” of the world that is characteristic of modernity, it results in the dissolution of peoples and the systematic erosion of their particularities. At the sociological level, the adoption of economic exchange leads the society to be divided into producers, owners, and sterile classes (such as the former aristocracy) at the end of an altogether revolutionary process. At the level of collective imagination, it ends in a complete reversal of values, raising to the highest level the commercial values which had always been considered inferior par excellence, since they arise from mere necessity. At the moral level, it rehabilitates the spirit of self-interested calculation, hybris (lack of measure), and egoistic behavior that traditional societies always condemned.

Considered intrinsically dangerous, insofar as it constitutes the locus where a power considered “irrational” is exercised, politics is reduced in this point of view to guaranteeing rights and the management of the social realm in terms of technical expertise. Carl Schmitt denied that there could be a liberal politics, since liberalism in his eyes is characterized by (besides the affirmation of the primacy of economics over politics and the private over the public) an invincible tendency to “neutralize” political problems by depoliticizing them. What is called political liberalism is in fact merely a way of applying principles deduced from an economic and individualistic doctrine to political life, a doctrine that tends to limit the role of politics as much as possible, to rob it of its prerogatives by opposing the sovereignty of the market to the strictly political concept of sovereignty. The ideal of “axiological neutrality” itself implies the dismissal of politics insofar as the latter always consists in choosing between possibilities in order to obtain certain objectives determined according to certain values — even as it favors the rise of expertocracy, for which there is only one possible solution to problems, these themselves having been reduced to “technical” questions. “There is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher used to say: an unpolitical statement par excellence. The result is to model the governance of men on the administration of things (or to replace the former by the latter). In the final analysis, relations between men themselves become like relations between things. This is the phantasm of the “transparent society,” the vision of a society immediately coincident with itself, beyond any symbolic referent or concrete intermediation. And this is also the deeper reason for the “reification” (Verdinglichung) of social relations so well studied by the young Lukács.

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As Hervé Juvin rightly says, “The advent of the individual renders citizenship obsolete.” In fact, it unbinds man from that which binds him to his fellows. Exclusively regulated by the anonymous and impersonal mechanisms of the market and the law, the social bond is reduced to legal contract and commercial exchange. From an anti-holist point of view in which society is merely an aggregate of individuals — “society does not exist,” as Margaret Thatcher put it — there can be no shared values or shared horizons.

If we want to continue speaking of “liberal politics,” we can say it consists in aligning with the reproduction of society and capital by implementing the sociopolitical conditions for the extension of capital accumulation. This is the very definition of the “commercialization of the world.”

In the long run, in a society entirely ruled by the market and founded upon the postulate of the self-sufficiency of “civil society,” the state and its institutions are destined to whither away as surely as in the classless society imagined by Marxist authors. The logic of the market, as Alain Caillé has shown, is coextensive with a whole process of equalization; indeed, of making men interchangeable by way of a dynamic already observable in the modern use of money:

Liberal ideology’s sleight of hand lies in equating the rule of law with the commercial state, in reducing it to the role of an emanation of the market. From that point, the plea for the freedom of individuals to choose their own ends reverses itself into a real obligation to have only commercial ends.[1]

The paradox is that liberals constantly affirm that the market maximizes the chances of each individual to realize his own ends even as they say these ends cannot be defined in advance, and that in the end no one can define them better than the individual himself. But how can you say that the market realizes the optimum when you do not know in what that optimum consists? You might even say the market multiplies the ends of individuals more than it gives them the means of obtaining them, increasing not their satisfaction but their dissatisfaction, in Tocqueville’s sense of the word.

On the other hand, if the individual is always the best judge of his own interests, what can oblige him to respect even a norm of reciprocity — e.g., respect for the “freedom of others?” As Alain Renaut writes, “In the ideal of autonomy, I remain dependent on norms and laws on the condition that I freely accept them.” But why should I accept them? Liberal doctrine wants moral behavior to result no longer from any sense of duty or moral rules, but from self-interest properly understood. Gisèle Souchon writes, “It is because he thinks firstly of his personal interest that the individualist, just as he can unite with others when it appears useful to him, avoids harming them in order to avoid possible retaliation.” By not infringing upon the freedom of others, I dissuade them from infringing upon mine. Fear of the police is supposed to do the rest. But if I can be certain that in breaking this rule I shall be at very little risk of punishment, and reciprocity is a matter of indifference to me, what can prevent me from violating this rule or the law by opposing the desires of others? What prevents me from defying the Kantian principle that the individual ought to be treated as an end, and not merely as a means? Nothing, obviously. Taking only my own interest into account suggests I do so as often as I can.

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith writes,

Though among the different members of the society there should be no mutual love and affection, the society, though less happy and agreeable, will not necessarily be dissolved. Society may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation.[2]

The meaning of this passage is clear. A society can very well economize on — such is the correct term — any form of organic sociality without thereby ceasing to be a society. It must only become a society of merchants: the social bond will then be the sentiment of “utility” and the “self-interested exchange of services.” It is therefore enough to participate in commercial exchange, to make free use of your right to maximize your best interest, in order to be human. Smith says that indeed, such a society will be “less happy and less agreeable,” but the nuance will quickly be forgotten. One might even ask whether for certain liberals the only way to be fully human is not to behave like a merchant; i.e., like those upon whom an inferior status was once conferred, not because they were not regarded as useful and even necessary, but precisely because they were merely useful — that their vision of the world was limited to the value of utility. This obviously raises the status of those who do not behave in this way, whether because it is not to their taste or because they do not have the means to do so. Are they still human?

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The logic of the market imposed itself only gradually starting from the end of the Middle Ages, when long-distance trade and local trade began to be unified within national markets at the instigation of the nation-states then forming. These wanted to monetarize formerly elusive non-commercial forms of exchange within the community in order to raise tax revenue from them. Far from being a universal fact, the market is thus a phenomenon strictly localized in space and time. And this phenomenon, far from being “spontaneous,” was instituted. Formerly, the market was all the less “self-regulating” in that it was embedded within the social realm and framed by the political and even religious realms. Especially in France, but also in Spain and several other countries, the market was not constructed in opposition to the nation-state but thanks to it. The state created the market just as it created money and the economic space that allowed for commercial transactions. The nation-state and the market were born together and proceeded in concert, the former constituting the latter at the same time as it instituted itself. As Alain Caillé writes:

At the very least, we should not consider market and state as two radically different and antagonistic entities, but as two stages in the same process. Historically, national markets and nation-states were built in step with one another, and neither was possible without the other.[3]

In fact, both develop in the same direction. The market amplifies the movement of the national state which, in order to solidify its authority, constantly and methodically destroys all the intermediate forms of socialization which in the feudal world constituted so many relatively autonomous organic structures (clans, village communities, brotherhoods, trade guilds, etc.). The bourgeois class, and nascent liberalism along with it, continues and aggravates this atomization of society insofar as the emancipation of the individual to which it aspires demands the destruction of all unchosen forms of solidarity or dependence, which represent so many obstacles to the extension of the market.

The new form of society that emerges after the end of the Middle Ages thus gradually constructs itself from the individual, from his ethical and political norms and his interests, gradually breaking up the concurrence of political, economic, legal, and even linguistic space that the previous society tended to realize. In the seventeenth century, state and civil society nevertheless continue to coincide: the expression “civil society” is still synonymous with politically organized society. The distinction begins to be made in the eighteenth century, especially with Locke, who redefines civil society as the sphere of property and exchange, the state of “political society” henceforward being dedicated to assuring the protection of merely economic interests. Finding its support in the autonomization of the sphere of production and exchange, and referring to the way the modern state is constructed in terms of its being characterized by the specialization of roles and functions, this distinction leads either to the valorization of a political society issuing from the social contract, as in Locke, or to the exaltation of a civil society based on the spontaneous adjustment of interests, as in Mandeville[4] or Smith. By becoming autonomous, civil society opens the way for the free deployment of the economic logic of interests. This is the meaning of the bourgeois revolution.

By the same token, society takes on the form of an objective order distinct from the natural or cosmic order, which coincides with the universal reason to which the individual is supposed to have immediate access. Its historic objectification is first crystalized in the political doctrine of law, whose development can be followed from Jean Bodin to the Enlightenment. At the same time, political economy imposes itself as a new general science of society, the latter conceived as a process of dynamic development in the sense of “progress.” Henceforward, society must be the object of a specific scientific form of knowledge. Insofar as it accedes to a supposedly rational form of existence in which all practices submit themselves to instrumental rationality as to their ultimate regulatory principle, the social world must follow a certain number of “laws.” But from the very fact of this objectivization, the unity of society along with its integration in a symbolic dimension becomes highly problematic, insofar as the privatization of belonging and attachment is not slow to express itself in the fragmentation of the social body, by the multiplication of conflicting particular interests, and by a beginning of deinstitutionalization. New contradictions will soon appear, not between the society instituted by the bourgeois class and the vestiges of the Ancien Régime, but within the [new] society itself: e.g., the class struggle.

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The distinction between public and private, the state and civil society, sharpens further in the nineteenth century, generalizing a twofold and contradictory apperception of social space. Liberalism, having extended its power, now promotes a “civil society” assimilated to the mere private sphere and denounces the “hegemonic” influence of the public sector, which leads it to plead for the end of state monopolies on the satisfaction of collective needs and for the extending of intra-social commercial forms of regulation. “Civil society,” defining itself less by its own nature than by its opposition to the state, as a vague representation of what is theoretically removed from the state, appears as an ideological operator more than as a precise reality.

Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, however, adjustments must be made to the purely economic regulation and reproduction of society. These adjustments are not so much the result of conservative resistance as of the new social configuration’s internal contradictions. Sociology itself is born of the resistance that real society opposes to political and institutional changes, alongside the appeal to a natural order on the part of those who denounce the new form of social regulation’s formal and artificial character. Among the first sociologists, the rise of individualism gives birth to a double fear: fear of the “anomie” resulting from the disintegration of the social bond in someone like Durkheim, and fear of a “crowd” of atomized individuals suddenly united in an uncontrollable “mass” in others such as Le Bon or Gabriel Tarde (both of whom tend to lead the analysis of social fact back to a “psychology,” or to a sociology of mores). The former will find an echo especially among the counter-revolutionary thinkers, while the latter will be mainly visible within a bourgeoisie concerned above all to protect itself against the “dangerous classes.”

Although the market was born and instituted by the nation-state, the antagonism between liberalism and the “public sector” will grow from this point on. Liberals constantly thunder against the welfare state without realizing that it was the very extension of the market which made increased state intervention inevitable. The man whose labor power is abandoned to the play of the market alone is in fact vulnerable, for it can happen that his labor power does not find a taker on the market, or even that it is worthless. Modern individualism had by this time largely destroyed the organic relations of proximity which were above all relations of mutual assistance and reciprocal solidarity, simultaneously causing the disappearance of the old forms of social protection. If it regulates supply and demand, the market does not regulate social relations, but disorganizes them, if only because it takes no account of the existence of an unmeetable demand. The rise of the welfare state then becomes a necessity, since it alone can correct the most flagrant disequilibria, in order to attenuate the most obvious distress. The welfare state was the response to the rise of individualism that gradually ruined older and more traditional forms of solidarity by seeking to limit social insecurity and compensate for certain inequalities — doing so at the threefold risk of aggravating social atomization further, transforming beneficiaries into dependents, and finding itself confronted with an insoluble problem of financing. This is why, as Karl Polanyi has shown, each time liberalism seems to have won out, we have paradoxically witnessed an increase in state intervention which is made necessary by the damage done to the social tissue by the logic of the market. As Alain Caillé observes, “Without a relative peace brought about by the welfare state, the market order would simply have been swept away.”[5] It is this synergy of market and state that long characterized the Fordist system. “Social protection is the necessary accompaniment of the self-regulating market,” concludes Polanyi.[6]

Insofar as its interventions aim at compensating for the market’s destructive effects, the welfare state hinders in a certain way the “commercialization” of social life. It cannot, however, be an integral substitute for the forms of communitarian protection that collapsed as an effect of industrial development, the rise of individualism, and the expansion of the market. Compared to these old forms of social protection, it displays characteristics that amount to so many limitations on the benefits it can bring. Whereas older forms of solidarity rested upon a mutual exchange of benefits which implied everyone’s responsibility, the welfare state promotes lack of responsibility and transforms members of society into helpless dependents — leaving liberalism free to denounce the rise of “dependency.” Whereas the old forms of solidarity were embedded within a network of concrete relations, the welfare state presents itself as an abstract machinery, anonymous and distant, from which one expects everything while not feeling obliged to do anything. The substitution of an impersonal, external, and opaque solidarity for the old, immediate forms of solidarity is thus far from being satisfactory. On the contrary, it is the source of the welfare state’s present crisis which, by its very nature, seems destined to only be able to implement an economically inefficient and financially increasingly ruinous (because sociologically ill-adapted) sort of solidarity. As Bernard Enjolras writes, “Getting over the internal crisis of the welfare state depends upon rediscovering the conditions under which local solidarity may be produced,” which are also “the conditions for reestablishing the economic bond in order to restore harmony between wealth production and social production.”[7]

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Péguy wrote, “All the degradation of the modern world — i.e., all the cheapening of the modern world — comes from that world which considers as negotiable those values that the ancient and Christian worlds considered non-negotiable.”[8] Liberal ideology bears major responsibility for this degradation insofar as it is based on an unrealistic anthropology and deduces a series of erroneous consequences from this.

The idea that man acts freely and rationally in the market is merely a utopian hypothesis, for economic facts are never autonomous, but relative to a given social and cultural context. There is no economic rationality per se; such rationality is merely the product of a well-determined socio-historic progression. Commercial exchange is not the natural form of social relations, nor even of economic relations. The market is not a universal phenomenon, but a local one. It never realizes the optimal adjustment of supply to demand, if only because it only takes effective demand into account. Society is always more than its individual components, just as a social class is always more than the elements which form it, since it is the class that constitutes them as such, and the class is thus logically and hierarchically distinct from those components, as Russell’s theory of logical types demonstrates (a class cannot be a member of itself, any more than one of its members can constitute the class by himself). Finally, the abstract conception of a disinterested, “decontextualized” individual whose behavior rests upon strictly rational anticipation and who freely chooses his identity based on nothing is an absolutely untenable vision. Communitarian theoreticians, or those close to them (Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandal), have shown the vital importance for individuals of having a community that necessarily constitutes their horizon, their epistēmē — if only in order to develop a critical representation of it — both for the construction of their identity and for the satisfaction of their aims. The common good is the substantial doctrine that defines the way such a community lives, and thus its collective identity.

The entire contemporary crisis comes from the increasingly painful contradiction between the ideal of the universal abstract man, with its corollary of atomization and the depersonalization of social relations, and the reality of the concrete man, for whom the social bond continues to be based on affective bonds and relations of proximity, along with their corollaries of cohesion, consensus, confidence, and reciprocal obligation.

It is liberal societies’ economic dimension that devotes them to “ever more,” insofar as any quantity is always susceptible of increase. This “ever more” is then posited as a new regime of truth: more becomes synonymous with better, and ever more with ever better (this is also one basis of the ideology of progress). Economic growth is perceived as both natural and always desirable, meaning that every form of production deserves to be encouraged, however harmful or useless it may be. Humanity then lives on credit from a nature which is continually impoverished and degraded. Stimulated by the individual aspiration to satisfy any desire, this “ever more” finally results in generalized frustration, contributing to the “psychological pauperization” of a society composed of immature narcissists; this society of emptiness itself become “liquid” (in the words of Zygmunt Bauman) thanks to having rendered everything else liquid.

Marx rightly spoke of the “highly revolutionary role” played in the course of history by the bourgeoisie. He also saw that capitalism, far from being a “conservative” and “patriarchal” economic system — as an archaic Left totally deluded as to its nature stubbornly persists in describing it — actually constitutes a permanent revolutionary force, to the point where “never in the history of humanity has an economic and social system transformed so greatly and so quickly the entire face of the Earth and the very substance of the human soul” (Jean-Claude Michéa). For the logic of capital, anything that obstructs the indefinite extension of commercial exchange is a bar to be broken and a limit to be suppressed, whether in political decision-making, territorial boundaries, moral judgment urging moderation, or cultural tradition favoring skepticism toward innovation. As Pasolini wrote, “From the anthropological point of view, the capitalist revolution demands men without any tie to the past.” Whence the tragic inconsistency of those conservatives, or “national-liberals,” who want to defend both the market system and the “traditional values” that this system continues to bulldoze.

Jean-Claude Michéa, as noted, has shown that the economic liberalism of the “Right” and the social liberalism of the “Left” are destined to join together, for they proceed from the same postulates: “Integral economic liberalism (officially defended by the Right) thus bears within itself a permanent revolution in mores (officially defended by the Left), just as the latter in turn demands the total liberation of the market.”[9] Slogans of May ’68 such as “enjoy without limits” and “it is forbidden to forbid” were typically liberal slogans. The Left today gives way all the more easily to social liberalism in that it has been fully converted to globalized economic liberalism.

Liberal authors believe in the possibility of a society entirely adapted to the values of individualism and the market. This is an illusion. Individualism has never been the model for all social behavior, and can never become so. Better yet, there are good reasons to think individualism can manifest itself in a society insofar as that society remains holist in some fashion. As Louis Dumont writes:

Individualism is incapable of completely replacing holism and reigning over all of society. . . . Moreover, it has never been able to function without holism contributing to its life in an unperceived and somehow clandestine manner.[10]

This is what confers upon liberal ideology its utopian dimension. It would therefore be wrong to see in holism only a legacy of the past necessarily destined to disappear. Even in the age of modern individualism, even in the age of universal commercialization, even in the age of the “atomization of the world” and the mutilation of human existence by the expedients of commercial prostitution and the machinery of profit, man remains a social animal. Holism reappears as soon as — faced with the liberal theory of a “natural harmony of interests” — we recognize the existence of a common good that takes precedence over particular interests.

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Notes

[1] Splendeurs et misères des sciences sociales. Esquisse d’une mythologie (Geneva: Droz, 1986), 347.

[2] Section II, Chapter 3.

[3] Op. cit., 333-334.

[4] Fable of the Bees (1714).

[5] Op. cit., 332.

[6] Op. cit., 265.

[7] “Crise de l’Etat-Providence, lien social et associations: éléments pour une socio-économie critique,” in Revue de MAUSS, 1st semester 1998, 223.

[8] Note conjointe sur M. Descartes [1914] (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

[9] Jean-Claude Michéa, Le complexe d’Orphée: La gauche, les gens ordinaires et la religion du progrès (Paris: Climats, 2011), 216.

[10] Op. cit.