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A panoramic view of the rebirth of liberalisms
0305-750X/93
World Development, Vol. 21, No. 8, pp. 1263-1269.1993. Printed in Great Britain.
$6.00 + 0.00
Pergamon Press Ltd
A Panoramic View of the Rebirth of Liberalisms JOSJ? GUILHERME MERQUIOR* Rio de Janiero, Brazil
Summary. - An abundance of liberal theory produced in the last decades of this century has provoked a powerful rebirth of liberalism. The author recommends against aligning with a specific school, advocating instead a return to critics such as Aron, Bobbio or Brittan who,
despite their dispersed and fragmentary
analyses, continue to have contemporary
1. INTRODUCTION A conservative, according to Irving Kristol, is nothing more than a liberal confronted by reality. The very motive of this epigram seems to indicate that the current “trend” in political theory is conservative, but in reality this is not so. Judging by the doctrinal ferment of the 198Os, and even by the shelves of theory in the bookstores of Europe and the United States, the current moment belongs to liberalisms. It is indeed necessary to insist on this plural. Under a label habitually used to classify a Friedrich von Hayek or a Raymond Aron, a John Rawls or a Norberto Bobbio. it is obvious that there is liberalism and liberalism. The same classic word - liberal today refers to the “new look” of the right as well as the most recent version of democratic socialism. Under these conditions, how is the rise of liberalisms to be understood without falling into pure and simple ideological confusion?
2. THE
NATURE
OF POWER
Perhaps it is worth noting the politicalideological atmosphere that surrounds the rebirth of the liberal idea. Formerly, liberalism lived on the defensive, because the imperfect, incomplete and in good part unjust liberal regimes were always compared, with evident disadvantage, to the socialist idea of liberty and justice. But the development of political realities subsequent to WW II, when state socialism was implanted in an authoritarian manner, resulted in the ills of “real socialism” becoming more and more visible. If liberalism has currently taken the offensive in theoretical production, it is due to the fact that its second great historical adversary, socialism, is far from having clean hands and a
relevance.
guiltless heart. Dahrendorf observed that a liberal rarely needs to be ashamed of the realities created in his name. Or, when necessary, he can resort to the consolation that the left illiberal (as even yesterday the right illiberal) possesses many more skeletons in his closet. We can arrive at the same conclusion via a more theoretical path, keeping in mind the evolution of the critique of ower. As I indicated in “0 Argument0 liberal” P the language of the critique of power has basically two transformations, one referring to the “object” and the other to the “nature” of power. With respect to the object, the critique of arbitrary power was first expressed in the language of “class” oppression, and only later was the “individual” victim of illegitimate domination brought in. In the Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie of the commons demanded, and obtained, state rights and privileges. Only much later, with the enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions (American and French), the discourse on liberty would include, together with human rights, the emancipation of the individual. Curiously, Marxism took up this recourse to some degree: it spoke first, above all, of “class” exploitation; later, in the belated post-Marxian Marxism, the theme of alienation was privileged, the subject of which is not strictly the working class, but man and, therefore, the individual. A central issue is the nature of power. There was a conceptual evolution from the critique of “political” power to the questioning of “social” power. The first classics of the liberal doctrine Locke, Montesquieu, Constant were still preoccupied essentially with the problem of *This article was first published in Ciencia Politica. III Trimestre, 1988, under the title ‘Una panoramica de1 renacimiento de 10s liberalismos.’ The translation from the Spanish is by Judy Rein.
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despotism; what obsessed them was the excessive extension of political power and the arbitrariness of government. But with the greatest classics of Victorian liberalism - Tocqueville and Mill the axis of liberal concern shifted toward the “tyranny of the majority,” or toward the evils of a more “social” than political oppression: the weight of mass conformism over the “different” individual, the product of civilization’s progress and glory. The advent of modern tyrannies - the totalitarianisms forced liberal theory to focus on power as political domination. In the past, liberal thought had taken care to defend the institution of the separation of powers as a brake on the despotic potential of political rule. Classic liberalism had perceived that the autocrat was or tended to be principally the head of a “monocracy,” that is, of a situation in which single and absolute power ruled without limits or without changes; and the effective antidote against this ill was the division of authority in institutionalized “powers,” functionally diverse and equally sovereign. In our century, totalitarian regimes caused the same problem, but from a different angle. By concentrating political and economic power in one authority structure - the single party those regimes dug up the ghost of monocracy. From there comes the neoliberal thesis of the indivisibility of freedom, based on the recognition that there cannot be freedom where political and economic decisions remain in the same hands. The preliberal state monopolized ideology (by means of state religions) and the economy (mercantilism). whereas the liberal state only monopolizes, as Weber would have it, the legitimate use of force. The state holds the monopoly of political authority but does not imply or constitute a monocracy of unlimited political-social reach.
3. THE
IDEA
OF JUSTICE
The indivisible freedom thesis represents a sociologically shrewd modern elaboration of the healthy liberal principle of the division of powers. Moreover, modern society, technified and consumerist, not only requires justice: it also demands efficiency; and efficiency, in turn, implies economic freedom, instead of the rigid command economies of the monocratic minotaur. To moral and political liberalism is thus joined, the concurrence of economic freedom. feeding the impulse of liberal rebirth. Economic liberalism still occasionally takes an extreme and violent form, in which antistatism - the most
is converted to generalized lucid position statephobia and not infrequently accompanied by antidemocratic sentiments. Statephobia and antidemocratism are perversions arising from the significant conceptual confusion created by contemporary liberalisms’ positive double, that is, both economic and political, motivation. It is useful to examine both of these distortions briefly. In Western thought, two normative principles of justice govern the interaction among individuals and the organization of institutions. Both date back to Roman law. The first principle states: neminen laedere, do harm to no one. This dictum seeks to protect the independence of the individual, the enjoyment of freedom without impediments understood as the broad sphere of legality, where everything in principle is legally permitted every person always and whenever no harm is caused to the equal right of another. This liberty-legality was defined by Hobbes in Book XIV of Leviathan (1650) as “the absence of external impediments;” Mill was thinking of this when he wrote about the equation happiness = liberty = individual sovereignty in 011 Liberty (1859). The second traditional principle of justice states: suum cuique tribuere, give to each his own, or, that which and as much as he is owed. As evident from its very etymology, it is an eminently distributive rule. Leibniz judged neminen Iaedere sufficient for the regulation of property rights, and suum cuique sufficient for the ordination of the rights of society l&r so&t&~). An examination of the history of political-juridical ideas shows that the crassly ideological liberalism of the Victorian era - of Spencer, for example only took up the neminen laedere, almost completely forgetting the principle of distributive justice. With this, observes Bobbio, public rights were reduced to mere penal rights - and the political theory was mutilated. When Hayek exorcises the idea of social justice -the idea of social justice in itself, not any of its more or less historical materializations - he is reediting Spencer. The excommunication of social justice is not an automatic logical consequence or evident corollary of the Hayekian defense of economic liberalism. It is perfectly possible to defend simultaneously the value of the market and redistributive regulation, as is done elegantly by the British neoliberal Samuel Brittan.’
4. STATEPHOBIA Neoliberals
AND
ANTISTATISM
of the neo-Hayekian
school
have
REBIRTH
OF LIBERALISMS
raised many points in denouncing economic statism. Statism in the economy does not mean bureaucratic pachydermism in productivist regimes that reject the logic of economics; rather, it refers to the tentacular expansion of state enterprises that, far from being the slaves of a political normally behave like impenetrable cupola, economic-financial strongholds, colossal examples of a true bureaucratic feudalism. Industrial statism truly looks bad in terms of performance. It is unrealistic to think that the state can stop managing finances or planning the economy but from there to absorbing the latter, there is a vast distance never traversed with economic success by any modern or modernizing state. The neoliberals of the right, however, do not stop there. Together with economic statism they attempt to make the modern welfare state another bogey-man. They allege that such a illiberal, although system is fundamentally “paternalist.” That may be, replies Bobbio; but it is no less certain that in the industrial cities of the liberal type, those welfare systems were established by democratic governments, under the exigency of popular demands freely articulated in the political market. From this arises the conclusion, to me impeccable, of the Italian thinker: democracy as it is experienced today is a consequence, or at least a prolongation of liberalism; but democratic practice generally led to a state form not at all “minimal” in the ideal sense of classic liberalism. Could it be, as the neoliberal statephobe statephobe and not only anti-statist - would have it, that the welfare and planning state, consequence of democratic freedom, is a a perverse consequence? The most categorical positive answer continues to be Hayek. In the famous The Road to Serfdom (1944), he advanced the thesis that the progressive development of the state in the economy and in society, even if through topical and isolated interventions, fatally institutes totalitarian subjugation over the long term. Nevertheless, the four postwar decades demonstrate that Hayek was mistaken. In the postwar West and Japan, planned capitalism and the welfare state helped to avoid totalitarianism because in a decisive way they contributed to neutralising the political movements advocating an authoritarian socialist model. Hal&y, author of Era of Tyrannies (1938), got it right: totalitarianism was born out of violence and revolution, not of the guiding and providing state circumscribed by the juridical order of institutional liberalism. In societies such as Brazil, I never tire of repeating, the problem of the state does not have one but two sides. The truth is that we have
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simultaneously too much state and too little state. Too much, certainly, in the economy, where in diverse areas the state entered development, slowing movement and carrying out excessive expenditures. We have too little state in the social plane, where so many deficiencies in health, education and housing are scandalous to the point of unacceptability. From this springs in great part the crossfire of a dialogue of the deaf: on the one hand, many (but not all) anti-statists “forget” to foresee our tremendous needs in social welfare; on the other hand, many champions of the “social,” under the pretext of justice and egalitarianism end up making across-theboard condemnations of anti-statist positions, as if they did not include the well-justified criticism of bureaucratic feudalisms in the economic sphere. Amid the agony of the Weimar Republic, Hermann Heller (1891-1933) initiated a fertile renovation of the theory of the state. Heller saved the idea of the state from its Marxist opprobrium, successfully demonstrating that modern society is intrinsically incapable of complete and satisfactory self-organization. With that Hegelian perspective, he sought to go beyond the paleoliberal notion of the guardian state, charged with the preservation of public order; and in its place, introduced the dynamic conceptualization of a social state of law (Soziafer Rechtaat.) The state is effectively the principal, if not the only social mechanism which successfully gave force to law instead of law to force. The neorepublican social state in Brazil proposes exactly that: like Heller’s, it wishes to be social without ceasing for an instant to be a state of law. that is, a juridical-liberal construct. The truly strong state, which is made from authority rather than repression, consists of the rule of law, and knows - as Tancredo Neves says in his neverdelivered inaugural address - that the law, in modern society, is the “social organization of freedom”; of freedom together with justice, without which the former is diminished or suffocated in privilege. But on that point, naturally, there is no justifiable statephobia. Finally, as Kolm’ recalls, liberalism does not mean less state - it means more freedom. Moreover, the social state can be a powerful instrument for the universalization of freedom. It is not coincidental that the embryo of the British welfare state, the famed Beveridge Report, was written in the Reform Club library - the historic temple of Victorian liberalism. Bobbio is correct: the social dimension of democracy, as much as its political aspect, is an unfolding of liberalism.
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DEVELOPMENT
5. NEOCONTRACTUALISM Where do neoliberalisms come out on the question of democracy? Keynes, who so transformed economic liberalism, and in more than one respect belongs to the English line of social liberalism (the current that goes from Mill to Green and Hobhouse at the end of the last century), imagined saving capitalism without deserting democracy. This meant rejecting the Leninist option extinguishing capitalism by sacrificing democracy - as well as the fascist: sacrificing democracy to save capitalism. Commenting on the Keynesian position in The Future of Democracy,’ Bobbio observes that the neoliberalisms in vogue try to achieve the inverse maneuver: they desire to preserve democracy without leaving capitalism. With all due respects to Bobbio, I consider some of the current neoliberalisms to be quite cold with regard to democratic fervor. Even Hayek came to toy with ideas of institutional alternatives to democracy and (in his New Studies) he deems it conceivable that an authoritarian government act on the basis of liberal principles. It would be highly unjust, however, to suggest that the neoliberalisms are all resistant to democracy. An entire strand of today’s liberalisms is nothing more than a restoration of the democratic contractualism that we find in the first classics of democracy, beginning with Rousseau.’ We are in the midst of a renaissance, not just of liberalism, but also of the idea of the social contract. In our polyarchic societies several of the principal decisions are collective deliberations based on agreements of a contractual nature; and the so-called crisis of the welfare providential state has only sharpened the urgency of maintaining and placing tripartite social contracts (business, labor and government) in the primordial position from which they governed, whether expressly or tacitly, the social peace of the “affluent society” from before the recession. The high priest of the neocontractualist perspective is John Rawls. A Harvard professor, he gave US liberals - liberals, as is known, of the left - their ethical-political bible: the popular Theory of Justice (1971). As a prologue to rationally deducing the fundamental principles of a socially just order, Rawls describes a totally hypothetical election situation. He assumes that the citizens, as future parties to the social contract, have available to them minimal information about social reality and about themselves. The Rawlsian contractors know that they live in a world dominated by scarcity of goods and positions, in which conflicts of interest occur for this very reason but a hypothetical “veil of
ignorance” conceals from them all knowledge of their own inclinations, talents or position on the social scale. Each one must choose the social order that is appropriate without knowing if he is rich or poor, capable or incapable, white or black, etc. Rawls’s objective is to deduce a social contract dictated by pure prudence and self-interest from this “blind” election hypothesis; that is, without reflecting any altruism on the part of the contractors. Otherwise, he maintains, the equity of the social contract will be truly persuasive only for the more ethically endowed citizens, but not for all parties to the contract. Given these hypothetical conditions, what would the choice of the contractors be? Being rational persons, attentive to their own interests, they would tend to adopt two principles of justice and equity: first, each individual ought to possess as much freedom as is compatible with the freedom of others (and thus returns our old neminen laedere). Secondly, all inequality ought to be instituted in benefit of the less privileged citizens. Why? Because only in this way - in the uncertainty over the consequences of their choices - the contractors will always want, out of pure prudence, to exaggerate the risk of being individually disadvantaged; and therefore will try to stipulate as just only the situations of inequality that minimize the disadvantages for each, guaranteeing themselves that all inequality will rebound to those least favored by the distribution of advantages. In other words, in a blind vote. the contractors would choose a sort of social security: seeking to reduce to a minimum the possibility of being disadvantaged, the citizens, maximizing this risk, will enter into a social contract of greater equity.
6. THE FAULTS OF NEOCONTRACTUALISM Rawls’s scheme - the maximin social pact, a deliberately abstract parameter of justice - has been criticized from several ideological angles. For many socialists, the scheme sins from insufficient redistribution: it does not go beyond a simple idealization of the current welfare state. But the liberal critics point out other defects. They believe that Rawls’s original hypothesis is an overly restrictive and abstract stylization. For example, in Rawls’s hypothesis, the original position implicitly includes personal attitudes toward risk (the risk of winning or losing in a roulette of life, ending up among the less advantaged). Nevertheless, everything indicates that normally several contractors will opt to take
REBIRTH
OF LIBERALISMS
the risk. They would prefer to subscribe to a social contract that carries a “bet” instead of constituting “security.” The election under the “veil of ignorance” described by Rawls is also too abstract: so abstract, that within it all the contractors think and act alike. The social contracts of classical theory (for example, those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant), did not assume identical contracts. It is not surprising that in later writings Rawls put less emphasis on the “veil of ignorance.” But in the Theory of Justice, by insisting on the purely hypothetical nature of the contract among isolated and uninformed citizens, he gave us everything, except for a realistic theory of modern society and the passions of his children. Happily, what theory denies is offered us by history. The history of political liberalisms provides some solid examples of concrete “social motivated by the rich vegetation of contracts,” interests, and not by the aerial geometry of the calculation of unreal conditions. Sometimes, these social pacts, or sociopolitical alliances, took an accentuatedly liberal-populist form. This was the case of the socializing Coloradism of Bathe, in the Uruguay of the Belle Epoque, or in Edwardian England. The latter has a special significance, because then the liberal-popular experience arose as a response to economic crisis. In the last decades of the 19th century, the British economy faced an industrial decline, with chronic unemployment of unskilled labor. In a context of growing anxiety in the middle-class sectors, the welfare reforms begun between 1906 and WWI as a prelude to the welfare state were led by a liberal party committed to renovating its popular credentials in the face of the challenge from rising syndicalism. Social-liberalism, in the beginning pure academic speculation in Oxford and the London School of Economics, was converted into a social-political lever of irreversible effects. As can be seen in the style of the great leader who emerged from this phase and line of thinking - Lloyd George - liberalism in no way was intimidated by the popular; to the contrary, it was able to simultaneously exploit and conquer it in a creative leap of leadership.
7. CRITICISMS
ON THE
PANORAMA
Keynes, in this a typical social-liberal, accepted the economic intervention of the state and envisioned equilibrium among freedom, efficiency and a considerable dose of social justice. In his view, capitalism was simultaneously the “habitat” of “the variety of life” and most efficient economic mechanism. The theme
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“the variety of life,” whose natural protagonists are “renaissance” personalities such as Keynes himself, was the direct descendant of the liberal humanism of Mill. But the valorization of capitalism’s expansive capacity (that Keynes places well beyond Schumpeter’s elegy for capital’s “suicide”) clearly broke with Mill’s digressions on the ambition of achieving a “stationary state” in the economy. As much as the Keynesian recipes, or those adopted in his hallowed name, have been discredited, today considered inadequate (or even according to some, responsible for the current recessionary-inflationary cycle), I can not stop sympathizing with his historical optimism; it is not necessary to agree with Bobbio, when he points to a restorationist philosophy of history as a substrata of the neoliberalisms of the right. The fanatics of the minimal state do not hesitate in demanding the dismantling of the welfare state, the adoption of private armies, even of private currencies. Robert Nozick, Rawls’s Harvard adversary, author of a classic work on the libertarian right, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), went so far as to compare taxation of profits with forced labor. These neoliberals want to turn back the clock of history. Their vision of history assumes a simplistic model, in which negative phases alternate with positive periods, the recovery of the authority of “wise” eras to correct the “deviations” of the institutionally and ideologically misguided . I confess I prefer the old liberal historicism, in which history is not a scale, but an evolution, made in stages and not in monotonously alternating phases. It should be noted that in contrast to the rest of today’s neo-Victorian liberals, Hayek’s historical vision is more complex. In his work, as Brittan has underscored in the best critical essay written on Hayek,h faith in economic liberalism is combined with a reverence fitting of Burke for the efficiency and wisdom of traditional institutions. The difference (I would add) is that the wise although immemorial institution for the conservative Burke was the oligarchic parliamentary monarchy, which he contrasted with French revolutionary republicanism; whereas for Hayek, the useful and sensible institution par excellence was the market, the same mechanism that, even more than the French Revolution, universally undermined the social hierarchies that Burke tried to preserve. Burke thinks in terms of religious values; Hayek, in evolutionist terms. For him the market is precious, not for constituting the best medium to allocate resources (since that can be accomplished better with computers), but for its ability
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to grapple with uncertainty and the emergence of novelty: previously unknown information, new technology, unexpected consumer reactions, etc. The key word here is not tradition, but progress. If, for liberal historicism, history is evolution. it is not possible to portray this evolution outside the mold of techno-economic progress. It is in this respect, in stressing the functional requirements of the economy, where the neoliberals of the right are correct. The most archaic dogma in our ideological panorama is without a doubt the u priori hostility to economic motivation a refrain that distinguishes post-Marxist radicalism, well represented by someone such as Cornelius Castoriadis. The need for the economy, which implies respect for economic logic, has triumphed and will continue triumphing over all its utopic negations - and no matter how much statism tries to ignore or distort it. I hope that this point has become quite clear: if statophobia is a happy delusion, statism is much more than this - it is an enormous prejudice. For right neoliberalism, economic freedom, besides being necessary is sufficient. It is for this reason that Hayek has been criticized, in the United Kingdom and in the United States, by neoconservatives. For the most eloquent of them, Irving Kristol, it is not enough to demonstrate, like Hayek or Milton Friedman, the positive role of the market. That is not enough, Kristol affirms, to face the challenges of the new left, because the new left swears by romantic values that are expressivist and communitarian, unlike the utilitarian and productivist values of traditional Marxism. In sum. man does not live on bread alone. The same criticism is directed against Hayek from the English new right by the philosophical terror, Roger Scruton, who pontificates in the Salisbury Review. Nevertheless, the neoconservatives - like all those who conceive society in terms of substantive rather than procedural consensus, globally shared values instead of simple agreement about the rules of the game-forget only one detail: no one has ever been able to satisfactorily specify the realm of values beyond bread. Moreover, if they are not able to define it, how can they avoid the uncomfortable impression that in the final analysis, these common values are dictated by the right, in a way that is strangely similar to the operating mode of the ideocratic elites of authoritarian socialism? No - overcoming the manifest insufficiencies of right liberalism does not lie in this false spiritualism. The proper course is to deepen the analysis of what Aron called “liberal democratic synthesis”: adding social rights to the list of civil liberties and political rights that are included in
the valuable legacy of the liberal tradition. In industrial societies with polycentric power structures, heterogeneous and often conflicting demands on the state from society constitute the rule pari passu with competition among parties, at the same time permeated with these same demands. In this way, on the social as well as the political side, industrial polyarchies increasingly live the experience of diverse contracts among diverse forces, institutions and powers. Increasingly, as Bobbio indicates, the privatist logic of the contract invades the public scene and substitutes for or superimposes on the reigning publicist logic. From the political-partisan coalitions to the great social-financial pacts of the Matignon or Moncloa type, the social contract expert fuels the legitimacy of the imperium - of the effective political authority. In other words. there does not appear to be a better means to halt a phenomenon that is highly harmful, yet inherent to a democratic society blessed with stable institutions. I am referring to the tendency observed by Mancur Olson:’ the longer the period during which an industrial country enjoys uninterrupted democratic freedoms, the greater proportion the economic growth rate will suffer due to the action of organized group interests. Brittan agrees with this assessment and calls attention to the paradox that this engenders: democracy eventually experiences the tensions that are a product of freedom, that is, of its own reason for being and it should be observed that the same problem is structurally possible, even probable. in a democratic socialist regime. How can the particularism of these organized interest groups be overcome, or at least partially solved. if not by the negotiated formula of long-range social contracts?
8. WITHOUT PURISMS UNILATERALISMS
OR
The classic image of democracy assumes an individualist conception of society. Today, nonetheless, the politically relevant subjects are collective: government, congress and parties, unions and representative associations of civil society, the church and the armed forces. Where they fail, or mutually condemn themselves to complete impasse, institutions cease to function and the putrefecation of politics produces the emergence of praetorian dominations. preceded or not by chaotic revolutionary upheavals. The hegemony of the group as political actor naturally creates anguish for libertarian democracy; and it is true that a great number of democrats
REBIRTH
have
a libertarian
enthusiast
for
the
soul. expansion
How
is one
of social
OF LIBERALISMS
to be an contracts,
when it is recognized that they are largely encased and conditioned by the intractable power of the technocracy (indispensable to the management of the modern economy) and the bureaucracy (generated, in large part, by the very pressure of social demands on the state)? At heart, the prestige of neocontractualism only makes virtue of necessity, since, in part, it hardly covers the ungovernabihty of this complex and contradictory animal: the technological republic. At the same time, the absence or impossibility of the optimum does not impede the recognition of the best. If all industrial societies are necessarily technocratic and bureaucratic, they are not so all in the same way. One difference continues to be decisive: that which separates the demotechnocracies, or demobureaucracies, liberal hybrids, in spite of everything, from the liberal ideocracies and, as is well understood, not at all democratic. Why then are we not content to admire the fact that liberalisms are alive and rejuvenated? The important thing is to know how to choose among them. In my view, the grand theoretical architectures, h la Hayek (on the right) or Rawls (on the center-left) are less
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penetrating and revealing - especially for the construction of freedom in developing countries - than the fragmentary and disperse yet always lucid analysis of thinkers such as Aron, Bobbio or Brittan, all of whom are liberals without purisms or unilateralisms and without regressive capriciousness. These political liberalisms inclination, or proto social
of social democratic democratic, such as
Uruguayan
Batllism and the post-Gladstonian of the British liberal party, constitute historical paradigms of social-liberalism. The social-liberal model’s pertinence to our current political situation is evident. Finally, as the social-liberal Celso Lafer observes in a beautiful and pioneering meditation on the Bobbian analysis of neocontractualism,x the expansionism of the state in Brazil did not come out of social demand, but from the logic of authoritarianism; and for the same reason, the liberal message of greatest resonance among us has not been the criticism of social democracy, but of the bureaucratic-authoritarian colossus. To repeat, although at the risk of becoming fastidious: our best liberalism is not nor need to be stratephobia; it is hardly - and here, with increasing vigor - antistatist. renouveau
NOTES 1.
Merquior
(1983).
2.
Brittan (1983).
3.
Kolm
4.
Bobbio
5. For (1980).
(1985). (1987).
a more
6.
Hayek
7.
Olson
(1982)
8.
Lafer
(1984).
thorough
analysis
see
Merquior
(1944).
REFERENCES Bobbio, Norberto, The Future of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Brittan, Samuel, Times Literary Supplement (March 9, 1984). Brittan, Samuel, The Role and the Limits of Government: Essays in Political Economy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Hayek, F., New Studies in Philosophy: Political, Economic and Historical Ideas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978). Hayek. F., The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1944). Helevy, E., The Era of Tyrannies (Garden City: Anchor, 1965).
Kolm, Serge-Christophe, Le Contrat Sociaie Liberal (Paris: Presse Universitaire Francaise, 1985). Lafer, Celso, Liberalismo. contractualismo y pact0 social (1984). Merquior, Jose Guilherme, “0 Argument0 liberal,” Nova Fronteira (1983). pp. 99-104. Merquior, Jose Guilherme, Rousseau and Weber (1980). Nozik, R., Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Olson, Mancur, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Rawls, John, Theory of justice (Cambridge: Belnap Press, 1971).
World Development, Vol. 21, No. 8, pp. 1263-1269.1993. Printed in Great Britain.
$6.00 + 0.00
Pergamon Press Ltd
A Panoramic View of the Rebirth of Liberalisms JOSJ? GUILHERME MERQUIOR* Rio de Janiero, Brazil
Summary. - An abundance of liberal theory produced in the last decades of this century has provoked a powerful rebirth of liberalism. The author recommends against aligning with a specific school, advocating instead a return to critics such as Aron, Bobbio or Brittan who,
despite their dispersed and fragmentary
analyses, continue to have contemporary
1. INTRODUCTION A conservative, according to Irving Kristol, is nothing more than a liberal confronted by reality. The very motive of this epigram seems to indicate that the current “trend” in political theory is conservative, but in reality this is not so. Judging by the doctrinal ferment of the 198Os, and even by the shelves of theory in the bookstores of Europe and the United States, the current moment belongs to liberalisms. It is indeed necessary to insist on this plural. Under a label habitually used to classify a Friedrich von Hayek or a Raymond Aron, a John Rawls or a Norberto Bobbio. it is obvious that there is liberalism and liberalism. The same classic word - liberal today refers to the “new look” of the right as well as the most recent version of democratic socialism. Under these conditions, how is the rise of liberalisms to be understood without falling into pure and simple ideological confusion?
2. THE
NATURE
OF POWER
Perhaps it is worth noting the politicalideological atmosphere that surrounds the rebirth of the liberal idea. Formerly, liberalism lived on the defensive, because the imperfect, incomplete and in good part unjust liberal regimes were always compared, with evident disadvantage, to the socialist idea of liberty and justice. But the development of political realities subsequent to WW II, when state socialism was implanted in an authoritarian manner, resulted in the ills of “real socialism” becoming more and more visible. If liberalism has currently taken the offensive in theoretical production, it is due to the fact that its second great historical adversary, socialism, is far from having clean hands and a
relevance.
guiltless heart. Dahrendorf observed that a liberal rarely needs to be ashamed of the realities created in his name. Or, when necessary, he can resort to the consolation that the left illiberal (as even yesterday the right illiberal) possesses many more skeletons in his closet. We can arrive at the same conclusion via a more theoretical path, keeping in mind the evolution of the critique of ower. As I indicated in “0 Argument0 liberal” P the language of the critique of power has basically two transformations, one referring to the “object” and the other to the “nature” of power. With respect to the object, the critique of arbitrary power was first expressed in the language of “class” oppression, and only later was the “individual” victim of illegitimate domination brought in. In the Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie of the commons demanded, and obtained, state rights and privileges. Only much later, with the enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions (American and French), the discourse on liberty would include, together with human rights, the emancipation of the individual. Curiously, Marxism took up this recourse to some degree: it spoke first, above all, of “class” exploitation; later, in the belated post-Marxian Marxism, the theme of alienation was privileged, the subject of which is not strictly the working class, but man and, therefore, the individual. A central issue is the nature of power. There was a conceptual evolution from the critique of “political” power to the questioning of “social” power. The first classics of the liberal doctrine Locke, Montesquieu, Constant were still preoccupied essentially with the problem of *This article was first published in Ciencia Politica. III Trimestre, 1988, under the title ‘Una panoramica de1 renacimiento de 10s liberalismos.’ The translation from the Spanish is by Judy Rein.
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despotism; what obsessed them was the excessive extension of political power and the arbitrariness of government. But with the greatest classics of Victorian liberalism - Tocqueville and Mill the axis of liberal concern shifted toward the “tyranny of the majority,” or toward the evils of a more “social” than political oppression: the weight of mass conformism over the “different” individual, the product of civilization’s progress and glory. The advent of modern tyrannies - the totalitarianisms forced liberal theory to focus on power as political domination. In the past, liberal thought had taken care to defend the institution of the separation of powers as a brake on the despotic potential of political rule. Classic liberalism had perceived that the autocrat was or tended to be principally the head of a “monocracy,” that is, of a situation in which single and absolute power ruled without limits or without changes; and the effective antidote against this ill was the division of authority in institutionalized “powers,” functionally diverse and equally sovereign. In our century, totalitarian regimes caused the same problem, but from a different angle. By concentrating political and economic power in one authority structure - the single party those regimes dug up the ghost of monocracy. From there comes the neoliberal thesis of the indivisibility of freedom, based on the recognition that there cannot be freedom where political and economic decisions remain in the same hands. The preliberal state monopolized ideology (by means of state religions) and the economy (mercantilism). whereas the liberal state only monopolizes, as Weber would have it, the legitimate use of force. The state holds the monopoly of political authority but does not imply or constitute a monocracy of unlimited political-social reach.
3. THE
IDEA
OF JUSTICE
The indivisible freedom thesis represents a sociologically shrewd modern elaboration of the healthy liberal principle of the division of powers. Moreover, modern society, technified and consumerist, not only requires justice: it also demands efficiency; and efficiency, in turn, implies economic freedom, instead of the rigid command economies of the monocratic minotaur. To moral and political liberalism is thus joined, the concurrence of economic freedom. feeding the impulse of liberal rebirth. Economic liberalism still occasionally takes an extreme and violent form, in which antistatism - the most
is converted to generalized lucid position statephobia and not infrequently accompanied by antidemocratic sentiments. Statephobia and antidemocratism are perversions arising from the significant conceptual confusion created by contemporary liberalisms’ positive double, that is, both economic and political, motivation. It is useful to examine both of these distortions briefly. In Western thought, two normative principles of justice govern the interaction among individuals and the organization of institutions. Both date back to Roman law. The first principle states: neminen laedere, do harm to no one. This dictum seeks to protect the independence of the individual, the enjoyment of freedom without impediments understood as the broad sphere of legality, where everything in principle is legally permitted every person always and whenever no harm is caused to the equal right of another. This liberty-legality was defined by Hobbes in Book XIV of Leviathan (1650) as “the absence of external impediments;” Mill was thinking of this when he wrote about the equation happiness = liberty = individual sovereignty in 011 Liberty (1859). The second traditional principle of justice states: suum cuique tribuere, give to each his own, or, that which and as much as he is owed. As evident from its very etymology, it is an eminently distributive rule. Leibniz judged neminen Iaedere sufficient for the regulation of property rights, and suum cuique sufficient for the ordination of the rights of society l&r so&t&~). An examination of the history of political-juridical ideas shows that the crassly ideological liberalism of the Victorian era - of Spencer, for example only took up the neminen laedere, almost completely forgetting the principle of distributive justice. With this, observes Bobbio, public rights were reduced to mere penal rights - and the political theory was mutilated. When Hayek exorcises the idea of social justice -the idea of social justice in itself, not any of its more or less historical materializations - he is reediting Spencer. The excommunication of social justice is not an automatic logical consequence or evident corollary of the Hayekian defense of economic liberalism. It is perfectly possible to defend simultaneously the value of the market and redistributive regulation, as is done elegantly by the British neoliberal Samuel Brittan.’
4. STATEPHOBIA Neoliberals
AND
ANTISTATISM
of the neo-Hayekian
school
have
REBIRTH
OF LIBERALISMS
raised many points in denouncing economic statism. Statism in the economy does not mean bureaucratic pachydermism in productivist regimes that reject the logic of economics; rather, it refers to the tentacular expansion of state enterprises that, far from being the slaves of a political normally behave like impenetrable cupola, economic-financial strongholds, colossal examples of a true bureaucratic feudalism. Industrial statism truly looks bad in terms of performance. It is unrealistic to think that the state can stop managing finances or planning the economy but from there to absorbing the latter, there is a vast distance never traversed with economic success by any modern or modernizing state. The neoliberals of the right, however, do not stop there. Together with economic statism they attempt to make the modern welfare state another bogey-man. They allege that such a illiberal, although system is fundamentally “paternalist.” That may be, replies Bobbio; but it is no less certain that in the industrial cities of the liberal type, those welfare systems were established by democratic governments, under the exigency of popular demands freely articulated in the political market. From this arises the conclusion, to me impeccable, of the Italian thinker: democracy as it is experienced today is a consequence, or at least a prolongation of liberalism; but democratic practice generally led to a state form not at all “minimal” in the ideal sense of classic liberalism. Could it be, as the neoliberal statephobe statephobe and not only anti-statist - would have it, that the welfare and planning state, consequence of democratic freedom, is a a perverse consequence? The most categorical positive answer continues to be Hayek. In the famous The Road to Serfdom (1944), he advanced the thesis that the progressive development of the state in the economy and in society, even if through topical and isolated interventions, fatally institutes totalitarian subjugation over the long term. Nevertheless, the four postwar decades demonstrate that Hayek was mistaken. In the postwar West and Japan, planned capitalism and the welfare state helped to avoid totalitarianism because in a decisive way they contributed to neutralising the political movements advocating an authoritarian socialist model. Hal&y, author of Era of Tyrannies (1938), got it right: totalitarianism was born out of violence and revolution, not of the guiding and providing state circumscribed by the juridical order of institutional liberalism. In societies such as Brazil, I never tire of repeating, the problem of the state does not have one but two sides. The truth is that we have
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simultaneously too much state and too little state. Too much, certainly, in the economy, where in diverse areas the state entered development, slowing movement and carrying out excessive expenditures. We have too little state in the social plane, where so many deficiencies in health, education and housing are scandalous to the point of unacceptability. From this springs in great part the crossfire of a dialogue of the deaf: on the one hand, many (but not all) anti-statists “forget” to foresee our tremendous needs in social welfare; on the other hand, many champions of the “social,” under the pretext of justice and egalitarianism end up making across-theboard condemnations of anti-statist positions, as if they did not include the well-justified criticism of bureaucratic feudalisms in the economic sphere. Amid the agony of the Weimar Republic, Hermann Heller (1891-1933) initiated a fertile renovation of the theory of the state. Heller saved the idea of the state from its Marxist opprobrium, successfully demonstrating that modern society is intrinsically incapable of complete and satisfactory self-organization. With that Hegelian perspective, he sought to go beyond the paleoliberal notion of the guardian state, charged with the preservation of public order; and in its place, introduced the dynamic conceptualization of a social state of law (Soziafer Rechtaat.) The state is effectively the principal, if not the only social mechanism which successfully gave force to law instead of law to force. The neorepublican social state in Brazil proposes exactly that: like Heller’s, it wishes to be social without ceasing for an instant to be a state of law. that is, a juridical-liberal construct. The truly strong state, which is made from authority rather than repression, consists of the rule of law, and knows - as Tancredo Neves says in his neverdelivered inaugural address - that the law, in modern society, is the “social organization of freedom”; of freedom together with justice, without which the former is diminished or suffocated in privilege. But on that point, naturally, there is no justifiable statephobia. Finally, as Kolm’ recalls, liberalism does not mean less state - it means more freedom. Moreover, the social state can be a powerful instrument for the universalization of freedom. It is not coincidental that the embryo of the British welfare state, the famed Beveridge Report, was written in the Reform Club library - the historic temple of Victorian liberalism. Bobbio is correct: the social dimension of democracy, as much as its political aspect, is an unfolding of liberalism.
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5. NEOCONTRACTUALISM Where do neoliberalisms come out on the question of democracy? Keynes, who so transformed economic liberalism, and in more than one respect belongs to the English line of social liberalism (the current that goes from Mill to Green and Hobhouse at the end of the last century), imagined saving capitalism without deserting democracy. This meant rejecting the Leninist option extinguishing capitalism by sacrificing democracy - as well as the fascist: sacrificing democracy to save capitalism. Commenting on the Keynesian position in The Future of Democracy,’ Bobbio observes that the neoliberalisms in vogue try to achieve the inverse maneuver: they desire to preserve democracy without leaving capitalism. With all due respects to Bobbio, I consider some of the current neoliberalisms to be quite cold with regard to democratic fervor. Even Hayek came to toy with ideas of institutional alternatives to democracy and (in his New Studies) he deems it conceivable that an authoritarian government act on the basis of liberal principles. It would be highly unjust, however, to suggest that the neoliberalisms are all resistant to democracy. An entire strand of today’s liberalisms is nothing more than a restoration of the democratic contractualism that we find in the first classics of democracy, beginning with Rousseau.’ We are in the midst of a renaissance, not just of liberalism, but also of the idea of the social contract. In our polyarchic societies several of the principal decisions are collective deliberations based on agreements of a contractual nature; and the so-called crisis of the welfare providential state has only sharpened the urgency of maintaining and placing tripartite social contracts (business, labor and government) in the primordial position from which they governed, whether expressly or tacitly, the social peace of the “affluent society” from before the recession. The high priest of the neocontractualist perspective is John Rawls. A Harvard professor, he gave US liberals - liberals, as is known, of the left - their ethical-political bible: the popular Theory of Justice (1971). As a prologue to rationally deducing the fundamental principles of a socially just order, Rawls describes a totally hypothetical election situation. He assumes that the citizens, as future parties to the social contract, have available to them minimal information about social reality and about themselves. The Rawlsian contractors know that they live in a world dominated by scarcity of goods and positions, in which conflicts of interest occur for this very reason but a hypothetical “veil of
ignorance” conceals from them all knowledge of their own inclinations, talents or position on the social scale. Each one must choose the social order that is appropriate without knowing if he is rich or poor, capable or incapable, white or black, etc. Rawls’s objective is to deduce a social contract dictated by pure prudence and self-interest from this “blind” election hypothesis; that is, without reflecting any altruism on the part of the contractors. Otherwise, he maintains, the equity of the social contract will be truly persuasive only for the more ethically endowed citizens, but not for all parties to the contract. Given these hypothetical conditions, what would the choice of the contractors be? Being rational persons, attentive to their own interests, they would tend to adopt two principles of justice and equity: first, each individual ought to possess as much freedom as is compatible with the freedom of others (and thus returns our old neminen laedere). Secondly, all inequality ought to be instituted in benefit of the less privileged citizens. Why? Because only in this way - in the uncertainty over the consequences of their choices - the contractors will always want, out of pure prudence, to exaggerate the risk of being individually disadvantaged; and therefore will try to stipulate as just only the situations of inequality that minimize the disadvantages for each, guaranteeing themselves that all inequality will rebound to those least favored by the distribution of advantages. In other words, in a blind vote. the contractors would choose a sort of social security: seeking to reduce to a minimum the possibility of being disadvantaged, the citizens, maximizing this risk, will enter into a social contract of greater equity.
6. THE FAULTS OF NEOCONTRACTUALISM Rawls’s scheme - the maximin social pact, a deliberately abstract parameter of justice - has been criticized from several ideological angles. For many socialists, the scheme sins from insufficient redistribution: it does not go beyond a simple idealization of the current welfare state. But the liberal critics point out other defects. They believe that Rawls’s original hypothesis is an overly restrictive and abstract stylization. For example, in Rawls’s hypothesis, the original position implicitly includes personal attitudes toward risk (the risk of winning or losing in a roulette of life, ending up among the less advantaged). Nevertheless, everything indicates that normally several contractors will opt to take
REBIRTH
OF LIBERALISMS
the risk. They would prefer to subscribe to a social contract that carries a “bet” instead of constituting “security.” The election under the “veil of ignorance” described by Rawls is also too abstract: so abstract, that within it all the contractors think and act alike. The social contracts of classical theory (for example, those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant), did not assume identical contracts. It is not surprising that in later writings Rawls put less emphasis on the “veil of ignorance.” But in the Theory of Justice, by insisting on the purely hypothetical nature of the contract among isolated and uninformed citizens, he gave us everything, except for a realistic theory of modern society and the passions of his children. Happily, what theory denies is offered us by history. The history of political liberalisms provides some solid examples of concrete “social motivated by the rich vegetation of contracts,” interests, and not by the aerial geometry of the calculation of unreal conditions. Sometimes, these social pacts, or sociopolitical alliances, took an accentuatedly liberal-populist form. This was the case of the socializing Coloradism of Bathe, in the Uruguay of the Belle Epoque, or in Edwardian England. The latter has a special significance, because then the liberal-popular experience arose as a response to economic crisis. In the last decades of the 19th century, the British economy faced an industrial decline, with chronic unemployment of unskilled labor. In a context of growing anxiety in the middle-class sectors, the welfare reforms begun between 1906 and WWI as a prelude to the welfare state were led by a liberal party committed to renovating its popular credentials in the face of the challenge from rising syndicalism. Social-liberalism, in the beginning pure academic speculation in Oxford and the London School of Economics, was converted into a social-political lever of irreversible effects. As can be seen in the style of the great leader who emerged from this phase and line of thinking - Lloyd George - liberalism in no way was intimidated by the popular; to the contrary, it was able to simultaneously exploit and conquer it in a creative leap of leadership.
7. CRITICISMS
ON THE
PANORAMA
Keynes, in this a typical social-liberal, accepted the economic intervention of the state and envisioned equilibrium among freedom, efficiency and a considerable dose of social justice. In his view, capitalism was simultaneously the “habitat” of “the variety of life” and most efficient economic mechanism. The theme
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“the variety of life,” whose natural protagonists are “renaissance” personalities such as Keynes himself, was the direct descendant of the liberal humanism of Mill. But the valorization of capitalism’s expansive capacity (that Keynes places well beyond Schumpeter’s elegy for capital’s “suicide”) clearly broke with Mill’s digressions on the ambition of achieving a “stationary state” in the economy. As much as the Keynesian recipes, or those adopted in his hallowed name, have been discredited, today considered inadequate (or even according to some, responsible for the current recessionary-inflationary cycle), I can not stop sympathizing with his historical optimism; it is not necessary to agree with Bobbio, when he points to a restorationist philosophy of history as a substrata of the neoliberalisms of the right. The fanatics of the minimal state do not hesitate in demanding the dismantling of the welfare state, the adoption of private armies, even of private currencies. Robert Nozick, Rawls’s Harvard adversary, author of a classic work on the libertarian right, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), went so far as to compare taxation of profits with forced labor. These neoliberals want to turn back the clock of history. Their vision of history assumes a simplistic model, in which negative phases alternate with positive periods, the recovery of the authority of “wise” eras to correct the “deviations” of the institutionally and ideologically misguided . I confess I prefer the old liberal historicism, in which history is not a scale, but an evolution, made in stages and not in monotonously alternating phases. It should be noted that in contrast to the rest of today’s neo-Victorian liberals, Hayek’s historical vision is more complex. In his work, as Brittan has underscored in the best critical essay written on Hayek,h faith in economic liberalism is combined with a reverence fitting of Burke for the efficiency and wisdom of traditional institutions. The difference (I would add) is that the wise although immemorial institution for the conservative Burke was the oligarchic parliamentary monarchy, which he contrasted with French revolutionary republicanism; whereas for Hayek, the useful and sensible institution par excellence was the market, the same mechanism that, even more than the French Revolution, universally undermined the social hierarchies that Burke tried to preserve. Burke thinks in terms of religious values; Hayek, in evolutionist terms. For him the market is precious, not for constituting the best medium to allocate resources (since that can be accomplished better with computers), but for its ability
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to grapple with uncertainty and the emergence of novelty: previously unknown information, new technology, unexpected consumer reactions, etc. The key word here is not tradition, but progress. If, for liberal historicism, history is evolution. it is not possible to portray this evolution outside the mold of techno-economic progress. It is in this respect, in stressing the functional requirements of the economy, where the neoliberals of the right are correct. The most archaic dogma in our ideological panorama is without a doubt the u priori hostility to economic motivation a refrain that distinguishes post-Marxist radicalism, well represented by someone such as Cornelius Castoriadis. The need for the economy, which implies respect for economic logic, has triumphed and will continue triumphing over all its utopic negations - and no matter how much statism tries to ignore or distort it. I hope that this point has become quite clear: if statophobia is a happy delusion, statism is much more than this - it is an enormous prejudice. For right neoliberalism, economic freedom, besides being necessary is sufficient. It is for this reason that Hayek has been criticized, in the United Kingdom and in the United States, by neoconservatives. For the most eloquent of them, Irving Kristol, it is not enough to demonstrate, like Hayek or Milton Friedman, the positive role of the market. That is not enough, Kristol affirms, to face the challenges of the new left, because the new left swears by romantic values that are expressivist and communitarian, unlike the utilitarian and productivist values of traditional Marxism. In sum. man does not live on bread alone. The same criticism is directed against Hayek from the English new right by the philosophical terror, Roger Scruton, who pontificates in the Salisbury Review. Nevertheless, the neoconservatives - like all those who conceive society in terms of substantive rather than procedural consensus, globally shared values instead of simple agreement about the rules of the game-forget only one detail: no one has ever been able to satisfactorily specify the realm of values beyond bread. Moreover, if they are not able to define it, how can they avoid the uncomfortable impression that in the final analysis, these common values are dictated by the right, in a way that is strangely similar to the operating mode of the ideocratic elites of authoritarian socialism? No - overcoming the manifest insufficiencies of right liberalism does not lie in this false spiritualism. The proper course is to deepen the analysis of what Aron called “liberal democratic synthesis”: adding social rights to the list of civil liberties and political rights that are included in
the valuable legacy of the liberal tradition. In industrial societies with polycentric power structures, heterogeneous and often conflicting demands on the state from society constitute the rule pari passu with competition among parties, at the same time permeated with these same demands. In this way, on the social as well as the political side, industrial polyarchies increasingly live the experience of diverse contracts among diverse forces, institutions and powers. Increasingly, as Bobbio indicates, the privatist logic of the contract invades the public scene and substitutes for or superimposes on the reigning publicist logic. From the political-partisan coalitions to the great social-financial pacts of the Matignon or Moncloa type, the social contract expert fuels the legitimacy of the imperium - of the effective political authority. In other words. there does not appear to be a better means to halt a phenomenon that is highly harmful, yet inherent to a democratic society blessed with stable institutions. I am referring to the tendency observed by Mancur Olson:’ the longer the period during which an industrial country enjoys uninterrupted democratic freedoms, the greater proportion the economic growth rate will suffer due to the action of organized group interests. Brittan agrees with this assessment and calls attention to the paradox that this engenders: democracy eventually experiences the tensions that are a product of freedom, that is, of its own reason for being and it should be observed that the same problem is structurally possible, even probable. in a democratic socialist regime. How can the particularism of these organized interest groups be overcome, or at least partially solved. if not by the negotiated formula of long-range social contracts?
8. WITHOUT PURISMS UNILATERALISMS
OR
The classic image of democracy assumes an individualist conception of society. Today, nonetheless, the politically relevant subjects are collective: government, congress and parties, unions and representative associations of civil society, the church and the armed forces. Where they fail, or mutually condemn themselves to complete impasse, institutions cease to function and the putrefecation of politics produces the emergence of praetorian dominations. preceded or not by chaotic revolutionary upheavals. The hegemony of the group as political actor naturally creates anguish for libertarian democracy; and it is true that a great number of democrats
REBIRTH
have
a libertarian
enthusiast
for
the
soul. expansion
How
is one
of social
OF LIBERALISMS
to be an contracts,
when it is recognized that they are largely encased and conditioned by the intractable power of the technocracy (indispensable to the management of the modern economy) and the bureaucracy (generated, in large part, by the very pressure of social demands on the state)? At heart, the prestige of neocontractualism only makes virtue of necessity, since, in part, it hardly covers the ungovernabihty of this complex and contradictory animal: the technological republic. At the same time, the absence or impossibility of the optimum does not impede the recognition of the best. If all industrial societies are necessarily technocratic and bureaucratic, they are not so all in the same way. One difference continues to be decisive: that which separates the demotechnocracies, or demobureaucracies, liberal hybrids, in spite of everything, from the liberal ideocracies and, as is well understood, not at all democratic. Why then are we not content to admire the fact that liberalisms are alive and rejuvenated? The important thing is to know how to choose among them. In my view, the grand theoretical architectures, h la Hayek (on the right) or Rawls (on the center-left) are less
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penetrating and revealing - especially for the construction of freedom in developing countries - than the fragmentary and disperse yet always lucid analysis of thinkers such as Aron, Bobbio or Brittan, all of whom are liberals without purisms or unilateralisms and without regressive capriciousness. These political liberalisms inclination, or proto social
of social democratic democratic, such as
Uruguayan
Batllism and the post-Gladstonian of the British liberal party, constitute historical paradigms of social-liberalism. The social-liberal model’s pertinence to our current political situation is evident. Finally, as the social-liberal Celso Lafer observes in a beautiful and pioneering meditation on the Bobbian analysis of neocontractualism,x the expansionism of the state in Brazil did not come out of social demand, but from the logic of authoritarianism; and for the same reason, the liberal message of greatest resonance among us has not been the criticism of social democracy, but of the bureaucratic-authoritarian colossus. To repeat, although at the risk of becoming fastidious: our best liberalism is not nor need to be stratephobia; it is hardly - and here, with increasing vigor - antistatist. renouveau
NOTES 1.
Merquior
(1983).
2.
Brittan (1983).
3.
Kolm
4.
Bobbio
5. For (1980).
(1985). (1987).
a more
6.
Hayek
7.
Olson
(1982)
8.
Lafer
(1984).
thorough
analysis
see
Merquior
(1944).
REFERENCES Bobbio, Norberto, The Future of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Brittan, Samuel, Times Literary Supplement (March 9, 1984). Brittan, Samuel, The Role and the Limits of Government: Essays in Political Economy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Hayek, F., New Studies in Philosophy: Political, Economic and Historical Ideas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978). Hayek. F., The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1944). Helevy, E., The Era of Tyrannies (Garden City: Anchor, 1965).
Kolm, Serge-Christophe, Le Contrat Sociaie Liberal (Paris: Presse Universitaire Francaise, 1985). Lafer, Celso, Liberalismo. contractualismo y pact0 social (1984). Merquior, Jose Guilherme, “0 Argument0 liberal,” Nova Fronteira (1983). pp. 99-104. Merquior, Jose Guilherme, Rousseau and Weber (1980). Nozik, R., Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Olson, Mancur, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Rawls, John, Theory of justice (Cambridge: Belnap Press, 1971).