The story goes like this: once upon a time, there were nation-states effectively ruled by aristocrats, and the liberals are the ones pushing for political reforms that lead to the empowerment of the middle and lower classes. And then there’s a big war, a tumultuous peace, and another big war. And liberalism wins! Except in Communist countries. Liberalism fights its way through the second half the twentieth century. When the Soviet Union folds in 1990, liberalism is ascendent at last. This liberalism is what is commonly called neoliberalism.
Liberalism started out in opposition to the political establishment, but eventually came to be the authority. John Rawls Theory of Justice is a representative work of political liberalism as authority. The libertarian position claims to remain true to the original liberalism by maintaining an oppostional stance. I’m describing Rawls as the neoliberal here, and not University of Chicago associated economists.
Rawls’ theory of justice has two principles: the equality principle and the difference principle. The difference principle says that inequality can be justified only as long as they do not make the least advantaged member of society worse off. I was reading a blog recently by a professional philosopher who wrote:
“…Alain Badiou’s account of universalizing from the position of the excluded as a productive alternative to liberalism’s approach. Badiou describes the political subject as the universal that is formed from the eruption of the previously excluded onto the stage. The subject formed out of fidelity to this appearance of what was excluded is the universal political that is universal not from the point of view of the centered subject against which everyone else is measured, but from the point of view of the excluded. Inclusion is not based on the extent to which one measures up to the historically centered but on the extent to which excluding differences become equal to other differences in the process of being faithful to the universality formed out of, among and between the previously excluded.”
[I’m purposely leaving off their name, in case they’d prefer not to associate themselves with this blog]
To me this feels like turning Rawls on his head. It’s not that equality isn’t important – its that it must be approached by bringing those at the margins to the center, throught the inclusion of the excluded. It’s a matter of prioritization, in some sense.
At the end of the piece, the author of the above quotation writes that “our philosophical sentiments tend toward the classically liberal, they tend toward the view that everyone has a right to speak, and that every forum is for everyone, that every question deserves a hearing.”
For me this felt like a kind of clarifying moment: we live in a liberal society – liberalism is the official ideology, the standard of authority. What the author is pointing to in their own writing is a more focused point about how to go about forming a good and useful community blogging space – and a challenge to that space is trolls. Why can’t you stop trolls? Because you’d have to take away their power to speak, which is against the rules of liberalism. Taking a person’s liberty away is basically always wrong under liberalism.
And what that brought me to was the thought that that is a kind of fundamental flaw in liberalism as authority. Because authority is ambiguous under liberalism, it can always be opposed. But if, instead of focusing on authority, you focus at the margins of society, you can remain faithful to the original liberating project of liberalism.
samuel barbour 