This is a thoughtful, inspiring, and future -focused post. Thank you for it.
At the same time, it's inspired in me a bit of a fond nostalgia for Olden Times, when I would go down to the street to the bar, have a beer, and read the most recent several hundred comments on Crooked Timber about what, exactly, neoliberalism is.
How nice it is, now, after all the intervening wandering in the wilderness, to be able to see a more Promising shape of what could come next.
This was, genuinely, one of the most exciting things for me to read this year. Henry Farrell has written a few posts that have touched on questions I was already mulling over and helped clarify the nature of the problem.
In this case, I had been thinking about why it is that, right now, that there's particular interest and attention to the question of, "what can we do to help build a government that is better able to achieve the goals it sets out?" Farrell not only offers a good answer but looks ahead to spot some of the tensions in the different paths people are taking to solve the problem.
The post has a somewhat lengthy initial stage-setting but after that I found it a thrilling read.
Thanks for writing this. Definitely going to share it with a few people. I think it'll be especially useful when talking to younger leftists as from about my age cohort on down there seems to be a bad habit of conflating neoliberalism and liberalism, for inverse reasons than Matt Yglesias does, which means that this piece, along with a few from people like Hamilton Nolan and Cory Doctorow, seem like they'd be especially good for getting young firebrands to direct their anger towards figuring out solutions. I think I'll have another comment on the actual content once I think it through a bit because there definitely seem to be several other interesting parallel typologies contiguous to do this.
Is there another that could be called, loosely, reframing system models? Donella Meadows was right when she said that the biggest point of leverage in a system is not its rules or parts but the stories we tell about it. It wasn't (just) Thatcher and Reagan's policies that remade the system in the 80s. It was a set of new beliefs about shareholder value, small state etc; etc; There are, I think, lots of new narratives vying to replace these mental models (degrowth, MMT, doughnut economics, Chinese state capitalism) but none has the allure or simplicity of Marxist doctrine, religious belief or Hayekian cod-evolutionary theory. Governments can do big things and good things but if belief systems don't change, then these advances will be rejected (see Biden's popularity ratings). Governments should probably do all the things you highlight - run big moonshot projects, build sensory mechanisms - red levers / andon cords into as many complex systems as possible, use big data to see further into the murk, use a combination of bottom up markets & top down steering ... but all these things will fail until we can loosen the grip of 'selfish gene' ideology on our culture. We know enough now to make a case for cultural group selection. For top down organising principles that favour the survival of the species over individual parts of the species. This doesn't mean authoritarian utilitarianism - it means, I think, nesting variation & novelty (markets) within a broader goal of improving social outcomes (longevity, human connections, health & agency). This may mean a redesign of all sorts of institutions - elections, local democracy, currencies, Ricardian models of trade, accounting standards (that favour resilience / energy use over profit), but until we change the beliefs, I can't see us changing the system quickly enough to avoid the impending financial / climate tipping points.
You wrote in the beginning that you wanted to "emphasize the enormous variety of liberal thought, stretching from some kinds of socialism on the left" but I couldn't help but noticing that none of the post-neoliberal ideas you discussed turns out to be socialist.
Is this because you have a blind spot there, socialism hasn't needed to update it prescriptions, or liberalism needs to redefine its brand after having been taken over by neoliberalism for decades?
That's an interesting comment. What I'd say in return that apart from the 'repurposed neoliberalism,' more or less by definition, none of the approaches are necessarily libertarian/right-leaning either. It would be interesting to think about some of the Red-Plenty-Could-Have-Worked-Dammit people in comparison to these accounts - Leigh Phillips/Michal Rozworski and that Half-Earth Socialism book - but I personally think (as does as committed a Marxist as Richard Seymour! - https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/06/half-earth-socialism-review-utopia-climate-crisis ) that they claim far too much for the joys of planning, waving away the associated problems. The most interesting socialism-meets-liberal-state-capacity thinking that I know of is coming from Suresh Naidu, mentioned towards the end, but since it is currently in the form of samizdat PowerPoints rather than publicly oriented arguments, I didn't include it. But Suresh obviously understands the planning problem far more deeply than I do, and I think that this line of thinking, once it becomes fully articulated, is going to provide a more socialist-friendly grounding for contributions to the debate (albeit one that I don't want to anticipate in the details, which I likely don't properly grok).
Hi, interesting list of approaches. Mariana Mazzucato's ideas about mission-driven state innovation seem like a good fit. They have some aspect of th Tooze's "big fix approach", combined with some faith in the ability of systems to adapt and coordinate, also with democratic input. So possibly a seventh category?
Also, I have been involved in advocacy efforts arguing for the need to create "public AI". The definitions are emergent, but coalesce around public interest AI, but also public option AI. So the political economic theories that you mention are very useful for these conversations. Obviously, you need a state that believes in some version of state capacity theory to embark on such an effort. But your categories show well, that depending on the adopted ideology, states might be more inclined to support "big fix public AI", and try to figure out whether they are capable on investing billions, or look for smaller, adaptive solutions. And obviously, any adherents of cybernetic state should support the creation of such alternatives.
This is a great write-up and recommended reading list. I really appreciate the Farrell work on an intellectual superstructure for government capacity liberalism which I've often sorely wanted from outside scholars as the Biden administration grappled with the sometimes competing strategies of such work.
Prior to the neoliberal ascension, large corporations were considered major players alongside governments and markets (cf. the Galbraithian oevre). Now granted that huge software corporations don't have the same dependence on plant tooling and transportation logistics that compelled the 20th century behemoths to engage in planning and market manipulation, but they seem to bend markets to their will all the same. You and Abe Newman have shown how corporate geopolitical aspirations were brought under State control, largely through international dependence on US dollars, but large corporations still manipulate markets and some of them may be causing social fragmentation that will only interfere with finding solutions to societal problems. Should large corporations be included as significant entities affecting the relation between democracy and policy?
Its heartening to read of people thinking about the bigger problem of how to retrofit this civilization apparantly hell-bent on collapsing into rubble. Capitalism and markets are powerful engines, but engines don't care much about anything but themselves while they burn fuel and generate power. It took a world war and global depression to shake up the last status quo, and there's a handful of Horsemen waiting in the wings to deliver the same medicine if the institutions set up after the previous shake up don't prove up to the job.
I think emphasizing the historical, cultural diversity of models or visions of liberalism is a great way to approach the impoverishment of current ideas that see few significant differences. I'd suggest a number of historical contexts to frame your group of contemporary liberal thinkers.
-The oldest North-European liberal theories respond to the early-modern European world of sectarian strife and rule by Brad DeLong's 'force and fraud' elites. Liberal thinkers went back to Neo-classical ideas of citizenship to construe 'subjects' as individual agents who benefited from some sort of enduring state that had origins in agreement-of-the-ruled, that had established laws that pertained (more-or-less equally) to all citizens, and that promoted forms of exchange/commerce to act-out their reasonable desires (even Hobbes works from a 'de facto' agreement of antagonists in the state of war to submit their liberties to an absolute ruler who gave security and stability).
-The Market became the exemplary ideal of how individuals could pursue their 'interests' in a system that was reciprocally rewarding. The market system invisibly resolves individuals' selfish, partly irrational impulses into an aggregate societal benefit that is 'rational'. Right from the start, there's a sense that the results of free commerce could be affirmed as reasonable and inevitable (Mandeville, Smith). Northern European cultures took Calvinist 'special providences' and generically Christian ideas of the world's innate order to stress that we didn't have to see the reasonableness of choices to declare the combined results necessary. American commercial shorthand resolved that all commercial decisions in the market were uniquely, inscrutably 'rational' for the acquisitive individual. And the market crowned the best/most industrious agents with exceptional wealth and influence in the state. Getting rid of overt religious claims, liberals transferred proofs of God's favor to demonstrations of optimal market success.
-Continuing from the old pre-liberal prohibitions against out-groups having full political and commercial agency, members of the outgroups argued that the market wasn't really blind to individual differences but established on the precept that Catholics or Protestants, Jews and Muslims and other recusants, people-of-color and foreigners, women and children, and servants/slaves were inherently not-accounted among the undifferentiated original groups who made themselves and their successors full beneficiaries of laws, politics, and commerce. Outgroup members militated for full recognition of their excluded differences and legal/social equality with the exclusive in-groups.
-Later liberals generally acknowledged that all public interactions were modes of commerce, and while specific future outcomes couldn't be guaranteed, whichever ideas and conventions of authority prevailed and were sustained over time 'must have' proven their superiority in the uncontrollable---and so claimed 'free'---societal 'marketplace of ideas'. Darwinian natural selection offered another rationale for the inevitable success of the most fit and most adaptable. That strain of thought would predominate among advocates of very limited government and laws, both of which, it was argued, must interfere with the miraculous, indifferent justice of free market outcomes.
-The liberal coalitions you identify with Left-politics contend it's not enough for the state to practice 'blindness' to difference but groups that have been marginalized must negotiate separate modes of autonomy and self-government with the ostensibly most privileged (and therefore always invisibly included) elite groups. That movement for negotiated 'identity politics' also pertains to evangelical Christians, conservative southerners, gun-owners, and other associative groups we think of as Right-leaning.
-The historian Quentin Skinner's _Liberty Before Liberalism_ was an attempt to identify some of the early-modern traditions that defined themselves against contractarian, individualist liberal claims. Political scientist James Tully's _Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity_ considers how European and American states have negotiated forms of traditional liberties and modes of sovereignty within the broader 'national' state.
This is a thoughtful, inspiring, and future -focused post. Thank you for it.
At the same time, it's inspired in me a bit of a fond nostalgia for Olden Times, when I would go down to the street to the bar, have a beer, and read the most recent several hundred comments on Crooked Timber about what, exactly, neoliberalism is.
How nice it is, now, after all the intervening wandering in the wilderness, to be able to see a more Promising shape of what could come next.
This was, genuinely, one of the most exciting things for me to read this year. Henry Farrell has written a few posts that have touched on questions I was already mulling over and helped clarify the nature of the problem.
In this case, I had been thinking about why it is that, right now, that there's particular interest and attention to the question of, "what can we do to help build a government that is better able to achieve the goals it sets out?" Farrell not only offers a good answer but looks ahead to spot some of the tensions in the different paths people are taking to solve the problem.
The post has a somewhat lengthy initial stage-setting but after that I found it a thrilling read.
Thanks for writing this. Definitely going to share it with a few people. I think it'll be especially useful when talking to younger leftists as from about my age cohort on down there seems to be a bad habit of conflating neoliberalism and liberalism, for inverse reasons than Matt Yglesias does, which means that this piece, along with a few from people like Hamilton Nolan and Cory Doctorow, seem like they'd be especially good for getting young firebrands to direct their anger towards figuring out solutions. I think I'll have another comment on the actual content once I think it through a bit because there definitely seem to be several other interesting parallel typologies contiguous to do this.
Is there another that could be called, loosely, reframing system models? Donella Meadows was right when she said that the biggest point of leverage in a system is not its rules or parts but the stories we tell about it. It wasn't (just) Thatcher and Reagan's policies that remade the system in the 80s. It was a set of new beliefs about shareholder value, small state etc; etc; There are, I think, lots of new narratives vying to replace these mental models (degrowth, MMT, doughnut economics, Chinese state capitalism) but none has the allure or simplicity of Marxist doctrine, religious belief or Hayekian cod-evolutionary theory. Governments can do big things and good things but if belief systems don't change, then these advances will be rejected (see Biden's popularity ratings). Governments should probably do all the things you highlight - run big moonshot projects, build sensory mechanisms - red levers / andon cords into as many complex systems as possible, use big data to see further into the murk, use a combination of bottom up markets & top down steering ... but all these things will fail until we can loosen the grip of 'selfish gene' ideology on our culture. We know enough now to make a case for cultural group selection. For top down organising principles that favour the survival of the species over individual parts of the species. This doesn't mean authoritarian utilitarianism - it means, I think, nesting variation & novelty (markets) within a broader goal of improving social outcomes (longevity, human connections, health & agency). This may mean a redesign of all sorts of institutions - elections, local democracy, currencies, Ricardian models of trade, accounting standards (that favour resilience / energy use over profit), but until we change the beliefs, I can't see us changing the system quickly enough to avoid the impending financial / climate tipping points.
You wrote in the beginning that you wanted to "emphasize the enormous variety of liberal thought, stretching from some kinds of socialism on the left" but I couldn't help but noticing that none of the post-neoliberal ideas you discussed turns out to be socialist.
Is this because you have a blind spot there, socialism hasn't needed to update it prescriptions, or liberalism needs to redefine its brand after having been taken over by neoliberalism for decades?
That's an interesting comment. What I'd say in return that apart from the 'repurposed neoliberalism,' more or less by definition, none of the approaches are necessarily libertarian/right-leaning either. It would be interesting to think about some of the Red-Plenty-Could-Have-Worked-Dammit people in comparison to these accounts - Leigh Phillips/Michal Rozworski and that Half-Earth Socialism book - but I personally think (as does as committed a Marxist as Richard Seymour! - https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/06/half-earth-socialism-review-utopia-climate-crisis ) that they claim far too much for the joys of planning, waving away the associated problems. The most interesting socialism-meets-liberal-state-capacity thinking that I know of is coming from Suresh Naidu, mentioned towards the end, but since it is currently in the form of samizdat PowerPoints rather than publicly oriented arguments, I didn't include it. But Suresh obviously understands the planning problem far more deeply than I do, and I think that this line of thinking, once it becomes fully articulated, is going to provide a more socialist-friendly grounding for contributions to the debate (albeit one that I don't want to anticipate in the details, which I likely don't properly grok).
Hi, interesting list of approaches. Mariana Mazzucato's ideas about mission-driven state innovation seem like a good fit. They have some aspect of th Tooze's "big fix approach", combined with some faith in the ability of systems to adapt and coordinate, also with democratic input. So possibly a seventh category?
Also, I have been involved in advocacy efforts arguing for the need to create "public AI". The definitions are emergent, but coalesce around public interest AI, but also public option AI. So the political economic theories that you mention are very useful for these conversations. Obviously, you need a state that believes in some version of state capacity theory to embark on such an effort. But your categories show well, that depending on the adopted ideology, states might be more inclined to support "big fix public AI", and try to figure out whether they are capable on investing billions, or look for smaller, adaptive solutions. And obviously, any adherents of cybernetic state should support the creation of such alternatives.
This is a great write-up and recommended reading list. I really appreciate the Farrell work on an intellectual superstructure for government capacity liberalism which I've often sorely wanted from outside scholars as the Biden administration grappled with the sometimes competing strategies of such work.
Prior to the neoliberal ascension, large corporations were considered major players alongside governments and markets (cf. the Galbraithian oevre). Now granted that huge software corporations don't have the same dependence on plant tooling and transportation logistics that compelled the 20th century behemoths to engage in planning and market manipulation, but they seem to bend markets to their will all the same. You and Abe Newman have shown how corporate geopolitical aspirations were brought under State control, largely through international dependence on US dollars, but large corporations still manipulate markets and some of them may be causing social fragmentation that will only interfere with finding solutions to societal problems. Should large corporations be included as significant entities affecting the relation between democracy and policy?
Its heartening to read of people thinking about the bigger problem of how to retrofit this civilization apparantly hell-bent on collapsing into rubble. Capitalism and markets are powerful engines, but engines don't care much about anything but themselves while they burn fuel and generate power. It took a world war and global depression to shake up the last status quo, and there's a handful of Horsemen waiting in the wings to deliver the same medicine if the institutions set up after the previous shake up don't prove up to the job.
I think emphasizing the historical, cultural diversity of models or visions of liberalism is a great way to approach the impoverishment of current ideas that see few significant differences. I'd suggest a number of historical contexts to frame your group of contemporary liberal thinkers.
-The oldest North-European liberal theories respond to the early-modern European world of sectarian strife and rule by Brad DeLong's 'force and fraud' elites. Liberal thinkers went back to Neo-classical ideas of citizenship to construe 'subjects' as individual agents who benefited from some sort of enduring state that had origins in agreement-of-the-ruled, that had established laws that pertained (more-or-less equally) to all citizens, and that promoted forms of exchange/commerce to act-out their reasonable desires (even Hobbes works from a 'de facto' agreement of antagonists in the state of war to submit their liberties to an absolute ruler who gave security and stability).
-The Market became the exemplary ideal of how individuals could pursue their 'interests' in a system that was reciprocally rewarding. The market system invisibly resolves individuals' selfish, partly irrational impulses into an aggregate societal benefit that is 'rational'. Right from the start, there's a sense that the results of free commerce could be affirmed as reasonable and inevitable (Mandeville, Smith). Northern European cultures took Calvinist 'special providences' and generically Christian ideas of the world's innate order to stress that we didn't have to see the reasonableness of choices to declare the combined results necessary. American commercial shorthand resolved that all commercial decisions in the market were uniquely, inscrutably 'rational' for the acquisitive individual. And the market crowned the best/most industrious agents with exceptional wealth and influence in the state. Getting rid of overt religious claims, liberals transferred proofs of God's favor to demonstrations of optimal market success.
-Continuing from the old pre-liberal prohibitions against out-groups having full political and commercial agency, members of the outgroups argued that the market wasn't really blind to individual differences but established on the precept that Catholics or Protestants, Jews and Muslims and other recusants, people-of-color and foreigners, women and children, and servants/slaves were inherently not-accounted among the undifferentiated original groups who made themselves and their successors full beneficiaries of laws, politics, and commerce. Outgroup members militated for full recognition of their excluded differences and legal/social equality with the exclusive in-groups.
-Later liberals generally acknowledged that all public interactions were modes of commerce, and while specific future outcomes couldn't be guaranteed, whichever ideas and conventions of authority prevailed and were sustained over time 'must have' proven their superiority in the uncontrollable---and so claimed 'free'---societal 'marketplace of ideas'. Darwinian natural selection offered another rationale for the inevitable success of the most fit and most adaptable. That strain of thought would predominate among advocates of very limited government and laws, both of which, it was argued, must interfere with the miraculous, indifferent justice of free market outcomes.
-The liberal coalitions you identify with Left-politics contend it's not enough for the state to practice 'blindness' to difference but groups that have been marginalized must negotiate separate modes of autonomy and self-government with the ostensibly most privileged (and therefore always invisibly included) elite groups. That movement for negotiated 'identity politics' also pertains to evangelical Christians, conservative southerners, gun-owners, and other associative groups we think of as Right-leaning.
-The historian Quentin Skinner's _Liberty Before Liberalism_ was an attempt to identify some of the early-modern traditions that defined themselves against contractarian, individualist liberal claims. Political scientist James Tully's _Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity_ considers how European and American states have negotiated forms of traditional liberties and modes of sovereignty within the broader 'national' state.