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The Liberal Mind
By Kenneth R. Minogue
(1963)
The Liberal Mind, written by a professor at the
London School of Economics and Political Science, has achieved the
status of a classic since its publication in 1963, sufficiently ahead
of the solidification of political correctness to establish itself
securely in reading lists for political philosophy and political
science courses. Minogue is an accomplished stylist, an elegant writer
possessing the ability to explicate complex and sophisticated ideas
clearly. Even so his book requires close attention, better yet study.
Philosophers have a trick of using ordinary words in ways that depart
by a few degrees from the ordinary, causing the nonprofessional reader
a certain perplexity produced by misled expectations. And Minogue does
appear somewhat eliptical in his approach to his subject--before we
remember that the author's specified concern is not liberal doctrine,
or liberal politics, or even liberalism itself, but instead the
mind capable of producing these phenomena. After that, it
is easier to discern the glimmering hints at Minogue's intent and
direction; until near the end of Chapter Two ("The Anatomy of
Liberalism") the trap is sprung and the galvanized corpse of
liberalism, tongue protruding and eyes bulging, dangles at the end of
the hangman's rope. After that, there is left only the brain autopsy
for Professor Minogue to perform with skill, humor, and a certain
sympathy for the victim which (as he is only too well aware) will be
up and about again in no time: an earnest zombie brimming with false
optimism and a shallow metaphysics, stalking the world in search of
"suffering situations" to alleviate and transform.
"The aim of this book," Minogue writes in his
Preface, "is to analyze the long tradition of liberalism. It regards
the current fluidity of political boundaries as due to the fact that
an enlarged and somewhat refurbished liberalism has now succeeded the
ideologies of the past. It maintains that this liberalism provides a
moral and political consensus which unites virtually all of us,
excepting only a few palpable eccentrics on the right and communists
on the left." Contemporary liberalism combines classical liberalism's
emphasis on individual liberty with modern liberalism's commitment to
state paternalism.
Additionally, Minogue identifies two elements of
liberalism as a whole: "libertarianism," which is disposed to subject
all of life to critical inquiry and hence is dangerous to all
authorities, traditional or modern; and "salvationist liberalism,"
which works from the assumption that, while the present is
revolutionary and the near future likely at least to remain so,
history must arrive nevertheless at a definite end in the perfection
of human society. Liberalism at its core is a balanced and prudent
doctrine. Libertarianism, however, when it elevated to a doctrine in
its own right, succumbs to irrationalism and romantic fantasy, under
the influence of which it tends toward violence and destruction. Both
elements, Minogue argues, are integral to liberalism as it has existed
over the past several centuries, resulting in the ideological
incoherence that is a feature of every ideology. "For liberals are
simultaneously to be found praising variety and indeed eccentricity of
opinion and behavior; and gnawing industriously away at the many
sources of variety in an attempt to provide every man, woman, child
and dog with the conditions of the good life. They are to be found
deploring the tyrannical excesses of totalitarian government, and yet
also watching with birdlike fascination the pattern of order and
harmony which those excesses are explicitly designed to promote."
Instinctually recognizing the incoherence of liberal movements,
traditional societies have rightly done all they could to ward off the
liberal infection. "For once liberalism gains a hold, a sort of
traditional innocence is lost." What is more, liberalism is a
culturally-specific ideology. "The political consequences of liberal
ideas may be the establishment of a liberal democratic society of the
western European kind. But this outcome requires the co-operation of
social and economic circumstances, or perhaps simply elements of good
fortune, which are far from being universally distributed."
Liberalism since the seventeenth century, Minogue
argues, has been disposed by its commitment to the concept of natural
rights and of a social contract predating the formation of government
to regard the individual as an autonomous political institution. "It
created a policy of the individual and called it ethics." . "The
liberal view of man must be regarded not as inadequate or as
unfruitful but simply false, because of the superior logical status it
accords to a grouping of interests or desires called the individual
self." In identifying these interests and desires, liberal theory has
created a hypothetical entity, or model, Minogue calls "generic man,"
who exhibits, always and everywhere, such desires
and interests, while depending on the fulfillment of "needs." The
problem here is the assumption that every individual may be explained
psychologically, and that all social institutions are comprehensible
in terms of the individuals who comprise them; while, in reality, "the
starting point for [social and institutional] explanation must not be
the rationalist essence of the individual, but the complex situation
we are trying to explain."
"Generic man," the conceptual basis of liberal
thought, of course is an abstraction. He is, however, an abstraction
highy useful to liberalism, and to liberals. The notion of "generic
man" gives the liberal concept of "progress" plausibility, while
answering liberalism's need to identify a single point of view which
will serve to harmonize all human relations and provide liberal
doctrine with a system. (".'Sophistry," Hilaire Belloc wrote in The
Free Press, ".consists in making up 'systems' to explain the
world.') Also, it reflects the fact that liberalism does not take
reality for its starting point, for the very good reason that it has,
finally, no interest in or concern for present reality, but only the
realization of a new reality and the transformation of human
existence. Liberals do not devise their melioristic and reformist
policies in accordance with their concept of society; instead, they
form those concepts in accordance with the policies they wish to
devise and apply. For liberals and liberalism, solutions typically
precede problems, because solving the "problem" is not in any
particular instance an end in itself but a means to realizing a
replacement society to which the immediate "problem" necessarily bears
no relation.
".[T]he idea of a social problem," Minogue goes on
to say, "appears to come from no particular location in society. It is
a social incoherence arising out of an ideal; and this ideal can be
most persuasively put in moral terms..The 'real question,' in liberal
terms, is 'whether the social order actually serves our needs.'. Here
we have illustrated the use of 'needs' as something mysteriously
outside the social order and acting as a moral criterion of the
'social order.' But what is the 'social order'? If 'society' is simply
the 'complex of social relationships' then it is not a single
manipulative order. In so far as there is a single order, then it is
that imposed by the State and expressed in laws. Similarly, when we
read that 'the true nature of society' is that it is a 'human
organization for common needs,' we can only observe that a complex of
relationships is not an 'organization' at all-only the State and the
institutions it sanctions are 'organizations' in that sense. But it is
precisely the aim of liberalism to make society into a single
complex organization."
"Where there's no solution," James Burnham once
observed, "there's no problem." In a similar vein, Minogue notes that
any particular situation presents a problem only to someone of a
certain character-in the liberal instance, one who believes that a
"solution" is not only possible but desirable, on a scale vastly
exceeding the level at which the problem exists. Apathetic persons, he
quips, are simply people who aren't concerned with the things that
concern liberals; totalitarianism, by his definition, is "the attempt
to find an absolute solution to a bogus problem." Once again, we find
ourselves confronted by the question of incoherency in an ideology
that has, however indirectly, been the cause of brutal inhumanity and
degrading misery (surpassing anything previously known to history) in
its quest for a utopia of freedom, tolerance, and love-in brief, for
universal happiness.
At this point, rather than pursue the incoherence
of liberalism, we should examine the contradiction that is both
related to the incoherence and integral to the ideology itself: a
contradiction that can be simply stated by saying that freedom, which
is both part of the liberal's conception of universal happiness and a
synonym for it, lies beyond the end-means context by which liberals
expect to achieve it.
Liberals are preoccupied with the conditions of
freedom, and the means to create or enhance these. But their
preoccupation betrays a naïveté amounting, really, to ignorance. "For
if we are seeking the conditions of freedom," Minogue explains, "we
must look not to those circumstances which happen to accompany it, but
to the manner it which it has been attained. And we will find that it
has always been attained because of a spontaneous growth of interest
in truth, science, or inventiveness; a spontaneous growth of moral
principles appropriate to freedom; a spontaneous construction of the
political arrangements which permit of free constitutional government.
Spontaneity indicates that free behavior has arisen directly out of
the character of the people concerned, and that it is neither a
mechanical process, nor a 'natural reaction' to an environment, nor a
means to the attainment of some end. Free behaviour, in other words,
is its own end."
As its own end, freedom provides or creates the
materials necessary to its continuance into the future. From this
reasoning, we can devise four theorems. One: "[A] political policy
which aims at attaining any of the supposed conditions of freedom is
likely to destroy free behaviour." Two: "[T]he political pursuit of
freedom is always the pursuit of something else." Three:
"[Freedom] is a question, not of what is done, but of how it is done
and who does it." And, four: "A populace which hands its moral
intiative over to a government, no matter how impeccable its reasons,
becomes dependent and slavish."
Liberalism, as Burnham concedes in Suicide of
the West, has made definite contributions to Western institutions,
chiefly by attacking and removing certain of their less attractive and
reformable features. Minogue, for his part, allows that policy based
on faulty or false assumptions and principles need not necessarily
produce bad effects. The presumption, however, must be that they
will-if not in this instance, then in the next, or the next after
that, since no human society grounded on a philosophy of unreality--in
particular, one that is by its nature essentially destructive--can
survive indefinitely. Conservatism, from its acute awareness of the
perverse frailty of man and the fragility of human institutions, is
always disposed to the tragic sense. What was built up over two
thousand years can be destroyed in two hundred (or less), without hope
of resurrection or recreation. How, after all, does one create
spontaneity? It is as easy, Minogue suggests, to create a nation of
mystics. Or of "happiness." On the other hand, we all have a fair idea
how to go about building a People's Republic of gulags, gas ovens, and
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