/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1444287]

Alright /lit/ I am at a crossroads. I consider myself liberal, probably a left libertarian if we were to do political compass, but I have reached a road block.

I have been reading David Livingston's Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy. Aside from reading this I read a few essays Livingston wrote about Abraham Lincoln from Livingston, which were eye opening to say the least.

Does anyone else who considers themselves liberal also find themselves conflicted between the vague abstractions of the enlightenment and what it was supposed to entail in regards to actual history or moreover human nature?

I guess what I'm saying is, who else here thinks neo-liberalism is a joke?

[Anonymous No.1444308]

You're going to have to go into more detail about what your specific issues are with liberalism / what Livingston's general thesis is, because I'm not precisely sure what you mean or what Livingston wrote.

I certainly agree that there's a big difference between the essentializing abstractions of classical liberalism and human nature / reality, and I certainly have issues with liberalism (although more inspired by Isaiah Berlin and Ernest Gellner and those sorts of writers than anything else). Curious to hear more about your views.

[Anonymous No.1444329]

duh

[Anonymous No.1444333]

>>1444287

I'm not sure how your previous statement about vague abstractions links with your statement about neo-liberalism.

I often wonder why I ever valued freedom in the first place. Not that I want fascism or anything. Just that I wonder why I thought freedom was an end in itself. Freedom is nice, but is never really Freedom if you mean "doing what you want". Because society seems to be about not doing anything you want, rather it is about coming together for general benefit. The only truly free society is an anarchist one and anarchism is a pipe dream.

[Anonymous No.1444354]

>>1444287
How can a liberal be a libertarian? A libertarian society would probably involve the majority of people getting fucked continually. It would be awesome.

[Anonymous No.1444355]

>>1444308
He criticizes I think quite eloquently modern liberals revisionism of Lincoln's 'freeing of the slaves' by saying that it fits into their narrative of enlightenment values and individual rights.

There are many more arguments he makes, another being that racial inequality in America as of the civil war was actually the same on both sides. Both North and the South by large majority agreed that slavery was bad, but saw it more as a class issue than a racial one.

In Massachusetts for example, in Lincolns time, you could be free and black but you had to pay a 1000 dollar tax which in those days was quite steep.

That was just his Lincoln essays. His Hume stuff I'm just cracking into.
>>1444333
I think what a lot of people misunderstand about freedom is that sometimes to discipline yourself allows you more freedoms. That if you work at a subject and become proficient at that subject, you may in turn be able to do more things than if you were your indiscernible self.

The problem with modern liberalism is that it says that freedom is a inalienable right. Freedom can't be given, it's taken and bended to the users desire.

[Anonymous No.1444380]

>>1444354
uh easily? i mean classically speaking liberalism IS libertarianism. it's only the modern usage of the word that differs. & if you believe in human freedom and capacity for goodness and all that stuff, and particularly in the incompetence of government to restrict people's actions, it's an easy step to move to believing in free markets.

[Anonymous No.1444389]

>>1444333
I think it can be viewed two ways; either individualist or collectivist. The former wants the freedoms of the one over the freedoms of the many, whereas the latter wants the freedoms of the many over the freedoms of the one. Also, the stoic metaphor of a dog tied to a cart is always relevant.

[Anonymous No.1444423]

>>1444380
OP here, I would say that as a libertarian I side with the markets and that they are basically self regulating apparatuses. Somehow as a collective individuals(ie free market) are able to make better decisions than planned markets and that this process should be administered to our governmental sector to increase efficiency.

That is to say I believe we should replace politicians with a direct democracy.

[Anonymous No.1444463]

>>1444423

That would be fucking hilarious. The idiots do enough harm as it is, imagine if they were actually allowed to decide things. Some inbred hillbilly steering monetary policy when he thinks "monetary" is a type of cheese...

[Anonymous No.1444472]

>>1444463
You're describing the worst part of communism. The bureaucracy.

I'm so far with Hayek on this, that the free market is the most efficient and representative forum we have for collective decision making. Although I think Zizek makes a good point on this; we need a third choice to market or government, since both have their inherent bad qualities.

[Anonymous No.1444478]

>>1444472
The thing is that the world is imperfect & any system we could impose on it will almost certainly be imperfect as well. The futile search for a perfect system leads to no good outcome. I agree with Raymond Aron when he wrote, "The liberal believes in the permanence of humanity's imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he subscribes to the pessimism that sees, in politics, the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state."

[Anonymous No.1444496]

>>1444478
Hang on, do you agree with him? He seems to be talking about the imperfections of man, and referring to the perfections of a system to counter this.

[Anonymous No.1444533]

>>1444496
>referring to the perfections of a system to counter this.

erm... I think that's a misinterpretation. I take Aron to mean that the imperfection of man is not something that you can counter; it's something that you have to deal with. You build a system which attempts, more or less effectively, to impose order and bring prosperity - and such a system should be founded on the understanding that people fuck up constantly.

Surely the mere fact of man's permanent imperfection implies that we cannot build a perfect system to deal with that imperfection? Aron means precisely that man is always imperfect - that liberals believe that there can be no perfect world, no eden. There can be a brighter future, if we try in a quotidian day-by-day way to make it brighter - if we arrange society such that man's imperfection does not ruin it. But we cannot, like gods, create a system which perfectly fits the world.

[Anonymous No.1444554]

>>1444533
Oh, I see what you're saying now. And I agree with you. You can't have a system which forces good.

But I must clarify, by fit the world, do you mean the inability of a system to account for all variables? For example, now we realize our system does not account for effects on the atmosphere well enough, so there are plans to incorporate the carbon credits.

[Anonymous No.1444561]

>>1444554
I think that is certainly something that is true - in some sense, no system is ever going to be perfect. that's just as true of whatever radically libertarian system you may be advocating, by the way - the imperfect nature of systems is not an argument for one system over another, except as those systems assume perfectibility. but I think that it's one of a number of factors which play into it. it's not just that systems don't match reality; it's also that we (being imperfect) are unable to build a perfect system, and that we (being imperfect) are unable to live in a perfect system and... really, the whole thing is an illusion.

That quote comes from Aron's book "The Opium of the Intellectuals"; it's meant to apply specifically to Communism, but it's easy to see these kinds of theoretical systems filling that role more generally.

[Anonymous No.1444974]

>>1444380
A million idiots on average make better decisions for the economy than the best economist all in a room could.

[Anonymous No.1444983]

>>1444974

Eh...on the "invisible hand" level, yes (even then there are easily fixable externalities though). On the macro level, no way. I'm pretty sure we'd go back to mercantilism if it were up to a direct vote.

[Anonymous No.1444984]

>>1444380
yeah but the modern meaning of liberalism is something more along the lines of Rawls's difference principle
this is absolutely opposed to libertarianism

[Anonymous No.1444991]

>>1444984
there's no one meaning of liberalism. liberalism is a complex thing with many different shades of opinion. Karl Popper could easily be called a liberal.

But yes, the main line of liberalism currently is certainly opposed to libertarianism - but liberalism as such is not.

[Anonymous No.1445056]

>>1444991
the liberalism of the nineteenth century was pretty much the same as libertarianism, the liberalism of today is not

Nozick is a good example of someone who would have been considered a liberal 100 or so years ago but today (ho ho, yes I know he's not exactly "of today") is much better characterised as a libertarian.

liberalism does have a meaning, however vague, and it has changed over time

[Anonymous No.1445061]

Marx already answered the question of liberalism.

[Anonymous No.1445069]

>>1445056
i don't know how much real disagreement there is between us

but as much is it is true that liberalism has a meaning & that liberalism has changed over time, liberalism has always been complex and has always had a number of different currents & tendencies. there's nothing new about the fact that there are different versions of liberalism - which there are. there are still things which could be called liberalism (which claim to be liberal, certainly) and which also believe in free markets. again, karl popper, whatever you may think of him, could be reasonably described as a liberal.

[Anonymous No.1445096]

>probably a left libertarian if we were to do political compass
Do you mean Anarcho-Syndicalist / Libertarian Socialist or somthing else?

[Anonymous No.1445102]

>who else here thinks neo-liberalism is a joke?
its not a joke for the people who suffer under the deregulation, privatization of services, cessation of services, and sending jobs overseas

read Chomsky OP

[Anonymous No.1445110]

>>1445102

[Anonymous No.1445121]

>>1445069
I don't think there's very much disagreement at all.
I think that today liberalism refers to a view which regards both individual freedom and some sort of egalitarianism as valuable whereas libertarianism only concentrates on freedom. There is definitely a wide spectrum of views within this and there may be instances where it is not clear whether a position counts as liberal or libertarian.
My initial point was just that the two terms are no longer as interchangable as they were.

I am not familiar with Popper's political philosophy. Is it worth reading?

[Anonymous No.1445127]

Liberalism is only a leftist political philosophy in the U.S. In Europe "liberal" still means "classical liberal". I find it common that "liberal" is used to denote minarchists while "libertarian" is used to denote anarchocapitalists.