Rubin - Soul, self, and society: the new morality and the modern state

Soul, Self, and Society

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rubin, Edward L., 1948
Soul, self, and society: the new morality and the modern state / Edward L. Rubin.

pages cm

Summary: Morality is not declining in the modern world. Instead, a new morality is replacing the previous one. Centered on individual self-fulfillment, and linked to administrative government, it permits things the old morality forbid, like sex for pleasure, but forbids things the old morality allowed, like intolerance and inequality of opportunityProvided by publisher.
ISBN 9780199348657 (hardback)
eISBN 9780199348671
1. State, TheMoral and ethical aspects. 2. Political ethics. 3. Conduct of life. 4. Social ethics. 5. Christian ethics. I. Title.

JA79.R76 2015
172dc23
2014021186

To Ilene, Greg, Tim, Juliette, and Alex

THIS BOOK HAS two separate sources. The first is as a follow-up to an earlier book I wrote, Beyond Camelot. The theme of that book is that many of the concepts we use in political and legal theory originated in the Middle Ages and reflect medieval modes of thought. These include the three branches of government, power, discretion, legitimacy, law, human rights, legal rights, and property. Since the Middle Ages, however, government has been transformed by the advent of the administrative state. As a result, the concepts we inherit from our past are no longer accurate or useful descriptions of our contemporary political and legal systems. If scholars want to understand those systems, I proposed, they need to bracket these conceptsto set them aside or at least recognize their premodern characterand think in different terms.

Having argued that the advent of the administrative state changes the way that scholars should think, I began to wonder whether this transformation of government has also changed the way that peoplescholars or otherwiseactually do think. My original inclination was to explore peoples attitudes toward law and politics, but then it occurred to me that both could be generalized as ways by which the government manages peoples lives. Private morality does the same thing. According to some definitions, it is the other half of our normative framework, in the sense that it includes any general rules for human behavior that are not imposed by government as a matter of law. So I began to wonder whether the advent of the administrative state had produced a corresponding transformation of morality. This led me to the converse question: Were changes in morality at least partially responsible for the advent of the administrative state?

The second source for this book is my own life experience. Some years ago, I became aware that events that I remembered clearly are now being taught in college history courses. My first reaction to this was similar to my reaction when I was told I needed eyeglassesa mixture of denial and existential dread. On reflection, however, I realized that I had in fact lived through a period of enormous change. When I was in elementary school, racial segregation was still rampant in the South, people could not only lose their jobs for being gay but even for suggesting that people shouldnt lose their jobs for being gay, and occupational equality for women was virtually inconceivable. There was a game called twenty questions where a kid would describe a mysterious event and the other kids would ask yes or no questions to figure out the explanation. One such event went as follows: A young man comes into a hospital emergency room needing an operation, but the doctor says, I cant operate on himhes my son. The doctor is not the young mans father, however. What could the explanation possibly be? Fairly often, no one could unravel the mystery with the allotted twenty questions.

It occurred to me that a great deal of current political controversy could be explained by peoples differing levels of comfort or discomfort with the massive changes that had taken place in the relatively brief duration of a human lifetime like my own. I realized as well that these reactions are indicative not only of social attitudes but also of moralitypeoples basic sense of right and wrong. At the same time, of course, peoples reaction to change determines their political positions, and those positionstranslated into law and policystrongly influence the pace of change. So in my life experience as well as in my academic speculations, I found that morality and government were intertwined.

Once I began exploring this connection, I realized that it was not only a recent phenomenon, but something that had occurred throughout the course of Western history, at least. I confronted this larger topic with some trepidation. To deal with it comprehensively, one should be a political scientist, historian, sociologist, anthropologist, and several other things besides. My only formal training is in law. The main source of reassurance for me when I decided to proceed was the fact that no one these days has enough specialized knowledge to cover a topic of this scope, so the only alternative was that this book should not be written at all. In addition, I realized that my legal training would provide me with some advantages, not only because law is an integral part of the story but also because studying it tends to focus consideration of government on the local levelthe way political systems manage relations among ordinary peopleand that this is the level most closely connected with private morality.

If I tried to name all the people who have helped me with this book, it would be an interminably long list, and I would undoubtedly leave many people out. So I will mention only my coauthors on books that preceded this one, Robert Cooter, Lisa Bressman, Malcolm Feeley, and Kevin Stack; my agent, Cecelia Cancellero; my former colleague at Berkeley, Robert Kagan, who provided enormously insightful and detailed comments on the manuscript; my editor at Oxford, David McBride, who provided equally helpful comments and sheparded the book through all its stages; Sarah Rosenthal, also at Oxford, who organized the illustrations for me; Sara Harrell, for her editing; the institutions where Ive taught, Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California, Berkeley; and the ones where Ive presented my ideas for the book at faculty workshops, Columbia University, University of California Irvine, the European Union University in Florence, Indiana University, Oxford University, Seattle University, the University of Toulouse, Southern California University, and the University of Wisconsin. Finally, I want to thank my family, to whom this book is dedicated, and who have had to put up with my idiosyncratic late-night hours when I was writing it, as well as with my daytime disquisitions about Early Medieval bloodfeuds, the organization of the Austrian Empire, the marketing of Uneeda biscuits, and other seemingly random topics.