Alejandro Abraham-Hamanoiel (editor) - Liberalism in Neoliberal Times: Dimensions, Contradictions, Limits (Goldsmiths Press)

Liberalism in Neoliberal Times

Liberalism in Neoliberal Times

Dimensions, Contradictions, Limits

Edited by Alejandro Abraham-Hamanoiel, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany, Kate Nash, and Julian Petley

2017 Goldsmiths Press

Published in 2017 by Goldsmiths Press

Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross

London SE14 6NW

Distribution by The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright 2017 Alejandro Abraham-Hamanoiel, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany, Kate Nash and Julian Petley for selection and editorial material. Chapter copyright belongs to individual contributors.

The right of Alejandro Abraham-Hamanoiel, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany, Kate Nash and Julian Petley to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with section 77 and 78 in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Gholam Khiabany

William Davies

Kate Nash

David Chandler

Costas Douzinas

Roberto Gargarella

Nivedita Menon

Ratna Kapur

Abdullahi An-Naim

Anne Phillips

Baak al

Ray Kiely

Monika Krause

Julian Petley

Robert W. McChesney

Jonathan Hardy

John Steel

Colin Leys

Des Freedman

Alejandro Abraham-Hamanoiel

Natalie Fenton

John Holmwood

Priyamvada Gopal

Patrick Ainley

Kathleen Lynch

Toby Miller

Michael Wayne

Howard Littler

Jonathan Rosenhead

John Holmwood

Michael Bailey

Joan Pedro-Caraana

Milly Williamson

Haim Bresheeth

Arun Kundnani

Deepa Kumar

Annabelle Sreberny

Introduction

Gholam Khiabany

Raymond Williams once suggested that the term liberal has, at first sight, so clear a political meaning that some of its further associations are puzzling. This, as Williams demonstrated, is partly because the word itself has a long and fascinating history that dates back to the fourteenth century. The original uses of liberal were mostly positive. Liberal was a mark of distinction, a free man in contradistinction with those who were not; liberal arts was a reference to skills appropriate for men who had means and status; liberal also came to be defined as generous, open-minded, and unorthodox. The distinction, from its very first usage, was all about class, privilege, and status. However, liberal also had, and still retains, negative meanings. For example, cultural and social conservatives still associate liberal with unrestrained and undisciplined attitudes and behaviour. Taking liberties is pejorative, as is a liberal reading/attitude to facts and figures.

In the realm of politics the term is just as complex and puzzling. On the one hand, being liberal has been regarded as being open-minded, progressive or even radical, while, on the other hand, liberals are attacked for either being insufficiently radical (from the Left) or being too progressive (such as in the United States). The prevailing definition of liberalism (as an ideology, political philosophy, and tradition) has historically revolved around tolerance, progress, humanitarianism, objectivity, respect for and promotion of reason, democracy, and human rights. To be considered a liberal (in this sense) can still be seen as a positive thing. Yet despite receiving a very good press throughout its history, liberalism has also been subject to passionate and sustained critiques by the Left and the illiberal. For the latter, liberalism has gone too far; for the former, it has never gone far enough. Raymond Williams, for example, argues that liberalism, while referring to a mixture of liberating and limiting ideas, is essentially, a doctrine of possessive individualism and that it is, therefore, in fundamental conflict not only with socialist but with most strictly social theories.

In the opening chapter of this collection, William Davies argues that the basic premise of liberal thought is the equality of individuals before the lawa conception that stresses the negative immunity of citizens from political intervention and coercion. Yet, as Davies notes, private property has long been recognised as a fundamental individual right within liberal frameworks, which partly accounts for the connection between political and economic liberalism. Historically, however, economic participation and entitlement have been limited to a small minority of people with resources and capital. It was precisely this liberation of men to own property that Marx criticised so trenchantly. None of the so-called rights of man, Marx argued in On the Jewish Question, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil societythat is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community.

The variety of uses and connotations certainly makes sweeping generalisation about liberals and liberalism impossible. Yet the seed of contradictions was visible from the very first moment of liberalism: the strength of liberalismits commitment to emancipationis also its main weakness in that there were at least three major exclusion clauses in this project. Not only love for liberty but also contempt for people of the colonies, the working class, and women more generally were factors that united liberal thinkers. In his book on liberalism, Domenico Losurdo reminds us that liberal thinkersincluding Locke, Smith, and Franklinshared an enthusiasm for a process of systematic expropriation and practical genocide first of the Irish and then of the Indians, as well as for black enslavement and the black slave trade.

Even for the most radical of liberal thinkers, John Stuart Mill, democracy was fit only for a civilised community. Despotism, Mill asserted, is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Indeed, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man said nothing about the rights of slaves, the people of the colonies, or women . And the power of capital in the land of barbarians came not through peaceful competition (as is usually claimed) but through the barrel of a gun.

The scars are still deep and still fresh. Slavery continued by other means in both the colonies and in the metropolis. The ideology of superiority and difference that underpins this barbarism is liberal in its origin and in its make-up. Contemporary versions of this thinking about freedom and democracyas evidenced through recent humanitarian interventionscontinue to evince a sense of superiority in which liberals enforce democracy upon the less enlightened. The love of freedom and liberty that is central to the idea of liberalism is indeed one that, in its realisation, has all too often been easily sacrificed at the altar of the interests of capital and (imperial) states.