A Critical Look at the Philosophical Roots of Liberalism

Author’s note: I have translated two books by Alain de Benoist, The Populist Moment and Against Liberalism. Two years ago, I gave a talk on The Populist Moment at a Counter-Currents gathering in Europe. It can be viewed here. [link: https://counter-currents.com/2023/06/alain-de-benoist-on-populism-video/] This year I was planning to give a similar talk on Against Liberalism, but a last-minute schedule change resulted in its cancellation. So I offer the text of the planned talk here.

Near the beginning of his treatise on Politics, Aristotle makes the famous declaration that “man is a political animal.” The word political, of course, comes from the Greek word for the city-state: polis. Aristotle meant that each man is intrinsically and by nature part of something larger than himself: a city, a state, a society, a community. No English translation of polis is perfect. Aristotle uses two analogies to illuminate his meaning: that of a hand within the body, and that of a piece in a board game such as checkers. A hand apart from the body, i.e., a severed hand, is not really a hand in the proper sense of the word, because it can no longer perform the functions of a hand, and the same goes for a checker piece apart from the game in which it is used. Everything is defined by its function, Aristotle writes, and if it is no longer performing its function, it is no longer the same thing, even though it may be called by the same name, just as a severed hand would in ordinary speech still be called a hand. The same is true of man: he is only a man in the proper sense of the term when living and functioning as part of a larger human community. He is not sufficient unto himself. In infancy he cannot survive without the care of adults. Even when full-grown he cannot live very well without some cooperation from his fellows. If anyone were self-sufficient and in no need of his fellow human beings, Aristotle remarks, he would be not a man but either a beast or a god. This is what Aristotle means when he calls man “a political animal.”

Some modern research offers support for this ancient view. According to the paleontologists, for most of our history as a species, men have lived together in hunter-gatherer bands of between fifty and a hundred and fifty individuals. At no time have members of the genus Homo been solitary animals.

A second point: biologists long puzzled over the phenomenon of self-sacrifice for the group, as observed not only in men but in social insects such as bees defending their hive. Today most biologists accept William Hamilton’s concept of inclusive fitness, first proposed in 1964, as a valid explanation for this behavior. The individual organism, whether man or bee, is merely a vehicle for its genes, tasked by nature with surviving and reproducing in order to get the genes—not the organism itself—into the future. So it makes perfect sense for an individual organism to sacrifice its own life, which is always finite in any case, to defend and preserve the hive, ant-colony, or human city.

So here are two quite modern ideas—the evolution of Homo sapiens in hunter-gatherer bands and inclusive fitness as a general biological law—that tend to support Aristotle’s view that man naturally forms part of a larger social entity.

One expression of this view of man’s natural sociability is that in many traditional communities, the punishment of perpetual banishment has been seen as among the most serious that could be laid upon an individual, falling little short of the death penalty. A famous example concerns the poet Dante, who was exiled from his native Florence in 1302 at the age of thirty-six due to factional intrigues in the city’s politics. Dante alludes frequently to this event in his writings as the most bitter experience of his life, giving powerful expression as only a great poet can to his longing for the familiar sights and sounds of his youth, and the intense humiliation he felt at being forced to eat another’s bread, a stranger everywhere he went. Only the great task he had set himself, the composition of the poem we call The Divine Comedy, seems to have kept him going through two decades as an exile.

But modern readers are likely to have more difficulty empathizing with this aspect of the poet’s experience than with his Medieval cosmology. A talented young man growing up in today’s Florence, e.g., may well be happy to pull up stakes and move to Milan or Rome in response to a better job offer. Any American who has not devoted his life to reading Wendell Berry is likely to feel the same. According to one recent study, sponsored by a moving company, the average American now moves more than eleven times over the course of a lifetime, and the average household moves every five to seven years. How have we come to take so easily in stride something that seemed a fate almost worse than death to the great Italian poet?

The change cannot all be due to Alexander Graham Bell’s invention. In addition to improved means of communication, man has undergone a dramatic change in philosophical orientation in the seven hundred years that separate us from Dante. At that time, Aristotle’s view that man is in his very essence a member of a specific human community still held almost undisputed sway. It was certainly shared by the great philosophical authority of the age, Thomas Aquinas, a conscious disciple of Aristotle. The man exiled from his natural community was nearly as useless and out of place as a severed hand.

But in the early modern period, a competing doctrine arose according to which larger human societies—cities, nations, empires—are artificially instituted by humans for their convenience and protection. The human individual is thus logically, and perhaps historically, prior to larger social formations. Man is in some sense self-sufficient, although Thomas Hobbes, an important contributor to the new doctrine, famously acknowledged that the lives of such unassociated men would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The new way of thinking may have been inspired by late-Medieval nominalism, the doctrine that only particulars exist, while kinds—classes of particular things called by the same name—are merely convenient shortcuts for speaking about the world.

The doctrine that arose from this atomized or individualistic conception of human existence is known as liberalism. And it must surely count among the most successful and influential philosophical doctrines in human history. Liberalism first fully emerged in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, and that work founded a tradition still very much alive and vigorous at the present day, when political conflicts often pit different kinds of liberalism against one another, with any residual nonliberals reduced to supporting whichever form of liberalism they believe least harmful to their community or nation.

Largely as a result of its success, liberalism has become confusingly diverse. It includes variants focused on politics, economics, or social and moral questions, as well as progressive and libertarian subvarieties. Particularly in the United States, liberalism has even colonized much that goes under the label conservative and is thus popularly supposed to be the direct opposite of liberalism. For example, toward the end of his presidency, Ronald Reagan was asked about his proudest accomplishment as president; he unhesitatingly pointed to America’s economic recovery of the 1980s. That was a liberal speaking. As Alain de Benoist emphasizes, traditional nonliberal societies do not make economic prosperity their central concern.

So, in short, there is a lot of confusion regarding the nature of liberalism and a corresponding need for clarification. This is best achieved by returning to the doctrine’s original philosophical basis, which Alain de Benoist rightly sees in its individualism, its dissent from the older doctrine of Aristotle that man is naturally part of a larger social whole.

The consequences of this starting point are many and questionable. One has already been alluded to. If man institutes societies for his own security and convenience, there can be no basis for requiring anyone to risk, still less sacrifice, his life defending his country. Yet much of human history is a record of men doing exactly that. Those biologists working in the days before William Hamilton introduced the concept of inclusive fitness, who conceived self-sacrifice for the group as almost a paradoxical phenomenon, probably did so because they were influenced by liberal thinking.

Another awkward fact for liberal theory is that human individuals are not self-created like Spinoza’s God but begotten by other humans known as parents. This has proven embarrassing to liberals ever since John Locke first set forth the doctrine. Locke tries to get around the difficulty by redefining fatherhood in terms of the care fathers commonly provide for their offspring, de-emphasizing the biological tie previously supposed to be the primary motive for that care. Ideally, liberals would prefer it if people popped into being fully grown and capable of choice, as Adam and Eve do in the story of creation.

Locke also claims that “a child is born a subject of no country or government,” since once he becomes an adult “he is free to choose the government under which he wants to live.” The human individual as conceived by liberalism is thus a curiously abstract being: without ancestors, belonging to no nation, worshiping no particular god or gods, speaking no particular language, the heir of no historical tradition. He is neither male nor female either. The recently popular extravagancy that each human individual ought to be able to choose which sex he is, or even invent a new one just for himself, is very much in line with liberal thinking.

The leading characteristic of the individual as conceived by liberalism is his possession of rights, beginning with a right of property in himself, as well as a capacity for choice in accordance with rational self-interest. This leads the individual to make contractual arrangements with other human beings in furtherance of his self-interested plans. Such contractual arrangements are the primary social bond in a liberal society, and ideally the only bond. A moral injunction such as “honor your father and your mother” is questionable in liberal terms because the relation of child to parent was never contracted for.

Furthermore, an individual’s right of property in himself takes no account of the praiseworthy or degrading way he makes use of himself. Pandering to the vices of his fellow men through loan-sharking, dope-dealing, or producing pornography are unexceptionable ways of pursuing one’s self-interest no less than growing food or building houses. A consistent liberal cannot explain why it would be better for a young woman to marry and raise a family than to pursue a career as a call girl: both are simply ways of maximizing her personal utility.

If we look around for who in this wide world most clearly behaves in the way liberals describe their ideal rational individual behaving—viz., entering into a series of contracts in pursuit of private advantage—we find his most perfect incarnation in the merchant, the tradesman operating to maximize his monetary profit in a market setting. In other words, liberalism makes the merchant into the paradigmatic human being, and makes his characteristic behavior, the making or rejecting of business contracts with a view to profit maximization, the paradigm for all human action.

Society thus comes to be conceived as a vast market on which all of us are trading. Large areas of human experience—including military service, parental sacrifice on behalf of children, religious devotion, and artistic production—must either be distorted to fit into this Procrustean bed of liberal thinking or ignored outright. Economic growth becomes the summam bonam, an endless accumulation of means not meant to be employed toward the achievement of any common end or good. For, as Benoist stresses, there can be no common good for the liberal apart from the aggregate of all individual goods, and the individual is left free to define such goods for himself. Thus, in practice, liberalism does not so much emancipate man as atomize him, cutting him off from his fellows until he becomes a homeless alien who, unlike Dante, does not even realize he has lost anything.

At Counter-Currents, we support a world of ethnic homelands, including homelands for European and European-derived nations. So we take a special interest in what liberalism has to say about the nation-state ideal, which nowadays becomes salient especially in the debate over immigration. What we find is that liberal thinkers conceive the issue of immigration entirely in economic terms. If a small nation such as Slovenia, with a population of about two million, were to accept one million newly arrived Zulus, all this would mean was that one million new producers and consumers would be added to those already here. There would be some downward pressure on wages, at least in the short term, but in the end the new arrivals would increase the total productive capacity of the territory. As Benoist puts it: “The liberal reasons as if people were interchangeable—which they are, in fact, as long as we take only the economic and quantitative side of things into account.” Many liberals would deny the Slovenes any right to exclude those one million Zulus for reasons already given by Locke: every adult has the right to choose the government under which he wants to live. Denying this right to Zulus would be a serious injustice. For the liberal, only individuals have rights; nations such as Slovenia do not, and anyone who think differently is a “collectivist.”

For nonliberals like most of us at Counter-Currents, a state has the right, and may even have the duty, to regulate, limit, or forbid immigration because, in Benoist’s words:

once it reaches a certain level it infringes on cultural habits, the ways of life—in short, the mores—of the receiving population. It risks threatening their identity or destabilizing their social cohesion, the latter largely based on the confidence members of the society have in each other., which is itself largely dependent on the ease with which they recognize themselves in their neighbors and identify with them.

Returning to our example, we may add that Zulus are not merely different from Slovenes. More specifically, they are less intelligent, less inhibited, more violent, and more inclined to live in the present and neglect planning for the future, and the damage this would do to Slovene society would more than cancel out any economic value some of them might contribute. Slovenia could not survive a million Zulus, and is under no obligation to make the experiment.

For the consistent liberal, however, nations have no intrinsic existence. They are mere aggregates, virtually random aggregates, of individuals. So a universal human right of migration is really only a first step toward the ultimate liberal goal of a planetary market unhindered by borders or distinctions of any kind. This final goal is known today as globalism, and it is nothing new but has been implicit in the logic of liberalism itself from the beginning, when the doctrine was first clearly formulated by John Locke. Distinctions between nations, families, the two sexes, religious and other cultural traditions—all are conceived by the globalist as limitations upon the spread of market relations and therefore enemies to be defeated and eradicated. But such identities and distinctions are also what make life worth living to billions of human beings, including to many liberals themselves, few of whom are perfectly self-consistent.

All of this makes up a damning bill of indictment against liberalism. Perhaps it is only fair to stop and ask whether this way of thinking really has nothing to its credit. One can certainly make a case that it does. We ought to remember, and Benoist reminds us, that the original inspiration for liberalism lay in a determined effort to put an end to the wars of religion which devastated Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the historical source of the liberal search for a form of government neutral with regards to the ends of human life, and it was obviously a legitimate concern. In later generations, liberal thinking influenced the movement to abolish slavery around the world. Most economists have worked within the liberal tradition, and have certainly illuminated the workings of the market economy even for those of us who do not accept the philosophical premises of liberalism. The liberal economist Ludwig von Mises may well have done a better job of demonstrating the unfeasibility of socialism than any antiliberal thinker or throne-and-altar restorationist.

We should also emphasize that nothing in Alain de Benoist’s critique of liberalism suggests he would endorse a centrally planned command economy. But then, there is no reason for our thinking about liberalism to remain beholden to such Cold War oppositions. The best and most humane society will have a market, but it will not be a market society in the sense of transforming all social relations into market relations. Exchange with a view to private profit is not immoral. It is a legitimate part of the life of a community, enabling individuals to achieve their private ends more successfully, exactly as liberals point out. As with so many other historically influential doctrines, liberalism falls into error by mistaking a part for the whole, by interpreting economic relations as the foundation of all human relations. At the most fundamental level, liberalism is an anthropological error that consists in treating as self-sufficient the human individual who by his very nature is connected to his fellow-humans through ties of blood and mutual assistance—as Aristotle already saw two millennia before the emergence of liberalism.