Globalization and Liberalism

Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Manent

Trevor Shelley

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781580469029
• eBook ISBN: 9780268107314
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this learned and wide-ranging book, Trevor Shelley engages the controversial topic of globalization through philosophical exegesis of great texts. Globalization and Liberalism illustrates and defends the idea that at the heart of the human world is the antinomy of the universal and the particular. Various thinkers have emphasized one aspect of this tension over the other. Some, such as Rousseau and Schmitt, have defended pure particularity. Others, such as Habermas, have uncritically welcomed the intimations of the world state. Against these twin extremes of radical nationalism and antipolitical universalism, this book seeks to recover a middle or moderate position—the liberal position. To find this via media, Shelley traces a tradition of French liberal political thinkers who take account of both sides of the antinomy: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Manent. As Shelley argues, each of these thinkers defends the integrity of political bodies, denies that the universal perspective is the only legitimate perspective, and recognizes that, without differences and distinctions across the political landscape, self-government and freedom of action are impossible.

As human beings, we can live free and fulfilling lives neither as isolated individuals nor as members of humanity. Rather, we require a properly constituted particular political community in which we can make manifest our universal humanity. In the liberalism of these three thinkers, we find the resources to think through what such a political community might look like. Globalism and Liberalism demonstrates the importance of these writers for addressing today's challenges and will interest political theorists, historians of political thought, and specialists of French political thought.

NOTES

ONE. Introduction

1. The conservative writer Yuval Levin states, “What is more distinct about our time is our nostalgic disposition, not our lack of agreement,” which he reveals to be equally present in different ways among conservatives and liberals in America, in The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 190 passim. The liberal writer Mark Lilla similarly identifies the reactionary as present on the right and left, suggesting, “One simply cannot understand modern history without understanding how the reactionary’s political nostalgia helped to shape it,” and there remains an “enduring psychological power of political nostalgia” in the present, in The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), xv, xx; see also Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), on contemporary nostalgia (16, 23, 125). For a progressive view of progress, see Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (New York: Penguin, 2018); for a conservative account of progress, see Jonah Goldberg, The Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York: Random House, 2018), “Appendix: Human Progress.”

2. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979); Jean M. Twenge and Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Atria, 2010). Noting that “narcissistic character disorders are the most common sources of the forms of psychic distress therapists now see,” Richard Sennett argues that this disorder “has arisen because a new kind of society encourages the growth of its psychic components and erases a sense of meaningful social encounter outside its terms, outside the boundaries of the single self, in public.” Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1976), 10.

3. Michael Barnett writes of “the rise of an international humanitarian order, a cosmopolis of morally minded militias supported by international law, norms, and institutions that reach out to suffering strangers around the world,” and “although humanitarian governance is not an empire in sheep’s clothing, it does bear some of its [i.e., empire’s] markings.” He underlines the “self-referential quality of humanitarianism,” which highlights its consistency with its apparent opposite of narcissism. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 220 – 239. See also Gary J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Knopf, 2008). On “the humanitarian spirit” as connected to an “ideology of intimacy”—one directly bound to growing tendencies of narcissism—and so to an ideology that “transmutes political categories into psychological categories,” see Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 321 ff.

4. Consider here the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who argues that there is a “first-person plural,” or prepolitical loyalty as such, that precedes politics and from which trust and a sense of identity and loyalty is born. “The ‘we’ that is the foundation of trust and the sine qua non of representative government has been jeopardized not only by the global economy and the rapid decline of indigenous ways of life, but also by the mass immigration of people with other languages, other customs, other religions, other ways of life and other and competing loyalties. Worse than this is the fact that ordinary people have been forbidden to mention this, forbidden to complain about it publicly, forbidden even to begin the process of coming to terms with it by discussing what the costs and benefits might be.” Scruton, “Politics Needs a First-Person Plural,” The Conservative, no. 5 (November 2017): 6 – 9; see also Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), ch. 4. Cf. the liberal thinker Mark Lilla, who writes, “There can be no liberal politics without a sense of we— of what we are as citizens and what we owe each other.” “There is no long-term future for liberalism without [we]. . . . We is where everything begins.” Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 14, 119 – 20.

5. See David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: Hurst & Company, 2017), which opens by suggesting that in light of Brexit and Trump’s election, “the first few years of the twenty-first century, culminating in these two votes, will come to be seen as the moment when the politics of culture and identity rose to challenge the politics of left and right” (1).

6. Contrast the words of former U.S. president Barack Obama delivered in his 2008 “Berlin Speech,” “For we are not only citizens of America or Germany— we are also citizens of the world,” with U.S. president Donald Trump’s Inauguration Address of 2017, “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength” (emphasis added). One might also consider Obama’s frequent use of the phrase, “That’s not who we are,” as analyzed by Christopher J. Scalia, “Why Obama Says ‘That’s Not Who We Are,’ ” USA Today, February 8, 2016, www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/08/barack-obama-thats-not-who-we-are-rhetoric-patriotism-column/79971138/.

7. “Globalization in its purest form would ultimately be a world without borders, without independent nation states, with the dominant institutions of government operating at the global level.” Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 10.

8. Pierre Manent, preface to Daniel J. Mahoney, The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (New York: Encounter Books, 2018), xi; original emphasis.

9. In The Natural System of Political Economy, trans. W. O. Henderson (New York: Routledge, 1983 [orig. 1837]), Friedrich List makes a key distinction between individual, national, and cosmopolitan economics, and despite his agreements with Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Le Say, he levels the charge that they fail to consider the extent to which there are national interests and that each nation has its own national political economy. Likewise, in Outlines of American Political Economy (Columbia: Origami Books, 2018 [orig. 1827]), List writes, “Every nation has its particular political economy. . . . Individual economy is not political economy. . . . Political economy is not cosmopolitical economy” (45; emphasis in original). It was List’s ambition to remain cognizant of the political in matters economic, to formulate a genuine political economy by being keenly attentive to the particularities of national interest and ambition. One does not have to altogether endorse the case for protectionism often associated with List to appreciate his effort in seriously engaging the political-economic nexus without presupposing the triumph of the economic.

10. For an example of a contemporary economist who recognizes the tensions between matters economic and political, see Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) and The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2011). Rodrik demonstrates at length that the ambition to hold together global markets (“hyperglobalization”), national interest (the nation-state), and democratic legitimacy (the principle of equality) necessitates sacrificing one of the three to preserve the other two in balance. This constitutes what he calls a “trilemma.”

11. See Dani Rodrik, “Who Needs the Nation State?,” Economic Geography 89, no. 1 (2013): 1 – 19; and Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere, 81 – 115.

12. Definitions of globalization are manifold, and debate continues among specialists; however, three general types or categories, as well as arguments for the phenomenon, seem the most common: (1) an economic phenomenon in terms of integrated markets, (2) a moral or legal phenomenon in terms of expanding universal or human rights and an apparatus of international law, and (3) a political phenomenon in terms of a diminished legitimacy among states due to an erosion of sovereignty and shifting allegiance with respect to national identity. All three aspects can be examined politically, which is to say, considered from the vantage of political philosophy; this is the suggestion of this book.

13. The World Values Survey (WVS) sufficiently illustrates the point, as found at www.worldvaluessurvey.org.

14. Bruce Mazlish, MIT historian and member of the New Global History Initiative, whose recent work offers “both an essay, as well as a historical analysis,” of Global History and so too “a moral exhortation” towards the “construction of Humanity.” Mazlish, The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 28–29.

15. See Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” in The Inclusion of the Other, ed. C. Cronin and P. De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 105–28. In numerous places he writes also about the emergent “post-national constellation” and the inevitable surpassing of the nation-state to more global forms of governance. See Habermas, “Toward a Cosmopolitan Europe,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 4 (October 2003): 86–100. Christine Min Wotipka and Kiyoteru Tsutsui, in “Global Human Rights and State Sovereignty: State Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties, 1965–2001,” Sociological Forum 23, no. 4 (December 2008): 724–54, speak of a process of “socialization in international society” that has affected states’ decisions to ratify human rights treaties and thereby sacrifices sovereignty. The trend, they argue, is only increasing, thus solidifying the concreteness of an “international society.”

16. For discussion of representative proponents of this idea—even conceived as a “movement” of scholars, lawyers, intellectuals, politicians, and the like—as well as a critique of such views, see John Fonte, “Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the Ideological Civil War within the West,” Orbis (Summer 2012), http://denbeste.nu/external/idealogical_war.pdf. See also Jon Kyl, Douglas J. Feith, and John Fonte, “The War of Law: How New International Law Undermines Democratic Sovereignty,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 4 (July–August 2013): 115–25.

17. Rather than political actors in any conventional sense, some see today’s agents of war as “thugs” and “criminals” on a global stage that amounts to a form of perpetual or endless global policing, which is not unrelated to the contemporary effort to make war “more humanitarian, more civilized, or less cruel.” Thus Western war, while waged to defend liberal values, is no less “intended to incarnate those values.” To whatever extent this is true, the following statement is poignant: “As ever, the way in which we respond to fundamental questions about ourselves and the world around us is reflected in the character of war.” Caroline Holmqvist-Jonsater, “War as Perpetual Policing,” in The Character of War in the 21st Century, ed. Caroline Holmqvist-Jonsater and Christopher Coker (London: Routledge, 2010), 103–18; see also Timothy Edmunds, “What Are the Armed Forces For? The Changing Nature of Military Roles in Europe,” International Affairs 82, no. 6 (2006): 1059–75. Adam Elkus, for one, disputes what he sees as exaggerated claims regarding a change in the very nature of war, as well as an end to the “Western way of war” and war more broadly, in “Only the West Has Seen the End of War,” Infinity Journal Exclusives, September 4, 2012, www.infinityjournal.com/article/65/Only_The_West_Has_Seen_The_End_of_War.

18. Zygmunt Bauman, “Reconnaissance Wars of the Planetary Frontierland,” Theory, Culture, and Society 19, no. 4 (2002): 81–90. In this case, it is not something to be necessarily welcomed, as it is an “obliteration” of previous modes of security—both real and theorized, or strategized. The “changed existential condition” that came about by surprise may be summarized as follows: “ Il n’y a pas du ‘dehors’ any more. . . . We are all ‘inside’ with nothing left outside. Or, rather, what used to be ‘outside’ has entered the ‘inside’—without knocking; and settled there—without asking permission. The bluff of local solutions to planetary problems has been called, the sham of territorial isolation has been exposed. Don’t ask where the frontierland is—it is all around you, in your town, on the streets you walk” (83–84).

19. Jagadeesh Gokhale, “Globalization: Curse or Cure? Policies to Harness Global Economic Integration to Solve Our Economic Challenge,” Policy Analysis, no. 659 (February 2010): 1–24. Gokhale rightly suggests that globalization has different results and prospects for different countries at varying ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• One. Introduction
• Two. Montesquieu and the ambivalence of the heart: On General and Particular Passions
• Three. montesquieu and the opening of the Universe: The earth, Commerce, and the right of nations
• Four. Tocqueville and the democratic revolution’s reach: Equalizing Conditions
• Five. Tocqueville and Generalizing ideas and sentiments: The effectual truth of le semblable
• Six. manent and Western Political development: Humanity and a history of Political Forms
• Seven. manent and the City in metamorphosis: The Western dynamic and american dynamism
• Eight. Conclusion
• Notes
• Index