The Three Ps of Liberty

Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Polycentricity

Allen Mendenhall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030396046
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030396053
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

This book considers the "three Ps" of liberty: pragmatism, pluralism, and polycentricity.  These concepts enrich the complex tradition of classical liberal jurisprudence, providing workable solutions based on the decentralization, diffusion, and dispersal of power.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. MendenhallThe Three Ps of LibertyPalgrave Studies in Classical Liberalismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39605-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Toward Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Polycentricity

Allen Mendenhall¹

(1)

Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, Faulkner University, Montgomery, AL, USA

Allen Mendenhall

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

PragmatismPluralismPolycentricityLibertarianism

End Abstract

This book considers the “three Ps” of liberty: pragmatism, pluralism, and polycentricity. Over several years we have heard debates about “thick” and “thin” libertarianism as well as “libertarian brutalism.”¹ The labels “right-libertarian” and “left-libertarian” have circulated roughly since the emergence of the word “libertarian.” I propose to reframe the discussion in terms of “pluralism,” a concept that, I believe, involves necessarily the decentralization and diffusion of government power. A conservative culture that values tradition and nourishes longstanding virtues is optimal for the preservation and advancement of liberty. Freedom flourishes where individuals accept personal responsibility, give charitably, read deeply and widely, and respect the dignity of every human person. Freedom cannot exist where people lie, cheat, steal, and murder without consequence. Societies enjoy liberty in proportion to their commitment to moral improvement and right reason. Where people are dedicated to virtue, generosity, and personal responsibility, the case for state or government intervention into their private affairs is more obviously untenable.

Libertarianism and conservatism (or traditionalism) are not mutually exclusive; they reinforce one another. Decentralization and the common pursuit of higher purposes—namely goodness, holiness, virtue, generosity, personal responsibility, or some combination of these—ensure the harmony and stability of society and between societies. People of differing backgrounds, raised in separate traditions, accustomed to distinct manners and mores, will not unite in political association absent a shared, motivating objective. Christianity has demonstrated that diverse peoples from all over the planet will combine to advance the everlasting glory of one eternal kingdom under Jesus Christ. A polity with defined boundaries, subject to the same laws, will not flourish if its members or citizens feel bound together only for material wellbeing or military alliance against common foes. Law and governing institutions alone will not quicken the heart, cultivate a sense of belonging or community, inspire a love of place and neighbor, or develop an appreciation for beauty and art. General principles, moral aspirations, civic duty, compassion—responsible, rational people pursue these ends despite variations in culture and experience.

Pluralism is that state of relative equilibrium in which diverse and even competing cultures, norms, beliefs, and values—and the social systems based upon them—cooperate to maximize individual liberty and minimize institutionalized coercion for the sake of higher purposes and goods. It is a paradigm that encourages tolerance and the constant pursuit of agreement about cardinal principles; complacency and violence result when that pursuit ceases. Pure, total agreement is practically unachievable; the continuous pursuit of pure and total agreement, however, is achievable. Dialogue and debate are workable constants; they furnish the conditions necessary for identifying and defining those overarching principles that nourish goodness, holiness, and virtue.

As an adherent of pluralism, I accept without qualification the sobering reality that many in our society are not committed to free markets and individual liberty, nor will they ever be. These people are as entitled to their opinion as I am to mine. A free society must guarantee each of us the liberty to espouse our views regardless of how misguided, erroneous, or offensive they might seem to any one person or group of people. Only against opposing views may our ideas be sharpened and improved. We may never convince certain people that our cherished positions are correct; still we must advance our principles without compromise or regret.

The pluralism I advocate is indispensable to a peaceful society. It multiplies the practical and ideational options available and ensures that a variety of competing views remain alive during complicated and destructive times. We need pluralism for the reason scientists need experimentation and free inquiry: to test our methods and assumptions with concrete data, cure ourselves of continued error, and expand the frontiers of knowledge without resort to dogma. Not all premises or principles are equally good or true; some are plainly wrong, others bad and dangerous. Yet all premises and principles deserve consideration, if for no other reason than that they may be discredited or falsified.

Pluralism, it seems to me, is necessary in a libertarian order that recognizes the non-aggression principle and refuses to coerce ideological compliance by force or the threat of force. Knowing that people can be irrational, that their goals and wants can conflict with their best interests, libertarians must restrain conflict at the level of discourse and suasion: we may not, and must not, aggress against those with whom we disagree to realize our desired ends. It is impossible, in my view, for fallible humans ever to achieve in this complex material world an ideal, utopian polity in which markets are totally free and norms are uniform and universal. Infights and disagreement among self-identifying libertarians are evidence enough that such harmonious homogeneity is impossible. Libertarians must, then, attain some degree of peaceful accommodation with their ideological opponents. Hence they must consider pluralism to be an achievable and principled objective even as they promote and advance their hard-won ideas.

What is pluralism? The term needs defining because it invites reasonable criticism and immediate, erroneous associations with moral relativism. In the words of John Kekes, pluralism is “a theory about the nature of the values whose realization would make lives good.”² Kekes posits six central theses for pluralism:

1. 1.
   The plurality and conditionality of values
2. 2.
   The unavoidability of conflicts
3. 3.
   The approach to reasonable conflict-resolution
4. 4.
   The possibilities of life
5. 5.
   The need for limits

Pluralism is at root about peaceful interactions between ideas and cultures, which are antecedent to government and its legislative and administrative regulations. Culture consists of the unwritten and generally accepted rules and customs that shape social institutions while binding individuals together into communities of purpose. Values, mores, traditions, and beliefs both define and prescribe culture. An absence of institutionalized coercion is the central feature of libertarian pluralism.

Libertarian pluralism is, I believe, implicit in the writings of F. A. Hayek. It is predicated on the fact that “no human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society and of the consequent need for an impersonal mechanism.”³ Hayek opened The Constitution of Liberty with the assertion that he is concerned “with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society.”⁴ The goal of libertarian pluralism, as with Hayek’s epistemological approach to governance, is to maximize liberty and minimize coercion to the greatest degree possible.

Pluralism as I understand it fits within a pragmatic epistemological tradition characterized not only by Hayek, but by David Hume, Edmund Burke, C. S. Peirce, Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, Michael Polanyi, and Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. Its starting point is humility, skepticism, and deference to the accumulated knowledge of society over time as against arrogance, hubris, certitude, and coercion. Libertarians who are committed to pluralism, rather than presuming our personal convictions to be universal and thus worthy of vigorous imposition on faraway communities, submit our most prized principles to constant testing in the marketplace of ideas. To assume benevolent superintendence over individuals with whom we differ is the paternalistic tendency Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler rightly recognize within some forms of libertarianism, namely those which champion universalism as the justification for intervening in foreign institutional and cultural arrangements.⁵ The pluralist libertarian favors the decentralization, diffusion, and dispersal of power, knowing that he cannot know what local communities and cultures tacitly understand about their unique circumstances. Within reason, the pluralist libertarian does not presuppose the correct normative order for local communities but, rather, leaves it to them to work out according to their cultural context.

In this book I use the term “libertarianism” as compatible with both pragmatism and conservatism; thus, some definitional preliminaries (for “libertarianism,” “pragmatism,” and “conservatism”) are due to explain this compatibility. Definitions of libertarianism often convey a sense that this freedom philosophy is total and complete, that its manifestation in the concrete world is immanently knowable. Vigorous debates about the fundamental tenets of libertarianism dispel any hope that the essence or principal attributes of libertarianism can be easily captured in a brief sentence or paragraph. The central concern of libertarianism, however, is to maximize individual liberty and economic freedom to enable human flourishing. Liberty and freedom involve the ability of human agents, acting alone or in concert, voluntarily to pursue their wants and goals, using their earned talents and natural skills, absent the forcible, coercive mechanisms of government and without infringing on the rights of others to so act.

Elsewhere I have said that “[e]xperimentation is compatible with—perhaps indispensable to—libertarianism to the extent that libertarianism is, as I believe, the search for the correct conditions for human flourishing—as well as the cautious description and reasoned implementation of principles emanating from that condition” (italics added).⁶ I used the hedging phrase “to the extent that” to suggest that my conception of libertarianism is not definitive or absolute, that it is subject to scrutiny and debate and revision. I emphasized “the correct conditions for human flourishing” because libertarians have propounded disparate and even contradictory theories about how best to achieve human flourishing. The conditions that have succeeded to that end have proven themselves to be correct, or at least more correct than demonstratively unworkable alternatives. The word “search” is meant to underscore the primacy of the intellect and knowledge: Human agents must be free to think and freely articulate the content of their thoughts before practices and institutions—the products of thought—may be tested, refined, verified, modified, adapted, or discarded according to their tangible success within physical (as opposed to purely mental or ideational) experience. The principles that emerge from this process of applied thinking can be described as libertarian if they aspire to generate—and actually generate—individual liberty and economic freedom without increasing the forcible interference of government with consensually interacting human agents.

Pragmatism is difficult to define because it refers to a wide-ranging philosophical tradition. Figures with little in common, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Isaac Levi, Reinhold Niebuhr, and George Herbert Mead, have been associated with pragmatism. C. S. Peirce is credited as the wellspring of pragmatism, in part because he used the term “pragmatism” to refer to his writings a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Toward Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Polycentricity
• 2. Jefferson’s Laws of Nature, Newtonian Influence, and the Dual Valence of Jurisprudence and Science
• 3. Natural Law and Racist Jurisprudence in Early Virginia
• 4. Seasteading and Polycentric Law
• 5. Justice Holmes and Conservatism
• 6. Toward Pragmatic Conservatism
• 7. The Corrective Careers of Concurrences and Dissents
• 8. Justice Brandeis as Jeffersonian Jurist
• 9. The Emersonian Natural Law of Justice Holmes
• Back Matter