Rural Poverty, Land, and Capitalist Globalization

At the PropertyProf Blog, Steve Clowney draws our attention to a recent New York Times article “on a conflict between subsistence farmers in Mali (who unknowingly don’t have good title to the land they farm) and international agricultural investors:”

Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come.

Organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank say the practice, if done equitably, could help feed the growing global population by introducing large-scale commercial farming to places without it.

But others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse, they contend, much of the food is bound for wealthier nations. [….]

My comment to Professor Clowney’s post follows, as well as some further remarks:

This painfully illustrates one of the downsides of capitalist globalization (facilitated by the political powers-that-be: from the State downward). In India, activists (notably, but not only, those on the Left, including Communists) have resurrected the Gandhian notion of gram rajya (village autonomy or rural democracy) to fight such land grabs (with varying degrees of success).* Of course this concept was, with Gandhi, part and parcel of other “Euclidean” constructs or utopian concepts (swaraj, swadeshi, sarvodaya, satyagraha, ahimsa, etc.), some of which are completely forgotten or ignored today.

This is also a reminder of the fact that in the so-called developing countries or emerging polities (with regard to common processes of ‘modernization,’ democratization and integration into the global economy), spatially localized resources

“are frequently neither private property nor state property, but common property. In poor countries communal property rights to resources are often based on custom and tradition; they aren’t backed by the kinds of deeds that could pass scrutiny in courts of law. [....] In poor countries the local commons include grazing lands, threshing grounds, swidden fallows, inland and coastal fisheries, rivers and canals, woodland forests, village tanks, and ponds. Being spatially localized, their use can be monitored by members of the community. [....] Communal property rights enable members of a group to reduce individual risks by pooling their risks. Moreover, the incentive to pool risks that are associated with the use of any particular resource depends on the other risks people face, it depends on their remaining sources of income, on transaction possibilities in other spheres of life, and so forth.”

As Partha Dasgupta** also explains, the communal management of local commons doesn’t imply open access: they are open typically only to those whose kinship ties and community membership is thought to confer historical rights in this regard. Dasgupta notes case studies have concluded that such communal property rights and management “have prevented rural and coastal communities from experiencing the tragedy of the commons.”

Finally, these are exquisite examples of the various means used to facilitate and sustain cooperation and non-market interactions outside the legal power of the State. Alas (at least in the short-term; relatedly, this may be a case of taking one step backwards in order to take two steps forward—which is not a normative policy endorsement of this strategy), the growth of modern markets in these countries often has “an adverse effect of the functioning of a local, non-market institution,” prompting, for instance, the weakening of prevailing social norms (e.g., of reciprocity, authority, and trust) which, in turn, leads to the precipitous deterioration of communal management systems: one reason why “free trade” simpliciter sans consideration for those who are vulnerable to the (inevitable?) erosion of communitarian practices is ethically disturbing and defective economic and political policy.

To widen our perspective yet further, it should go without saying that polemical rhetoric against capitalism, or free trade and globalization, can only be made in the context of a nuanced economic and historical accounting of the virtues and vices of capitalism, one along the lines made by the Marxist economist Meghnad Desai in Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (2002):

“Capitalism is not a kind or a benevolent system. It is the most effective mode of production discovered so far in wealth creation [despite its endemic ‘cycles, with their manias, crashes, and panics’]. It has no overarching objective, since it works through the profit-seeking efforts of millions of capitalists. It generates economic growth, prosperity, and employment as side-effects. It also causes much misery and destruction in its tendency towards incessant change. But over the last two hundred years, it has achieved the largest gain in well-being in all previous millennia. For one thing, many more people are alive now than in 1800 (around six times as many), and they live longer on average—between ten to twenty years longer—than they did then. [….] If length of life can be taken as a crude measure of potential well-being, a billion people living, say, forty years on average in 1800 compared to six billion people living sixty year today speaks volumes for the success of capitalism. In 1800, perhaps two thirds of that billion were poor; today, at most a quarter of the six billion are poor. Yet the reduction of poverty is neither automatic, nor to be taken for granted.

Adam Smith was not wrong, however, in saying that the new system of natural liberty imposed the cost of inequality while delivering a universal betterment of living standards. More people have been brought out of poverty in the last two hundred years, especially since 1945, than ever before in history. The very idea that poverty could be eliminated could not have occurred in any precapitalist stage. Capitalism provides the means for eliminating poverty, but these means were not directed immediately, or evenly, in the course of its development.”

China, and to some extent India (e.g., the state of Kerala), provide compelling contemporary evidence that capitalism can make enormous strides in addressing the question of poverty, but as both China and India make plain, this is often purchased at the price of recalcitrant and novel forms of inequality (gender, geographical, urban/rural, income, and otherwise). The creation of new forms of “relative” poverty and inequality, the system’s “manias, crashes, and panics,” and the urgent ecological and environmental problems we face today, are among the more prominent and pressing reasons we have to endeavor, with Marx, to look beyond (in an Hegelian dialectical sense) this economic system (although Marx himself had very little to say about socialism and communism, his analytical prowess being devoted to capitalism). Along with Desai we might therefore ask:

“Is it possible to have a society that is not merely self-organizing, but consciously so? A society fully self-conscious of its own workings, and able to direct them, where individuals are not alienated from their work, or from themselves, but fully participate in their self-emancipation, and realize the full potential of the species-being that they are—in other words, Socialism beyond Capitalism?”

As Desai makes powerfully pellucid, any economic transcendence of capitalism will have to incorporate a full and honest accounting of its historical accomplishments and economic virtues, or transcendence by way of Hegelian-like negation and sublation. In other words, sloganeering along the lines of “capitalism sucks” or crude anti-globalization polemics is pointless, not unlike (assuming the sloganeering and polemics are sincere and grounded in coherent beliefs) the reasons Marx had for excoriating the socialists of his time and place for “their delusions about the prospects of achieving socialism.”

* See, for instance, this story: “Karnataka JD(S) vows to usher in gram rajya.” On the Janata Dal (S), see the Wikipedia entry.
**Partha Dasgupta, Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Further Reading:

• Bardhan, Pranab. Scarcity, Conflicts, and Cooperation: Essays in the Political and Institutional Economics of Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
• Bardhan, Pranab, Samuel Bowles, and Michael Wallerstein, eds. Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution. New York: Russell Sage Foundation/Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
• Basu, Kaushik. Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Bhala, Raj. Trade, Development and Social Justice. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2003.
• Brock, Gillian. Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Cottier, Thomas, Joost Pauwelyn, and Elisabeth Bürgi, eds. Human Rights and International Trade. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Held, David and Anthony McGrew. Globalization /Anti-Globalization: Beyond the Great Divide. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007.
• Iyer, Raghavan. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 2nd ed., 1983 (1st ed., Oxford University Press, 1973).
• Macy, Joanna. Dharma and Development: Religion as Resource in the Sarvodaya Self-Help Movement. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, revised ed., 1985.
• Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
• Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

[cross-posted at ReligiousLeftLaw.com]

UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

“Today, the United States government at last officially endorsed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and joined the international community in recognizing that American Indians and other indigenous peoples have a permanent right to exist as peoples, nations, cultures, and societies.” [….]

For the rest of this article by Robert T. Coulter, see this post, UN Declaration Sets New Agenda for US-Indian Relations, at Turtle Talk.

Coulter is the “founder and executive director of the Indian Law Resource Center in Helena, Mont., and Washington, D.C., has practiced Indian and human rights law for more than 30 years.”

For more commentary, see this page at the Indian Law Resource Center.

For the text of the Declaration, see here.

For the Wikipedia entry on the Declaration, see here.

A few titles under the rubric of relevant scholarly literature:

• Anaya, S. James. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2004.
• Ivison, Duncan, Paul Patton and Will Sanders, eds. Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Keal, Paul. European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• McHugh, Paul G. Aboriginal Societies and the Common Law: A History of Sovereignty, Status, and Self-Determination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Thornberry, Patrick. Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights. Huntington, NY: Juris, 2002.
  
  See too the chapters that make up Part Three, “Self-Determination,” especially the chapter on “Intrastate Autonomy,” in Allen Buchanan’s very important book, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  
  Image: A Bedouin man and camel in Negev

[cross-posted at ReligiousLeftLaw.com]

Liberalism: Keynesian, Cold War, Rawlsian…and Cosmopolitan

At the U.S. Intellectual History blog there’s a post by Andrew Hartman prompted by Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay in the New York Review of Books on Rawls’ now published senior thesis. Hartman concludes in part as follows:

“Appiah, famous in his own right for his work, among others, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, sees Rawls as a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism. I had never understood Rawls as such. I was more inclined to think of Rawls as my colleague Mike O’Connor does in his manuscript-in-progress on democratic capitalism—as perhaps the last leading Cold War liberal thinker. By way of conclusion, I would like to pose questions. Does it make sense to think of Rawls as a cosmopolitan thinker?” [….]

Herewith my comment to the post:

I don’t think it’s very helpful to categorize Rawls as “the last leading Cold War liberal thinker,” or even an exemplary “Cold War liberal thinker.” The secondary literature on Rawls is enormous, and much of it reflects the biases and ideologies (not always in a fatal way, mind you) of its authors. And Rawls’ works are themselves in part responsible for the wide range of interpretive positions owing to occasional inconsistencies, ambiguities, contradictions, and so forth, in spite of the brilliance of the works in toto. Here we might agree with Gerald F. Gaus in his invaluable analytical survey, Contemporary Theories of Liberalism (2003):

“The interpretation of Rawls’s texts is notoriously difficult [as is often the case with any decent philosopher]; at different points Rawls appears to reinterpret his earlier statements, and at times apparently affirms competing interpretations of his views. It is not difficult to find in Rawls’s work passages that support widely different interpretations.”

For the moment, let me say that it is true that to the extent there exists (or that one can find) “cosmopolitanism” strains in Rawls’s thought (and I believe there to be some) it reflects the influence of Kant, nonetheless, as Onora O’Neill has made plain,* in some respects at least, Kant was more of a cosmopolitan than Rawls, at least the Rawls of Political Liberalism (1993) and perhaps more clearly of The Law of Peoples (1999) as well. The “Kantian constructivism” of the former work “identified the reasonable with the public reason of fellow citizens in a given, bounded, democratic society [i.e., like ‘ours’].” Thus, here at least, Kant is more cosmopolitan than Rawls, for Kant’s ethical method was indeed cosmopolitan while Rawls’ is “implicitly statist.” Now we might also bear in mind the audience or rhetorical character of Political Liberalism insofar as it appears to deliberately restrict itself to members of “actually existing democratic societies” so to speak, and this certainly represents an endeavor to respond if not appeal to communitarian critics like Sandel, perhaps reflecting, as some have argued, a needless concession to the communitarian argument generally. However, things may not be quite as clearcut as O’Neill makes them out to be if we focus on both the rhetorical and rational character of the argument. After all, Rawls aims for a political conception of justice that is “freestanding,” that is, not (deductively) dependent in its presuppositions, axiomatic assumptions or premises upon a commitment to any specific comprehensive worldview, and in so doing it aims to ground itself in reason as such, be it as “the rational” or the “reasonable.” Now Rawls does appeal here to the public culture of a constitutional regime because he believes its fundamental principles, say, autonomy, liberty, equality, fairness, or welfare, are core Liberal political principles and values and thus, as such, are capable of transcending their possible justification in any particular comprehensive view, in other words, they need not depend on any such worldview, indeed, these differing comprehensive views may in fact possess the intellectual resources from which one might (or better: should) reason to an endorsement of the aforementioned principles or at least come to an appreciation of their indispensable and basic political value or worth (by analogy: consider the manner in which people of differing worldviews or ‘cultures’ across the globe have come to endorse at least some human rights, or the notion of human dignity, even if they’ve come to that conclusion, that is, even if they’ve reasoned from different conceptual premises or values and beliefs seemingly unique to their specific worldviews in a manner that permits or encourages them to endorse the inviolable dignity or inherent worth of the individual human being).

Now it will not do to dismiss Rawls’ argument here because the political salience or significance of the above values and principles were historically and politically generated from or common to Liberalism, for that would be to commit the genetic (or ‘reductive’) fallacy, if only because these principles are in fact generalizable or universalizable** regardless of their association with various thinkers and theories in the tradition of Liberalism. Or, with Gaus, we can point out that principles like (negative and positive) liberty, equality, welfare, and (moral) autonomy “are not necessarily embedded in any comprehensive doctrine [or ‘worldview,’ the term I prefer],” yet those of differing comprehensive doctrines are capable, presumably, of agreeing to them (or at least they should insofar as they share a commitment to the value of rationality and the need to be reasonable). Insofar as Rawls is speaking to citizens of constitutional democratic regimes, the rhetorical purpose of his argument is “consensual,” i.e., he aims to show that everyone “has reason R to accept belief X” (we share a reason for endorsing X). And insofar as his argument is capable of appealing to those of different comprehensive doctrines or worldviews, that is, irregardless of whether or not one is a member of a democratic society, it makes use of a “convergence” argument which seeks to demonstrate that “we have different reasons for endorsing X, though we all have some reason for endorsing it” (I’m relying here on Gaus who, in turn, is drawing upon Fred D’Agostino for the distinction between ‘consensus’ and ‘convergence’ arguments). O’Neill appears to be focusing on the former argument to the neglect of the plausibility or possibility of Rawls making this latter argument. Those who reject the conception of persons as being free and equal (in at least the Kantian moral if not the metaphysical sense) and, no less importantly, lack a commitment to being reasonable and rational, are outside the rhetorical scope and attraction of Rawls’ argument. As Gaus explains,

“Rawls argues that justice as fairness is a justified political conception because it articulates the requirements of the person and society that all reasonable citizens in our democratic societies share. However, Rawls does not believe that this exhausts ‘full’ and ‘public’ justification [and here we get closer to Kant and his notion of practical and public reason in the sense that the scope of ethical reasoning encompasses an unbounded plurality of agents]—citizens draw upon their full range of beliefs and values and find further reasons for endorsing the political conception. Thus ‘overlapping consensus’ constitutes a convergent public justification, drawing on our various ‘comprehensive doctrines.’”

The Rawls of A Theory of Justice (1999 ed.) does not make ethical arguments or even assumptions that can be dismissed as “statist,” and the extent to which it relies on Liberal principles in the broadest sense (in conceiving ‘justice as fairness’), these are universalizable or generalizable, as they are in Kant’s case, and thus Rawls’ argument can be seen as having cosmopolitan implications, even if he himself did not tease these out in any sustained manner. To the degree, in other words and for example, that he relies on the Kantian notion of “free and equal” persons he falls within the ambit of the cosmopolitan tradition going back to the Stoics (as does Kant himself for that matter). Now I’m not here going to attempt any critique (as Gaus himself does) motivated by the fact that Rawls concedes his notion of “justice as fairness” is only one possible liberal conception, granting, in other words and as Gaus points out, “that there are diverse interpretations of the basic concept of a liberal political order,” a plurality that at bottom is inevitable if only because of the abstract character and level of the fundamental principles and values found in the Liberal tradition, indeed, this also accounts for the different “kinds” of Liberalism: (to some extent) Hobbesian, Lockean, Millean, Nozickian, Rawlsian, etc.

In The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (1986), Ian Shapiro correctly notes that Rawls’ ideological impact, while more complex than that of Robert Nozick,

“can be summed up by saying that his is the natural response of a liberal who has read Pigou and Keynes seriously. He appeals to those who believe in the desirability, efficiency, and justice of capitalist markets, recognize that they may not always function well and may generate serious inequities for some, and want to find efficient ways of addressing those inequities without altering the essential nature of the system. The ambiguous moral status of Keynesianism and welfare economics has always inhered in the fact that they appeal to the short-term interests of the disadvantaged (such as unemployed workers and firms on the edge of bankruptcy during recessions) by ensuring subsistence, creating employment, and expanding credit, yet these policies are geared in the medium term to sustaining the system which generate those very disadvantages—hence the ironic force of Joan Robinson’s quip that the one thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited at all.”

Now while this may account for the ideological appeal of Rawls, it does not do his argument full justice in as much as he was capable of envisioning, like not a few contemporary democratic socialists and Social Democrats, and even some (especially self-described ‘analytical’) Marxists (e.g., Roemer), the possibility of non-capitalist or socialist markets (hence the debate on the Left about ‘market socialism’). Rawls speaks (in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007)), for instance, of the “illuminating and worthwhile view” of “liberal socialism,”*** enumerating its four basic elements and referring in a note to John Roemer’s “Liberal Socialism (1994),” which is not, it turns out, a title of any of Roemer’s books (if I recall correctly, this error was confirmed in correspondence with Samuel Freeman). The volume Rawls probably intended to cite is Roemer’s A Future for Socialism published the same year (it is no less a delightful Freudian slip for all that!). Here once more we might appreciate why it may be more than a tad misleading to view Rawls as a “Cold War liberal” (there are, however, not a few of that species: for a discussion of the ‘intersection between the various approaches to rational choice liberalism and Rawls’s theory of justice,’ please see S.M. Amadae’s Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (2003)).

With regard to political cosmopolitanism proper, particularly insofar as it includes a theory of distributive global justice, there are at least several theories of global justice that are avowedly inspired by Rawls even if they depart from him in some or significant respects (e.g., Charles Beitz’s Political Theory and International Relations (1979) Gillian Brock’s Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (2009)). Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism, which is intellectually adverse to the social contract tradition, remains in some ways beholden to Rawls as she herself has acknowledged. This alone should provide sufficient presumptive reason for refusing to exclude Rawls from the rubric of cosmopolitanism, whatever the shortcomings from vantage points provided by more vigorous—or “robust” as we say today—theories of same (e.g., Simon Caney’s Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (2005) and Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006), and several books by Thomas Pogge).

*In her essay, “Constructivism in Rawls and Kant,” in Samuel Freeman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (2003): 346-367.

**It might help to recall, again with O’Neill, that abstract, “universal principles need not mandate uniform treatment; indeed, they mandate differentiated treatment. [....] Even principles that do not specifically mandate differentiated treatment will be indeterminate, so leave room for differentiated application.” Uniformity is, in other words and in the first place, a matter of content: “For example, principles such as ‘Each should be taxed in proportion to ability to pay,’ or ‘Good teachers should set work that is adjusted to each child’s level of ability’ respectively prescribe and recommend universally, but both will require varied rather than uniform implementation in a world of varying cases.” In addition, “even when universal principles specifically prescribe some degree or aspect of uniformity of action or treatment, they underdetermine action, so must permit varied implementation.” Finally, universal principles of action “hold universally only relative to some domain of agents.” In sum, it follows that, as Kant himself appreciated and many of his critics have not (among those critics O’Neill includes contemporary ‘particularists’ like ‘communitarians, virtue ethicists, and some “radical” feminist writers’), “the application of principles to cases involves judgement and deliberation.” Thus principles serve as “side-constraints (not algorithms) and can only guide (not make) decisions.” (For a fuller treatment, see her book, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (1996)). One might compare the manner in which (indeterminate) Platonic Forms, as abstract and general ideas, are intuitively and dialectically realized (at least according to what T.K. Seung terms ‘bedrock’ Platonism) “in many different ways.” Constructivism is therefore essential to ethical reasoning in both Plato and Kant, assuming the form and function of utopian thought in the sense outlined by William A. Galston in Justice and the Human Good (1980): “First, it guides our deliberation, whether in devising courses of action or in choosing among exogenously defined alternatives with which we are confronted. Second, it justifies our actions; the grounds of action are reasons that others ought to accept and—given openness and the freedom to reflect—can be led to accept. Third, it serves as the basis for the evaluation of existing institutions and practices.”

***A work that intriguingly combines Rawlsian ethical conceptions and reasoning with Marxism that is a must-read, and further evidence of the wide appeal and implications of Rawls’ work beyond the label of “liberalism” (Cold War, Keynesian, what have you), is Rodney G. Peffer’s (rather neglected) Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (1990).

The Collective Punishment of Gaza

At Informed Comment, Juan Cole writes that the Israeli actions in Gaza do not fall under the rubric of a “policy” for, presumably, a public policy in a would-be democratic State is by definition is capable of a corresponding public justification that conforms at least to minimalist conceptions of what it means to be reasonable and Liberal canons of rationality. But the Israeli blockade and collective punishment of Gaza “is not a policy. Policies are rational, have bounds, have attainable goals. What has the blockade accomplished? When will it end? How can it be justified given it breaks about ten major international laws? How can it be justified given that it is contrary to everything in Jewish ethics (would Israelis like to have their children blockaded that way, is the question Rabbi Hillel would ask). It is not a policy. It is a piece of sadism on a mass scale.”

Gisha, an Israeli nonprofit organization “whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents,” while “promot[ing] rights guaranteed by international and Israeli law,” has acquired documents from the government that spell out the terms and conditions of the blockade, including a “policy of deliberate reduction” of basic goods. Furthermore, as Cole explains,

“There has been no significant easing of the blockade. Virtually no goods made by Palestinians in Gaza may be exported abroad, by Israeli fiat. As military occupier, Israel controls Gaza’s shore, its waters, and bombed its airport into smithereens. Two-thirds of Palestinian businesses have been shuttered by the baleful Israeli siege since 2007. Those that remain function at much reduced capacity, often denied the raw materials they need to produce made goods. [….]

None of the justifications typically given for the blockade hold water in international law. That Hamas was voted into power in the January 2006 elections sponsored by the Bush and Olmert administrations is no reason to deny a small child permission to leave Gaza for medical treatment (1/5 of Gazans’ application to leave for medical treatment are much delayed or denied by Israeli authorities). Not letting Palestinians make clothing for export is an illegal policy in the law. Only directly military goods may be blockaded.

What is truly disgusting is not only that the Israelis pursue this beastly policy toward Palestinian children and other civilians. It is that the major world powers are complicit in it. If the United Nations Security Council amounted to anything, it would order (and I mean order) the Israelis to desist. [….]

People who don’t think massive long-term sadism toward a million and a half people will cause trouble for the perpetrators are adopting an ostrich policy. Gaza’s conditions are on Arabic satellite TV daily. Nothing can be hidden.”

And so, as Cole informs us, and as reported in The Guardian, sixteen international aid and human rights organizations have called for an end to this “cruel” embargo and blockade.

[cross-posted at ReligiousLeftLaw.com]

A center-left Clinton/Gore-type New Democrat and “a radical lefty"?

At the Legal Ethics Forum, Bradley Wendel wonders if he is properly identified as a “‘liberal’ legal ethicist,” proceeding to inform us that he’s “more of a center-left Clinton/Gore-type New Democrat, certainly not a radical lefty.” In response, I wrote as follows:

As an aside to your comment, it’s of course quite possible that you could be BOTH “a center-left Clinton/Gore-type New Democrat” and “a radical lefty.”

Let’s say, for example, or in the best of all possible worlds, you’re a Marxist or “radical lefty” of some sort (Social Democrat, democratic socialist, philosophical anarchist, and so on) when it comes to an analysis of capitalism, including belief in the (theoretical and historical—the latter in a non-determinist sense) possibility of non-capitalist alternative socio-economic structures, portents of which were presaged in the works of the utopian socialists castigated by Marx for their political naïveté (among other things) as well as, later, among philosophically inclined anarchists (or ‘anarcho-communists’) like Kropotkin and Gandhi. This orientation need not rule out the possibility that, on election day, you vote as ”a center-left Clinton/Gore/[Obama]-type New Democrat,” especially given the constraints of electoral politics in this country. Furthermore, you may be at the same time a Liberal in the classical sense (from Hobbes, Locke and J.S. Mill through Rawls) when it comes to your understanding of and fondness for the legal system and your appreciation of the myriad virtues of the institutions and processes of democratic representation of Liberal provenance.

The reasons for this are in accord with an observation made by the late Ninian Smart that most of us, “when it comes to the crunch,” don’t have systematic or even robustly consistent ideological worldviews, possessing rather an amalgam of belief and values: religious, moral, political, etc., “which we may publicly characterize in a certain way,” for instance, as Christian, Liberal, Radical, Leftist, and so forth, despite the fact that such rhetorical and political shorthand, in the end, fails to capture the inconsistent if not motley (at least as assessed by some criteria) character of these values and beliefs. As Smart wrote, our values and beliefs are composed “more like a collage than a Canaletto. They do not even have consistency of perspective.” I’m reminded here of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, who spoke of himself as being “half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.”

This selfsame point was more or less made by the New Left veteran (among the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society) and sociologist Richard (Dick) Flacks in his book, Making History: The Radical Tradition in American Life (1988):

“Since there is no national organization around any more that can set doctrinal boundaries for the left, there is today room for expressing and acting upon the full range of issues and perspective that actually constitute the radical, democratic, critical tradition. One can more easily be a Marxist in the morning, a pacifist in the afternoon, an environmentalist at dinner, and a feminist in the evening, while going to church on Sunday and voting Democrat on election day.”