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From Liberalisms to Enlightenment's Wake

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From Liberalisms to Enlightenment's Wake JOURNAL OF IBERTARIAN TUDIES S L S JL VOLUME 21, NO. 3 (FALL 2007): 79–114 GRAY’S PROGRESS: FROM LIBERALISMS TO ENLIGHTENMENT’S WAKE JEREMY SHEARMUR The progress of that darkness . from its first approach to the period of greatest obscuration. William Robertson, History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth I HAVE KNOWN JOHN Gray for quite a few years, and have long admired his work. We were among the (very few) political theorists in the U.K. who, in the early 1970s, had an interest in the work of Hayek, and more generally in issues relating to classical liberalism. During the 1980s, he emerged as the most powerful and effective theorist of classical liberalism in the U.K., notably through his re- interpretations of John Stuart Mill in Mill on Liberty (1983a), his Hayek and Liberty (1984), and his overview and critical assessment of the lib- eral tradition, Liberalism (1986). We had, over the years, various dis- cussions about Hayek and liberalism—as Gray mentions in his Hayek on Liberty—and in that connection we shared many intellectual con- cerns; notably, with problems about how classical liberalism related to particular traditional cultures, and about the value of lives that did not involve autonomy in any significant sense. Our discussions about these and related matters were occasional, and typically by telephone or at Liberty Fund conferences. In the course of one of these conversations, I suggested to Gray that he might consider col- lecting some of his essays on liberalism into a volume, as he kindly JEREMY SHEARMUR is Reader in Philosophy at the Australian National University. I would like to thank James Taylor, Eric Mack, Andrew Vincent, Barry Hindess, and participants of the Australasian Political Studies Association, and the Department of Political Science seminar at ANU for comments on an earlier draft. I would particularly like to thank the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University. Finally, I would like to thank an anonymous referee for some particularly useful com- ments and criticism. 79 80 — JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES 21, NO. 3 (FALL 2007) mentions in the preface to Liberalisms—which was the result. Since that time, however, we have not been in more than very occasional contact, and I have not had the opportunity to read his writings sys- tematically. It was for this reason that I particularly welcomed the opportunity to review his work;1 not least because it tells an interest- ing story of Gray’s shift away from the classical liberalism which we shared, and to which I still subscribe, through conservatism, to the espousal of a position which brought him, intellectually, to Nietzsche and to Heidegger, and, politically, to writing a column in the leftish London Guardian, and close to the “new” British Labour Party.2 LIBERALISMS As Gray tells the first part of this story in the Preface to his Liberalisms (1989), his progress represents a progression through various attempts to provide foundations for liberalism, until he reached the point where he gave up on this project and, in a sense, on liberalism itself. This does, certainly, take place. But in some respects the story is more complex, as I shall explain. As disclosed by the papers in his Liberalisms, Gray starts with an appreciative, but not uncritical, discussion of such liberals as Mill and Popper. He then offers a critique of both Rawls’s Theory of Justice and of Nozick, for each offering what Gray describes as a contractarian- ism3 that while having pretensions to universality, has what are, actu- ally, culturally specific premises. There is then a critical exploration of strengths—and also problems—of the indirect utilitarianism that Gray elsewhere attributed to Mill, and which also in part informs Hayek’s work, and some useful discussion of a bevy of problems 1Liberalisms (1989); Post-Liberalism (1993a); Beyond the New Right (1993b); Enlightenment’s Wake (1995a), and Isaiah Berlin (1995b). This project started with a plan for a review essay of the first three volumes, but not only did the project grow, Gray’s output meant that it seemed that by the time I had read and thought about one volume, two more had appeared. I plan to continue this critical survey, starting where I have left off, on a future occasion. 2David Willetts (a former student of Gray’s) took issue with Gray as one of “Blair’s Gurus,” in his Blair’s Gurus (1996). Gray, as far as I can tell, did not then object to this designation, as I seem to recall seeing him in a posed pho- tograph with some of the other “gurus,” in a newspaper at around the time at which Willetts’s study came out. 3The designation of Nozick’s approach as “contractarian” itself being a slightly strange description. GRAY’S PROGRESS, PART 1: FROM LIBERALISMS TO ENLIGHTENMENT’S WAKE — 81 relating to liberalism (such as the contented slave), and of natural law theory. After an acute but highly critical paper on Hayek, Gray then turns to the later Rawls. For Rawls’s later ideas Gray shows some sympathy, but argues that there is such diversity within spe- cific contemporary Western cultures, that what, on Gray’s account, one can obtain from Rawls’s approach is only an updated version of Hobbes; an approach which Gray also identifies with that of James Buchanan. Gray concludes that what one can derive from this is lim- ited and culturally specific in its scope—and is close to Oakeshott’s account of “civil society,” of whose views Gray then offers a sympa- thetic exposition. Gray finally goes back to savage Mill for lacunae and indeterminacies in his approach, and to offer a critique—which seemed to me less than compelling—of several broad strands in lib- eral argument. From all of this, two things emerge. By the end of Liberalisms, Gray has turned his back upon foundationalist argument. This—at least in my view—is reasonable enough; indeed, one might have thought that someone with the interests reflected in the opening pieces in this collection—Mill’s On Liberty and Popper—should not have had much sympathy for it in the first place. But when he is engaged in polemical argument against liberalism, Gray’s work seems haunted by foundationalism—at least in his account of what it is that he is turning his back on. For when Gray speaks critically of the enterprise of liberalism, he depicts it in very strange terms. First, he demands that justification should be produced in a quite unreal- istic manner; for example, he complains (1989, p. 42), that no “tran- scendental justification” is offered; or, later, that there is no “deduc- tion from conceptual analysis or from rationally certified principles” (p. 100). But it is not clear why a reader of Mill or of Popper—or, indeed, of any work in recent epistemology—would demand such a thing. Second, Gray takes liberals to task for a lack of determinacy or completeness in their views; complaining—to use an example from Enlightenment’s Wake—because Mill’s principle of liberty does not offer an immediate way of resolving problems such as those posed by “electronic bugging devices or long-distance cameras” (1995, p. 132). But after Gödel’s work, there can surely be no reasonable expectation of completeness of this kind.4 Third, Gray also some- times takes liberals to task for offering their views as compelling for 4I am not, here, claiming that Gödel’s work has political significance, but rather that, if formal systems of even a certain limited degree of content are incomplete, it should surely not surprise us to find incompleteness in other areas. 82 — JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES 21, NO. 3 (FALL 2007) all times and all places. But in the light of Mill’s remarks about Akbar, and many other cases to which Gray refers us at other points in his essays, it is clear that Gray knows better. Indeed, there is a sense in which polemics—which are well-represented in these collec- tions—bring out the very worst in Gray. For while when he is not engaged in polemical argument Gray can give a good, sympathetic, yet critical account of other people’s work, when he turns to polemics, Gray offers accounts of other people’s views in which he can recognize no good in them. This is odd, as one of the strange fea- tures of Gray’s writing is that he frequently offers us criticisms of various positions which he himself seems to have held until fairly recently, but which are then characterized in the most pejorative of terms, and as if only a fool or a knave could hold them. There is also the issue of Gray’s own position. This is worth con- sidering in two parts; his substantive views, and his views about the character of argument in political philosophy. In substantive terms, there is a sense in which his views do not, in fact, change all that much over this collection (indeed, until we get almost to the end of his Enlightenment’s Wake the variations in his substantive views are in some ways quite small). Broadly speaking, Gray is—and through much of his work remains—a classical liberal, with conservative and pluralist tendencies. His account of civil society is of a form of social organization in which people live under the rule of law, in market- based societies (in his account of which he largely follows Hayek, and others in the “subjectivist” tradition in economics). Gray is concerned, however, about the social prerequisites of such societies, in the sense that they are not, in his view, available to all or even good for all.
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