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The Myth of Modern Liberalism of Myths, Major And CONSTITUTIONAL CAPITALISM JOHN TOMASI (Draft of 8/23/08: Please do not circulate or cite.) Chapter 1: The Myth of Modern Liberalism Of Myths, Major and Minor I have been a parent and a professor for almost exactly the same number of years. As a parent, my wife Amy and I are raising two children---Peter and Lydia. As a professor, I have taught political thought to hundreds of students at Brown University. Most of the students studying politics with me have been undergraduates, but a good and growing number are graduate students working toward their Ph.D.s. From the beginning, I have noticed similarities between the members of these two groups---my children and my students interested in political thought. The members of both groups are curious by disposition and are blessed—developmentally at least---with enviously high levels of energy. Members of each group demonstrate a wonderful flexibility of mind, a capacity for the unexpected insight and, at their best, a certain purity of heart.1 But there is a further similarity between my growing children and my students of politics that most striking to me: both groups are remarkably vulnerable to accepting myth as fact. 1 As my children were growing, they believed fervently in many myths. For example, there was the myth about an elderly local man who often sat smoking cigarettes on a curb outside a local fish market. This man cut a striking figure, with a worn Portuguese-style barrette riding low across his brow and enormous hands, as broad as a lobster’s claws. But this man’s most intriguing physical feature---to my children at least---was his prominently missing right front tooth. The story, which I often heard my children relate in hushed tones to friends in the back seat of our car, was that this man was the last of a long line of successful fishermen on Narragansett Bay. This family had a ring, passed through the generations from father to son, which brought their nets great luck---luck the family would continue to enjoy on the condition that the ring be worn only during time spent ashore and never be taken out on the bay. One morning, long ago, this man had forgotten to remove the ring before pushing off in his skiff for his morning work. His first catch of the day included a massive striped bass. While hauling the slippery monster into his boat, the fish pulled the ring off his finger and escaped into the sea. The next day, while eating fish and chips at a local clam shack, he found his ring-- in the midst of his batter-fried cod fillet. While thus recovering his ring, he lost not only his right front tooth but his family’s piscatorial luck. Unable to catch fish, he had ever since spent his days outside the local fish market, wistfully smoking and wringing his powerful hands. My children believed many such myths. But the terrain of their young imaginations was dominated by one towering myth. This myth was so powerful, so vivid, so relied upon, that belief in it seemed to enable belief in 2 all the lesser myths. For my children, growing up in a mixed Catholic/secular household as they did, the master myth of their youth was that of Santa Claus---an elderly, overweight, hirsute, polar, Caucasian dandy, said to fly around world in a sleigh, climb down chimneys, and precisely deliver batches of requested toys, at least to good little girls and boys. My children are not stupid. How could they believe such a tale? How could they continue believing it long after they learned that reindeer are large Laplandic mammals that can barely run let alone fly, that even the best delivery companies routinely mess up the simplest of orders, and that the chimney in our house is blocked by a flue? Yet for years they accepted this unlikely story as fact. They did this, I suppose, because they first heard the tale from the persons upon whom they relied as authorities in such foundational matters—their mother and me. Further, they grew up surrounded by friends most of whom had heard this story from the authority figures in their lives. The members of this peer group reinforced in one another belief in this tale. Later, worries about some parts of this myth began seeping into my children’s private thoughts [“Why doesn’t Santa visit the home of Eli Zeltzer? After all, Eli is a (reasonably) good boy.” “How did Santa get that trampoline down our chimney?”]. Their faith was further shaken—and ultimately broken---by their increasingly frequent encounters with peers eager to explode the myth. But for years the myth had remarkable staying power: my children wanted the myth to be true. The myth made their lives simpler. It provided them with a role to play during the run up to 3 Christmas day. The myth provided comfort. It shielded them from responsibilities and thoughts they did not want to think. My students in political thought, at both the graduate and undergraduate level, are also vulnerable to the lure of myth. There are many minor myths prevalent among them. For example, there is the story about how a famous contemporary political and legal scholar—who shall remain nameless here-- -won the Rhodes scholarship that launched his glittering career. According to the story, this scholar as a youth had been a very bright spark but an equally poor athlete. As a child, he had thick glasses, poor coordination, and---on my students’ telling at least---was always picked dead last for school-yard games. A lack of physical prowess is no disability for an aspiring academic, but it was a problem for someone hoping to win a Rhodes scholarship—an honor traditionally reserved for the brainy and burly. Later, when on the merits of his stellar academic record this person was invited to the interview stage of the Rhodes competition, he was clever enough to understand that he had a problem. He responded the way any good academic would: he went immediately to the local Library. There he took out a dozen books about tennis and memorized them in every detail. Throughout his interviews, no matter what the question, he cheerfully turned the topic to tennis. Afterward, when the committee met to evaluate the candidates, someone mentioned how strange it was that one of the candidates seemed to have nothing in his head but tennis, tennis, and more tennis. Curious at how such a mono-dimensional candidate could have made it to the interview stage, they dug up his paper dossier---and found a transcript heavy with A’s. Within the minds of the selection committee the 4 hoped-for equation thus fell neatly into place: “Dumb Jock” plus “Bright Spark” equals …“Rhodes Scholar.” But, as with my children, so too with my students, there is a dominant, or if you like, a master myth that dominates their thinking about politics. This is a myth about the structure and nature of debates about political ideology in contemporary society. It concerns the relationship of the moral ideal one affirms and the range of political institutions that one might advocate in pursuit of that ideal. In particular, this myth insists that a moral commitment to a social ideal that many people find attractive requires a commitment to a set of institutional structures that are claimed uniquely to realize that ideal---institutional structures that, ironically, have become increasingly worrying to people in actual liberal societies. The social ideal that many people find attractive is the ideal of social justice. The set of institutional arrangements that one might permissibly advocate in pursue that ideal, we are told, are all and only those political regime-types that march under the banner of social democracy. I shall have much to say about the requirements of social justice, and about the nature of social democracy, in this book. For now though, by “social justice” I mean a conception of justice that is essentially social in nature. In the liberal context, principles of social justice guarantee certain liberties of 5 citizens, but also include guarantees about the distribution of goods across the society. Considered socially, justice is a standard that requires that designers of political structures take responsibility for the effects of political decisions on the life prospects of citizens across the full spectrum of social concerns: economic, cultural, familial as well as the properly political. In the liberal context, a concern for social justice requires that the liberal state guarantee not only the formal equality of citizens, but takes responsibility for providing citizens with substantive equality as well. Liberals who are committed to social justice take political responsibility for the full experience of citizens, seeking to create and maintain the social conditions under which citizens can develop the capacities they have as free individuals committed to sharing a social world with one another. Like social justice, the term social democracy has a number of meanings. By “social democracy,” I mean a range of regime-types that, we are told, are uniquely fitted to realize the values of social justice under modern conditions. This range of regimes is usually said to begin on the leftward edges of welfare-state liberalism. It runs robustly through mixed socialist- capitalist regimes, such as property-owning democracy, and extends out to include various forms of liberal socialism. [brief descriptions: welfarism, income transfers; POD, property transfers; liberal socialism, worker- managed firms]. Social democratic regimes, in all their variety, have an uncomfortable, if not openly hostile, relationship with capitalism.
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