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Jun, Nathan. "Liberalism." Anarchism and Political Modernity. New York: Continuum, 2012

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Jun, Nathan. Jun, Nathan. "Liberalism." Anarchism and Political Modernity. New York: Continuum, 2012. 47–78. Contemporary Anarchist Studies. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 23 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501306785.ch-003>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 23 September 2021, 18:07 UTC. Copyright © Nathan Jun 2012. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 3 Liberalism Representationalism Ancient and medieval political theory, as we saw in the fi rst two chapters, was situated in an archic context that presupposed a natural cosmological order. To this extent it is best understood as a kind of ethical naturalism according to which the lives of human beings (ought to) refl ect or conform to the order of nature. Political relations and institutions, by extension, are described and/or justifi ed in relation to natural laws. For Aristotle, human beings are social creatures by nature, thus life in the polis is natural for human beings. Certain Stoics, while not necessarily disagreeing with the idea that human beings are social by nature, nonetheless deny that the polis (or at least certain of its key features, such as private property) is natural in the strict sense. In both cases, the concept of the individual person is at best secondary to the concept of the community, which is in turn secondary to the archic concept of natural order. Because human beings are essentially social, and because this essential sociability helps to defi ne the place of human beings within the broader cosmological order, sociopolitical relations within communities and among individual human beings are justifi ed to the extent that they are deemed “natural.” Political naturalism of this sort is better understood as a species of a wider genre which might be called “political holism.” This “holism,” as I understand it, rests on two crucial theses. The fi rst is that corporate entities such as communities, societies, cultures, and states have interests that transcend those of individual persons. 1 The second, according to Charles Taylor, is that “living in society is a necessary condition of the development of rationality, in some sense of this property, or of becoming a moral agent in the full sense of the term, or of becoming a fully responsible, autonomous being.” 2 If holism is essentially a descriptive or metaphysical doctrine, naturalism is an ethical doctrine; for the naturalist, after all, what matters is not just that human beings are social by nature, but that “naturalness” is 99781441140159_Ch03_Fpp_txt_prf.indd781441140159_Ch03_Fpp_txt_prf.indd 4477 99/2/2011/2/2011 66:33:06:33:06 PPMM 48 ANARCHISM AND POLITICAL MODERNITY the standard according to which political practices and institutions are to be ethically evaluated. Later holistic theories, such as those of Vico, Herder, Rousseau, and Hegel, do not necessarily ground ethical evaluation in an account of what is natural even though their accounts of the natural are similar to those which underwrite naturalistic theories. 3 Thus the concept of “nature” in general and “human nature” in particular did not vanish in the wake of modernity. On the contrary, questions such as “what does it means to be human?” or “what is the universal essence shared in common by all human beings?” remained centrally important for liberal and protoliberal philosophers, especially those of the so- called early modern era. One crucial difference is that for such philosophers, human beings are generally understood fi rst and foremost as individuals who are to be distinguished from each other as well from the natural world which they inhabit. This constitutes a rather signifi cant departure from the aforesaid ancient and medieval theories, which, while scarcely denying the existence of individuals, tended to analyze them in terms of their relationship to the community and, by extension, to nature as a whole. Liberalism tends to invert this priority by analyzing both the community and nature as a whole in terms of their relationship to individual human beings. From this we can adduce two distinctively “liberal” theses which serve to distinguish liberal and protoliberal theories from other theories. The fi rst, which Pettit calls “personalism,” claims that “whatever is good or bad about a set of institutions is something that is good or bad for the people whom they affect.” 4 In contrast to the fi rst thesis of holism mentioned above, personalism claims that there are no distinctly corporate interests or, to put it another way, that all corporate interests are reducible to individual interests. The second thesis, which Pettit calls “solipsism” or “social atomism,” holds that (a) “the solitary individual— the agent who is and always has been isolated from others— is nevertheless capable, in principle, of displaying all distinctive human capacities”; (b) that “any property that can serve as an ultimate political value, any property that can be regarded as a yardstick of political assessment has to be capable of instantiated by the socially isolated person, by the solitary individual”; and (c) “that the ultimate criteria of political judgment . are provided by non- social as distinct from social values.” 5 Taken together, these two theses basically turn political holism on its head. One way to explain this inversion has to do with the development of modern natural sciences in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The scholastic natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, which these sciences eventually surpassed, was a bricolage of ideas drawn from Ptolemian cosmology, Galenic medicine, Aristotelian physics, and so on. Generally speaking, medieval science retained the Aristotelian emphasis on the empirical observation of material entities and the explanation of natural phenomena in terms of internal principles of change and causation (especially 99781441140159_Ch03_Fpp_txt_prf.indd781441140159_Ch03_Fpp_txt_prf.indd 4488 99/2/2011/2/2011 66:33:06:33:06 PPMM LIBERALISM 493 teleological principles, i.e., fi nal causes). Within this framework human beings, alongside all other material entities, belonged to a hierarchy whose elements were differentiated according to their natural functions and ends. (This way of thinking is captured vividly in the famous Tree of Porphyry and similar classifi catory schemes.) The starting point of philosophy, which was almost always regarded, with appropriate reverence, as the “handmaiden” ( ancilla ) of theology, was the natural world as given to the senses. The human mind or soul, while crucial for locating human beings within the natural order, was not regarded as theoretically foundational. Broadly construed, ancient and medieval philosophy was not concerned with the problem of individuating human beings vis- à- vis mental or spiritual categories, the concept of consciousness, or the question of whether sensory experience correspond authentically to any “external” reality. 6 For example, Aristotle’s De Anima , which is widely regarded as the magnum opus of premodern psychology, pertains chiefl y to the operation of the senses and other mental faculties. 7 Aristotle does not discuss individuation in psychological terms (this would later become important in debates surrounding the so- called problem of other minds) nor the relation between mind and world. In point of fact, correspondence between the senses and the material world was largely taken for granted by Aristotle and his scions. For a number of reasons, the new scientifi c and mathematical ideas articulated in the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler cast signifi cant doubt on the explanatory framework of medieval science. 8 Descartes, among others, sought to create a new philosophical methodology modeled on and capable of accommodating these developments. 9 His approach, which we will refer to as representationalism , involved nothing less than a comprehensive upheaval of prevailing philosophical wisdom (“rebuilding the house,” as Descartes put it). 10 Adopting a kind of tactical skepticism, Descartes rejected any ideas, concepts, or entities which could, within the limits of logic, be doubted. 11 As an immediate consequence, he could no longer take for granted that his perceptions faithfully corresponded to (“represented”) an external reality, or even that there was such a thing as external reality. 12 The best he could do, at least initially, was to establish, by means of the vaunted cogito , 13 that he himself existed as a thinking thing (res cogitans ). 14 In this way Cartesian philosophy introduces the critical modern notion of the subject —literally, “that which is thrown under.” 15 The human being is no longer defi ned in terms of its functions or attributes or fi nal causes— in short, its position within the Aristotelian cosmological order. 16 Rather, the human is defi ned as “that which is thrown under” (i.e., the subject of) conscious experiences, including thoughts, perceptions, and sensations. 17 It is the res of the res cogitans . The question becomes: what, if anything, exists apart from the thinking thing and its representations? Are there objects of knowledge before which stand the subject of consciousness and, if so, how do the former relate to the latter? 99781441140159_Ch03_Fpp_txt_prf.indd781441140159_Ch03_Fpp_txt_prf.indd 4499 99/2/2011/2/2011 66:33:06:33:06 PPMM 50 ANARCHISM AND POLITICAL MODERNITY Attempts to answer these questions,
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