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5. Liberalism and the Concept of the Collective Experiment

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5. Liberalism and the Concept of the Collective Experiment 5. Liberalism and the Concept of the Collective Experiment The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised. Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition The game of liberalism . means acting so that reality develops, goes its way, and follows its own course according to the laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality itself. More precisely and particularly, freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security. An apparatus of security . cannot operate well except on condition that it is given freedom, in the modern sense [the word] acquires in the eighteenth century: no longer the exemptions and privileges attached to a person, but the possibility of movement, change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things. —Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population In his classic text On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill suggested that liber- alism was intimately connected with what he called “experiments in liv- ing.”1 Mill meant that individuals, and voluntary associations of individuals, ought to be allowed to live as each saw fit, provided that their experiments did not diminish the liberty of others to live as they saw fit. The state’s purpose was to protect and facilitate such individual experiments in living, including in areas such as the education of children: “An education estab- lished and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of ex- ample and stimulus, to keep the others [i.e., non- State forms of education] up to a certain standard of excellence” (302). Mill’s claim about the fundamental importance of experiments in living for both individuals and society as a whole was based on several premises. These included the principles that individuals differed from one another and that it was difficult (and generally impossible) to prove that one way of life was best for everyone. Experiments in living had a quasi- scientific Liberalism and the Concept of the Collective Experiment 149 social function for Mill, for they allowed members of a particular society, as well as the long- term developmental process he called “civilization,” to explore advantages and disadvantages of many forms of life. Both govern- ment and social opinion, by contrast, tended to produce uniformity. As a consequence, the best role for the state, beyond enforcing laws that enabled experiments in living, was to serve as what Mill called a “central depository” for the many experiments in living that he hoped contemporary society would engender: Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. What the State can usefully do, is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others; instead of tolerating no experiments but its own. (306) The laissez- faire, or “letting be,” of Mill’s version of liberalism was thus less a matter of facilitating the operations of the free market than of enabling experiments in living, for these latter—at least when their results were collected by a central state repository—would make possible scientifically oriented progress in collective forms of living. Though Mill’s depiction of the relationship between liberty and exper- iments in living is a classic statement of Victorian liberalism, there are striking resonances between his account and our contemporary under- standings of what I will call “collective experiments.” Mill’s advocacy of social diversity and individual freedom in choosing how one wishes to live, for example, has been echoed since the 1960s in widespread efforts to encourage respect and legal protection for a wide variety of class, gender, racial, religious, and medical forms of diversity. The quasi- scientific ratio- nale of Mill’s defense of experiments in living—his claim that many such experiments enabled “society” to observe and choose the best among these—is also echoed in the efforts of neoliberal thinkers and policy makers to create population- wide health experiments. In the 1970s, for example, Louis Lasagna, head of the Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD), a neoliberal think tank focused on the pharmaceutical industry, claimed that clinical trials were too “artificial” to ascertain the efficacy of pharmaceutical drugs. He argued for what he described as a more “natu- ralistic” method of testing experimental drugs, namely, allowing pharma- ceutical companies to sell minimally tested potential drugs to anyone who wished to take them and carefully monitoring the results of this collective 150 Romanticism and the Operations of Biopolitics experiment.2 Though Lasagna’s proposal did not, in the short term, per- suade the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), something like his vision of medicine has nevertheless become standard practice, partly from a relax- ation of standards around experimental drugs, partly through the triumph of the consumer model of the patient- doctor relationship, and partly as a consequence of the development of data- and tissue- gathering protocols that now track large swathes of national populations.3 We cannot know whether Mill would have condoned these health- oriented experiments in living, but it seems fair to say that these latter are implied by the quasi- scientific logic of experimentation outlined in On Liberty. The links among health, population, and experiments in living so important in our own moment also provide a lens that allows us to under- stand better earlier interest in collective experiments. In the early eigh- teenth century, for example, the Scottish physician John Arbuthnot contended that opponents of the newly introduced method of smallpox inoculation sought to prevent a widespread, and necessary, collective experiment from occurring. He noted that though one published criticism “pretends to be an Admonition to Physicians not to meddle in this Practice of Inoculation, ’till they are better ascertain’d, by experience, of the Success of it,” that publication was actually a “most warm Dissuasive, not only to Physicians, but to all Sorts of people, not to practice [inoculation] at all” and thus amounted to an effort “to deprive [people] of all Possibility of coming by Experience.”4 Drawing on what would become a central prin- ciple of subsequent liberalisms, Arbuthnot contended that each individual is the best judge of his or her interests, and therefore each individual should decide whether or not to be inoculated against smallpox (3). Allowing individuals to choose would enable precisely that collective “experience” that could determine the efficacy of inoculation as a medical practice. Arbuthnot thus praised physicians who, “from their Disinterestedness and Innate Love to Mankind, are willing, that an Experiment should go on, which, in Proportion to the Extensiveness of the Practice, must necessarily diminish the Mortality of the Smallpox in general” (39–40). Arbuthnot’s early- eighteenth- century connection between individual choice and a larger social health experiment suggests that Mill, in valorizing experi- ments in living, was himself further developing an implicit—though, I will argue, essential—connection between liberalism and the concept of col- lective experimentation. My goal here is to document the centrality of the concept of collective experimentation to the history of liberalism. I argue that liberalism has been, since its eighteenth- century origins, intrinsically bound to the Liberalism and the Concept of the Collective Experiment 151 concept of collective experimentation. This concept has served as a con- ceptual matrix for bringing together five elements—populations, institu- tions for data gathering, individual rights, progress, and what I will call “test subjects”—that have been central to subsequent forms of liberalism, and different versions of liberalism can be distinguished by the ways that they combine these elements. Understanding collective experimentation as central to the theory and practice of liberalism illuminates the close link between liberalism and biopolitics, for the purpose of collective experi- mentation is, in all versions of liberalism, to maximize human capacities in ways only possible at the scale of populations. However, to judge by the examples I discuss here, this approach is either equivalent to, or easily slips into, an immunitary logic that necessarily exempts test subjects from both the freedoms promoted by liberalism and the benefits that purportedly result from collective experimentation. I develop five case studies, each focused on a specific author: John Arbuthnot, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, and Ulrich Beck. I begin with Arbuthnot’s early- eighteenth- century case for continu- ing the collective experiment of smallpox inoculation, noting that though his advocacy was not itself a brief for liberalism, he established the matrix of elements—populations, institutions for data gathering, individual rights, progress, and test subjects—that subsequent liberalisms
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