Prospect Magazine asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question:
Left and right defined the 20th century. What’s next?
The responses they received were overwhelmingly negative. Almost every respondent expected the world to stay as screwed up as it is, and most expected it to get worse. The list of the dichotomies they see is interesting however:
- Cosmopolitans vs patriots
- collective action and solidarity vs individual self-interest
- egalitarianism & responsibility vs oligarchy & libertarianism
- politics of identity vs politics of money
- Global or central universalism vs local or parochial communitarianism
- humanism vs post-humanism
- Nation state vs market state
- Liberalism vs authoritarianism
- faith vs science
- hegemony vs diversity
Personally, I would have to vote for the great schism of the future being the market vs everything else, which I talk about constantly as the battle between the industrial and the post-industrial, between those who believe the moral of the tragedy of the commons and those see the tragedy as only possible when economic thought dominates all conception of the common.
I personally believe that the 21st century will be about the struggle to move beyond economic thinking - to remove it as the totality of conception. We see the beginnings of it now, with people questioning whether the free market is the best way to provide for a truly diverse set of goals and conceived goods.
I find it interesting that some variation on this theme was present in almost every answer provided except those of the economists.
The most interesting single answer, to my mind, was the following from Andrew Moravcsick, American political writer:
How quaintly European a question. Left vs right may be passé in Europe, but not here in America. Here it is not just an important issue—it’s the only issue. We Americans inhabit the only major industrialised democracy still fighting the domestic battles of the 1930s (or 1890s) essentially unchanged. Unlike Europe—in this regard, Britain is fully European—Americans never reaped the fruits of progressive victory in such battles: the establishment of social democracy, secularism and anti-militarism. Instead we remain a firmly libertarian nation. The costs are evident: 40m without health insurance, the west’s highest infant mortality, a tragic chasm between black and white, widespread religious domination of personal life choices, an aversion to the application of international law, and still an unhealthy fascination with imperial military might. In Europe, all this vanished a half century ago. Here, after a generation of conservative domination, it is resurgent.
It is well worth remembering that there is a significant possibility that the US could actually become a libertarian society over the next century. If it does, my belief is that by the end of the 21st century, all questions on the utility and good of “actually existing minarchism/libertarianism” will have disappeared, much as Stalinist/Maoist Socialism has at the close of the 20th.
Trevor Phillips, a rights campaigner in the UK provides the best summation:
There will always be a divide between those who believe that human behaviour should be regulated in the interests of the common good and those who believe the common good will emerge out of the aggregate exercise of free will. But this difference will be expressed in new ways, on new battlegrounds. So what’s the point of politics now? There are two issues: how we live with our planet and how we live with each other. Let me just stick with the latter. Each year more of humanity finds itself in the same global high street, yet the fact that we see more of each other only emphasises how different we can be. This isn’t just a problem of race and faith, it’s also about the assertiveness of people who used to be invisible—women, the disabled, children, the elderly, sexual minorities. It’s scary. And it’s hard work finding solidarity with people who don’t look like us, talk like us, or behave like us. The task of politics is to find a language in which to communicate across the lines of identity and difference.
Let’s get on with it then, shall we?
Tags: conservative, future, liberal, libertarian, politics, Post-Industrial, society
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Jon, you say see a “struggle to move beyond economic thinking - to remove it as the totality of conception”, with the example of “people questioning whether the free market is the best way to provide for a truly diverse set of goals and conceived goods.”
That sounds like a struggle to move beyond capitalistic thinking, or, more specifically, libertarian thinking. If we imagine a system to replace or moderate the free market, we’re imagining a different economic system, not the absence of economics.
Economics, as a social and empirical science, is inescapable. It describes how we relate to one another. The behavior of rats can be described in economic terms. Whatever comes after the free market will be describable in economic terms. (And I’m not talking freakonomics here, man, just good old micro- and macro-economics.)
About the US you are correct; we are moving towards libertarianism at a stunning pace. We are by far the most conservative democracy on the planet, and it’s only getting worse. Here in Oregon, we are in a race to the bottom in education funding, and our once enviable state health care program for the working poor has been reduced to cover only the destitute. Oregonians are among the least taxed in the nation, yet there is virtually no hope of replacing revenues lost in the Oregon Tax Revolt of the ’90s.
But (and this is a big “but”) we may be nearing the tipping point. Let’s remember that no democracy has ever chosen a libertarian government (is that an oxymoron?). The trend, as evident in the rest of the industrialized world, is to move toward social democracy. Maybe we’re just behind the curve, as Moravcsick suggests. While we’ve been moving steadily towards libertarianism, I think people may be starting to wake up to the fact that it’s not really in their interest to do so.
Perhaps I should have said beyond purely economic thinking. I am talking about rolling back the “economic imperialism”, as Barry Schwartz calls it, that has colonized every aspect of our lives. There are quite a few things that are changed completely by considering them in economic terms; marriages, friendships, education, health…
Certainly whatever follows free-market capitalism will be described in economic terms, because it will be legitimately within an economic sphere. What I am most concerned with is how we define that sphere - how large we, as a society allow it to be and what other spheres we construct/resurrect to act as countervailing forces on the economic sphere.
That is my main critique of libertarianism - that it is one dimensional - it simply declares that everything is within a (solely) economic sphere and leaves it at that.
So, yes, it is the struggle against libertarianism, against Capitalistic thinking. I never meant to imply the absence of economics.