John Rawls

John Rawls

I found this piece in the Guardian almost revelatory.  Ok, I’m exaggerating my reaction, but I was impressed.  For quite a while now, it has seemed to me that we’ve been stuck with the stale leftovers of the political philosophies from the 19th and 20th centuries.  We keep coming back to the old debates about a more purely free market, libertarian system, or a more socialistic system.  But socialism and economic libertarianism are zombies, dead theories that are still on two feet because we keep propping them up.  We can’t seem to think of new categories.

That’s basically the premise of Eric Hobsbawm’s essay in the Guardian.  Now, for the record, I think that he is wrong when he says that capitalism has been shown to be “bankrupt” by the current economic crisis.  A form of capitalism has been revealed to be bankrupt, but so long as we have a free market system of some kind, we will have capitalism.  Maybe I’m splitting hairs.

Hobsbawm builds from the above premise to argue that the left faces an especially difficult problem in this intellectual vacuum because the Labour party in Britain and the Democrats in the US have moved further and further to the economic right since Thatcher and Reagan.  As a result, liberals are trying to figure out what the right balance is in trying to recalibrate government intervention in the market without reverting to the old, familiar, but bankrupt socialism.  Hobsbawm’s proposed starting point for a new liberalism is the following:

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the “capabilities” of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

I think Hobsbawm is onto something in focusing on the environment, but it needs more spelling out. Where I do agree with him completely is that we need new, fresh ways of thinking about politics and economics.  As President Obama liked to say on the campaign trail, the old ways of thinking “just won’t do.”

There were some important thinkers in the 20th century who can lead the way in helping us break out of the old ways of thinking.  In my view, John Rawls‘ political liberalism is the closest thing we have to a 21st century political philosophy.  Rawls was effective at largely escaping the socialism-libertarianism dead end, and he offered a view of economics that was based largely on democratic institutions and values.  He was open to the free market without trusting it, and he was open to government intervention in the market without trusting it.  It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I often seem to see Rawls’ pragmatic liberalism in some of President Obama’s rhetoric and policies.  There seem to be many parallels between Rawls and Obamanomics, though it would take more time to explain why.  Is Obamanomics and the philosophy behind it the future for liberals?  Who knows.  But since this economic philosophy still seems to be in development, we will just have to wait and see.