Individualism as the sine qua non of liberalism is one the great shibboleths of the modern era. The unmoored individual, a mythical creation in its own right, is both protagonist and antagonist in the various ills of society. From “society does not exist” and greed is good to deaths of despair and anomie, individualism serves a dual purpose in relation to liberalism as a governing ideology.
Similarly community, the erstwhile enemy of the individual, fits into the same category of individualism – a spook of modernity that is ambiguous and ideologically weaponised. What does community even mean outside the contexts of its multiple existences? I hold a number of hobbies. Does that produce a community of fellow hobbyists of which I am a member? Are neighbours part of a community? Or work colleagues? Community means whatever is required to fulfil the obligations inherent upon it. Where there are rules, there are communities. Equally, there are individuals that follow or break those rules.
Community and the individual, far from being opposed, are binary. Both are also constructed out of varying contexts. Individualism or community, beyond their manifestation in specific locations or actions, don’t exist. They are emplaced upon manifestations so as to codify the dispositions of a governing structure. Hobbes was most clear on this – the state of nature can produce neither community nor individual, only anarchic violence.
In some ways, such egoistic individualism is the most true version of it. But when one speaks of individualism, one does not have in mind might is right or coercion fragmented across personal relations. The purpose of individualism is to produce societal harmony. Adam Smith’s dictum – “the division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”[1] – has community at its heart.
The propensity to exchange can only exist in a rules-based environment i.e. one that creates communal or societal relations. When Thatcher said there was no such thing as society, only individuals, she did not have in mind a state of nature where individuals were their own last line of defence. Individuals, whether exchanging in a market or performing their occupation, are fulfilling functions greater than themselves.
Liberalism’s ideological history, from the Lockean proviso to the Rawlsian original position, sees the link between community and individual as immutable. Thus when J Sorel writes about the death of the individual in Modern Britain and the development of post-liberalism as the governing ideology, I see similar confusion as to what the individual is in liberalism.
“The New Labour years saw the beginnings of Stakeholder governance, which envisages society as a compact of chartered interest groups – faiths, ethnicities, capital, labour – who have a right to be consulted on all matters of public policy. This is an anti-liberal idea: it formally dispenses with the individual citizen as the primary political unit, and denies the rights of voting majorities – a basic premise of liberal democracy. The establishment of protected characteristics is another example; it was premised on the idea that, in the eyes of the law, you were a member of a community first and an individual second”[2].
Yet this is the very premise of individualism, to be capable of forming groups and creating agendas. The capability of exchange or barter means the capacity to form rules that define the parameters of such activities. These rules are then influenced and reformed by the participants within them. Post-liberalism is not the end of liberalism but its evolution within new contexts. The amorphous individual is replaced by the amorphous stakeholder. Community and individual are placeholders for the division of power in society. Liberalism can easily dispense with them when new modes of governance are required. In heterogeneous nation-states with international obligations and no clear definitions of nationhood or citizenship, the individual and the national community become replaced by migrant groups, refugees and their various representatives.
“The civil servant Gus O’Donnell has famously recounted how he lobbied for continuous mass migration, not so much because it benefited the British people, but because the British belonged to a wider human community, whose utility they had an obligation to help maximise”[3]. This is not the negation of liberalism, but it’s evolving to meet new parameters of action.
What remains is still the integral element of liberalism. The thread running between liberalism and post-liberalism is the inability of either to understand conflict and struggle. Liberalism cannot conceive of any enemy. Where an enemy exists, it is both totalising and spectral, to be eliminated or sublimated. “Any breakdown in relations is seen as a disruption of communal harmony, which is to be solved, not with the victory of one side, but through all parties getting around the table”[4]. This is the essence of liberalism – to solve conflict and prevent a winner-takes-all. Individualism is a useful component of a non-conflictual society, as struggle can be abstracted into fields that don’t require an exclusive champion. The purpose of exchange is to spread wealth and distribute opportunity, both at an individual and collective level.
Post-liberalism “is not in contradiction to liberalism, but an outgrowth of its depoliticising tendencies that turn the banality of personal politics into arenas of contestation. Governance, as a meliorative set of systems, opens avenues to the expression of identity through the mode of a consumer and/or manager which then develop political bite as they change the operating procedures of universities, businesses and bureaucracies”[5]. In having no systemic enemy, conflict is fragmented across the social space. Governance, the actual sine qua non of liberalism, is there to govern such conflict. Society is a space for conciliation. Ideological contestation is no more than a parlour game. Where evolutions in this space occur, liberalism must sublimate them or other them totally. Room outside the liberal ideological system is unrealisable within the confines of a liberal political structure.
Individual and community are phantoms, conjured to serve the purpose of defining and delineating political power. They can sublimate and divide antagonisms such that they become meaningless infighting, a Hatfield vs. McCoy politics that never troubles the centre of authority. However, as the screw tightens on the everydayness of modern life through crises and the growth of alternative regimes[6], the purpose of liberalism as a non-conflictual ideology becomes questioned. Sorel points toward the future of politics and concomitantly of liberal destruction when he praises the Bladerunners, groups of people destroying ULEZ infrastructure in London. “Anarchic, destructive, yet altruistic”[7], and fundamentally antagonistic. Their conflict is zero sum. There is no middle ground.
[1] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
[2] https://dailysceptic.org/2023/09/27/the-british-people-have-had-enough-of-their-endless-obligations-to-impoverish-themselves/
[3] https://dailysceptic.org/2023/09/27/the-british-people-have-had-enough-of-their-endless-obligations-to-impoverish-themselves/
[4] https://dailysceptic.org/2023/09/27/the-british-people-have-had-enough-of-their-endless-obligations-to-impoverish-themselves/
[5] https://thelibertarianideal.com/2023/01/30/troubled-relations-defining-the-successor-ideology/
[6] https://thecritic.co.uk/the-rise-of-arabofuturism/
[7] https://dailysceptic.org/2023/09/27/the-british-people-have-had-enough-of-their-endless-obligations-to-impoverish-themselves/
The Libertarian Ideal 