- The South Korean massacres in the Vietnam War Hoang Do, Diplomat
- It’s time to democratize the workplace, too Ingrid Robeyns, Crooked Timber
- Inheritance, marriage and swindle: the three ways to the top Branko Milanovic, globalinequality
- The specters of comparison Michael Rothberg, Latitude
Year: 2020
Wats On My Mind: Polling NOL readers about COVID-19
538 has some interesting new polling data. While the vast majority of respondents in the US agreed that social distancing et al is the right thing to do right now, there is a large and rapidly growing split between Democrats and Republicans on the future, and whether the worst is over or not. Their story fits what’s going on on my Facebook feed certainly. But I was curious what Notes on Liberty readers think (wherever in the world you happen to be living). Which of the following best describes your outlook in your country? Please choose only one:
a) There will be a 2nd or even 3rd wave during 2020 that will be far worse than we have had so far. Total deaths in my country will more than triple from where they are today. The highest number of new deaths in a single day is in the future. (For the US, that’s more than 255k deaths total and more than 4000 dead in a single day; for the UK and Italy, that’s more than 100k dead; and so forth)
b) There will be a 2nd or even 3rd wave during 2020 that will be worse than we have had so far. Total deaths in my country will double from where they are today. (For the US, that’s more than 170k deaths total and a return to 2000-3000 dead per day in on average; for the UK and Italy, that’s more than 65k dead; and so forth)
c) Right now is the worst it will be. Total deaths will increase from where they are today, but at a decreasing rate.
d) We have already survived the worst of the infections and death (For the US, total deaths will be less than 170k and average dead per day will not increase above 2000 again; and so forth).
And let me ask you a second polling question about civil liberties that have been constrained during the quarantine in most countries. Which of the following describe(s) your outlook? Feel free to answer more than one:
e) The restriction of my civil liberties will be temporary (less than 6 months).
f) The restriction of my civil liberties will be long lasting, but eventually I’ll get them back (6 months – 3 years)
g) The restriction of my civil liberties will be nearly permanent (3+ years)
h) The restriction of my civil liberties was a deliberate power grab by the state
i) The restrictions on civil liberties successfully prevented many more deaths in the last few months and in the future
j) The restrictions on civil liberties successfully prevented many more deaths in the last few months, but not many in the long run
k) The restrictions on civil liberties may have prevented some deaths in the last few months, but not many in the long run
In Defence of Economics Imperialism
Under the guise of the end of “Neoliberalism”, economics is losing its grip. Troubles had begun with the 2008 financial crisis. As people had once lost their faith in the Gold Standard, by 2008 the consensus upon the self-regulation of the markets slept away. Even some of the most notorious free-marketeers -like Alan Greenspan- became renegade from their lifelong beliefs.
The COVID-19 crisis seems to complete that process. However, it is not a process of the end of Neoliberalism, but of the end of what Gary Becker called the “economic way of thinking” -and this is truly bad news. The end of the imperialism of economics is, in some way, the end of rationality and universalism in political thinking.
The demise of economics in politics, in fact, had begun just some months before the 2007-2008 Crisis: when Tony Blair stepped down from Downing Street. Or even before: when George W. Bush, trying to avoid losing his re-election as his father had done in 1992, crushed the superavit inherited from Bill Clinton’s administration and created twin deficits. But Bush’s misfortunes were at least generated by an ill-understanding of economics. We are in danger of the near future being ruled by a not-understanding of economics at all. That is why we should not renounce the use of the economic way of thinking.
The key is not to leave the task only to the economists. Philosophers, lawyers, sociologists, historians, and all sorts of social scientists should get involved. Milton Friedman was the scapegoat of the Left, but the 1980’s and 1990’s came after decades of works of thinkers of all nationalities and sorts, like Karl Popper, Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek, Bruno Leoni, Max Weber, Raymond Aron, T. S. Ashton, Gary Becker, Robert Mundell, James M. Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Anthony Downs and many more.
Nightcap
- Kid culture: American life and its neontocracy Sarah Menkedick, Aeon
- The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800 Jonathan Clark, History Today
- How to think about human diversity without hierarchy Kwame Appiah, NYRB
- This is the best left-wing essay on capitalism I’ve read in years Jodi Dean, LARB
Nightcap
- How to be wrong Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
- Here’s what 30% unemployment looks like Nicholas Smith, Boston Review
- Welcome to Fascistville Mario Carrillo, The Long Run
- Khrushchev’s Great American Road Trip Angela Brintlinger, Origins
Nightcap
- Professional Libertarians and the posts they delete Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
- Small business, bankruptcy, and the Federal Reserve George Selgin, Alt-M
- This is the best left-wing essay on capitalism I’ve read in years Jodi Dean, LARB
- Iraq has a new government Douglas Ollivant, War on the Rocks
On growing up in Brazil, political liberty, and religion
Steve Bishop recently interviewed me for his blog and we talked about my personal background, my Christian faith and my interest in Reformational philosophy, a tradition of thought of which Abraham Kuyper was an early proponent and Herman Dooyeweerd, the main exponent.
Here is a personal part of the interview that might be of interest to NOL readers. I answer a question about what influenced my intellectual development:
Another influence I should mention came from people and events that taught me to mistrust the hubris of political authoritarianism. My Italian granddad was a child during World War II and his family never joined the Fascist party. As a result, they had much less access to food and clothes and suffered a lot during the war. This is part of the reason why he later decided to try something new in Brazil. I grew up hearing his stories about the horrors of war. My other grandfather was older and he had been drafted by the Brazilian Army to join the allied forces and fight the axis powers in Italy. But, before shipping to Europe, in the Army base, he decided he shouldn’t go fight the war, so he had to hide for a few years before amnesty was granted for defectors. When I was born, Brazil was still under the rule of a military junta, but later transitioned to a convoluted period of democratic transition. High inflation was destroying people’s livelihoods. I remember running in front of the “price man” at the supermarket to get products for the previous day’s price before the new tags were placed in them. My father got his salary and would have to immediately spend most of it by stocking up groceries for the entire month. This was very early in my childhood, until age nine or so, but I still have vivid memories of the national currency changing name every six months or so. By college time, I was already immune to the idea that politicians are more enlightened than the rest of us.Then, when I read books such as The Road to Serfdom or, say, Orwell’s 1984, they helped me conceptualize what I had already noticed intuitively. I had already grasped Lord Acton’s maxim that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. If you have, let’s say, an Augustinian view of the potential damage we can cause to fellow human beings if unhampered by checks and balances, then you can easily identify some of the naivete about human nature both right and left on the political spectrum, and that can lead you to the normative point that civil government should be limited in scope.
Further on, I talk about current projects:
In 2018 I delivered the Calihan Lecture at the Acton Institute and applied the notion of sphere sovereignty to interpret the crisis we are facing in the public square. This lecture has recently been published in the Journal of Markets & Morality. Last year I finished a project on the classical liberal background of the anti-revolutionary movement. An article summarising the main findings will come out in the Journal of Church and State in 2021. I didn’t want it to be too controversial and deliberately toned down the argument after the first peer review, but the main point is that Groen van Prinsterer and Kuyper fall under the category of “anti-rationalist liberals”, together, of course, with figures such as Lord Acton, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others who were, together with the anti-revolutionaries, very critical of the “rationalist liberalism” of, say J.S. Mill or the French liberals. As part of this project, I wrote an epilogue to the Portuguese translation of Kuyper’s speech on the social question, a book chapter for a South African publisher on Christian ethics and entrepreneurship in an interventionist economy.
This, of course, alludes to F.A. Hayek’s distinction between two kinds of liberal tradition, one of which he rejected (rationalist liberalism) in order to embrace the other (anti-rationalist liberalism).
Nightcap
- Will COVID-19 be a generation-defining event? Peter Nelson, Power & Market
- The inner life of American communism Corey Robin, the Nation
- San Francisco’s vision of progress and freedom Michael Gibson, City Journal
- More on the “public” in “public choice” Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber
Nightcap
- Deepak Lal: Rest In Peace Kapil Komireddi, The Critic
- Why the French Revolution was so important Robert Blackman, Age of Revolutions
- The limits of fiction Katherine Voyles, War on the Rocks
- “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism” Stuart Jeffries, Financial Times
A Queens’ Marxist in the Lions’ Court
When I first walked into the conference room, two other girls were already there. One of them caught my eye and with a friendly nod indicated I should take the seat next to her. I did and then observed the girl on the other side of the table.
She was quite striking, well-dressed in the trendiest fashion, and clearly intelligent, but she exuded an agitation and antagonism that clashed with the sleepy serenity of the room and our own quiet desire for friendship. As our other six classmates trickled in, the Girl across the Table never relaxed and though she responded correctly to any friendly overture, she did so with an attitude of suspicion. Puzzled but too preoccupied to give it much thought, I turned my attention to the department chair who was opening orientation.
For the first couple of weeks I was much too in awe of my new surroundings at this Ivy League university to concern myself with anything more than adjusting as quickly as possible. Only one of us had attended an Ivy for undergraduate and she was one of the nicest people in the class. Recognizing how intimidating the new environment could be, she went out of her way to demystify the place for us, and with her help we soon realized that the tranquil, yet demanding, atmosphere of the first day was genuine. We were meant to become our best selves, not to compete insanely with each other. About three weeks in, our entering cohort of nine had settled into a social and academic routine with everyone participating in a cordial, collegial manner, everyone except one: the Girl across the Table – hereafter called GatT.
Her hostility from the first day was unabated, and now we were its direct target. During lunch, if someone suggested a book, she had a snarky putdown, even if seconds later she would be raving about another book by the same author. One evening a group of the classical music lovers took advantage of free tickets from the school to go to the opera. GatT came with us. Stretching our legs at intermission time devolved into standing in a circle and listening uncomfortably as GatT made snide comments about how everyone in the lobby was dressed. As we turned to go back in, I heard her mutter something about “bourgeois” under her breath. A light went on in my heard: GatT was a Marxist – puzzle solved! The next morning, GatT publicly avowed her Marxist leanings during a seminar discussion.
The mystery of her hostility solved, we moved on with our social lives and pretty much managed to maintain a state of cautious détente with GatT. She made her desire to lead a jacquerie against us fairly clear a couple of times a week. This became funny once a casual lunch conversation revealed that eight of the nine of us had some familiarity with firearms; I commented to the friendly girl from the first day that this particular jacquerie wouldn’t end the way GatT thought. Eventually we became accustomed to her outbursts, and it took one of extraordinary absurdity to elicit any reaction from us. The closest anyone came to snapping at her was the time she claimed that our completing assignments on time was an act of class oppression against her.
One of the other students was the daughter of two economists who had became ardent free-marketeers after spending their youths as equally ardent Marxists; consequently her grasp of both arguments was comprehensive. After losing a verbal bout with her, GatT refrained from practical arguments and retreated to social commentary. One day during our daily class coffee gathering, she proclaimed that if she had known our school was an Ivy, in order to show support for the proletariat, she would not have applied. As the “discussion” continued, she branded us as privileged elitists. Meanwhile, we quietly drank our cheap coffee and pondered the fellowships that made this our most affordable option.
The remainder of our graduate studies passed in the pattern of endless writing and studying, intense debates on all sorts of topics, excursions to museums and evenings at the theatre or concerts, and of course simply socializing with each other. We tuned out GatT’s insulting nattering and someone always ensured she received an invitation to whatever activity was scheduled. Despite her clear resentment, she usually came.
In the final term, when the course load was intentionally light to leave room for writing the Masters thesis, GatT disappeared for a few weeks. We learned through her social media that she was participating in anti-austerity protests in Europe and was immediately sprayed with tear gas during a raucous demonstration. Soon after she returned to school, I ran into her. She told me that she hadn’t started writing her thesis yet: the submission deadline was three weeks away.
I haven’t seen GatT since that last meeting, but the rest of us stay in touch. During a dinner with some of the gang a few months ago we tallied where everyone is now. GatT was the only one we couldn’t account for; because of her propensity for agitating, we suspect she might be locked away in a third-world prison somewhere. We also wonder if she ever managed to complete her thesis.
Nightcap
- On Scialabba’s How to be Depressed Morten Høi Jensen, American Interest
- More on the Jersey surge (philosophy and journalism) Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
- Big government is not the solution, it’s the problem Scott Sumner, EconLog
- The future that we won’t have (bitter) Arnold Kling, askblog
Be Our Guest (Sunday Poetry): “The Tyrant’s Burden”
Our latest Be Our Guest post comes from poet N.D.Y. Romanfort, and it’s great. So great, in fact, that I’m taking liberties in regards to Alex’s “Sunday Poetry” series and sharing Romanfort’s poem today. An excerpt:
Shoulder the Tyrant’s Burden-
Yield to “expert” decree-
3 Lettered Health Institutes
Control mind and body-
Free thinking doctors? They’re called
Medical Heretics-
Big Tech will silence their noise,
Thus, public thought is fixed.
Please, read the rest. And if you’ve got something to say and no place to say it, Be Our Guest.
Nightcap
- The separate worlds of Covid-19 Leah Windsor, Duck of Minerva
- Whose freedom? Anti-lockdown protests Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
- The glory—and risk—of cities Joel Kotkin, City Journal
- Still don’t believe in aliens? Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias
Nightcap
- When do emergency measures turn into dangerous government overreach? Jonathan Wolff, Times Literary Supplement
- A philosophy of fear – and a society of scolds Daniel McCarthy, Modern Age
- The perils of lockdown living Sayed Kashua, New York Review of Books
- It’s time to take UFOs seriously Alexander Wendt (interview), Vox
On Abraham Kuyper’s Political Liberalism
My article “Abraham Kuyper and Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer as Anti-Rationalist Liberals” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Church & State and will hopefully be in print in 2021.
In this article, I explore F. A. Hayek’s division of pre-1848 liberalism into two contrasting worldviews — rationalist and anti-rationalist. I argue that both Groen van Prinsterer and Kuyper, two important Dutch Anti-Revolutionary writers, were anti-rationalist liberals.
Both of them are on the record denouncing “liberalism”, but both refer mostly to French liberalism of the rationalist kind. And both admired Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, cited by Hayek as great exponents of anti-rationalist liberalism.
I hope this article will lead to an interesting conversation as to why the contemporary Kuyperian movement seems to be much more left-wing than the original anti-revolutionaries.
A pre-print version of the article can be viewed on the Oxford Academic website.
Notes On Liberty 