While aligned with John Neville Figgis’ pluralism and Marxist socialism, Harold Laski endorsed liberal and democratic values. However, he synthesised several elements from older liberal theories in a way that diluted the division to which these theories had adhered, namely that between the private and the political spheres. The resulting combination preserves privacy’s status as the realm where individuals are free to pursue their separate ends, but enables essentially private activities based in voluntary social spaces to infuse the space of (...) politics. From this emerged a vision of liberal democracy, in which freedom plays out in multiple private spaces that do not require an autonomous civic arena to complement them. The combination was reached within the contexts of mid-century thinking about the welfare state and a broader project of reformulating democracy by reducing its equation with representation. (shrink)

In the past few decades, liberal and democratic thought has been subjected to attacks from the adherents of nationalism, populism, and social radicalism. Much of these attacks involve suspicions about liberalism’s association with the contents and purveyors of structured knowledge, scientific and humanistic alike. I suggest that an examination of the history of liberal beliefs may add to our understanding of what is at stake. Such an examination may reveal how liberal thought in the twentieth century shifted away from its (...) earlier individualist and constitutional position towards the pluralist position that grants a special place to educated knowledge, to experts and professionals, and thus invites allegations of elitism. In particular, I focus on the differences between the ideas that conventional liberal authors elaborated during early modernity and the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and the version of liberal values and the polity based on them that were tacitly adopted during the mid-twentieth century, on the other hand. The examination involves highlighting the common denominators of mid-century authors on right, left, and centre, such as Laski, Popper and Hayek, as well as asking what in their shared worldview could attract allegations of elitism from later generations. (shrink)

Formulated as a common conceptual ground for all democracies, Popper's notion of the open society sprang from the mid-20th century context that demonstrated democracy's vulnerability to hijacking through its own electoral mechanisms. Popper's concept may accordingly be considered as a resource for combatting the populist appeal to majority decision and its threat of diminishing individual and minority rights. I examine the affirmative and critical aspects of such a consideration. On the affirmative side, the open-society concept allows room for both majority (...) decision and the rights of individuals and minorities, as well as for particular group identities and class demands, showing that they may all cooperate to facilitate the growth of liberty, knowledge and the quality of life. Democratic institutions are justified from the grounds of this concept. Populism's equation of democracy with majority decision is, thus, incompatible with democracy's essence: decision by majority exists to cater to the vision that justifies that mode of decision making itself and cannot stay legitimate if it scuttles that vision. The more critical interpretation focuses on a detail of the open society's projected development. Popper tasks democracy's institutions with assuring conditions for progress through the expansion of knowledge. Popper expects the same process to modify the civic sphere's scope and content, as political bodies will be increasingly exposed to the expanding insights of scholarship and science. This anticipation involves grading the agents engaged in these two respective spheres, as well as looking forward to the ascendancy of one of them. Accordingly, the open-society concept might validate claims that, when seeking to confine the scope of majority decision through an emphasis on rights and law, constitutionalist and liberal approaches to democracy are subtly elitist. (shrink)

Political philosophy is a discipline researched and taught in Western universities, typically within political-science departments. Political philosophers examine the intellectual basis of public i...

ExcerptFrom the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, a series of critical remarks were traded between the historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch and the psychoanalyst and feminist philosopher Jessica Benjamin. Researchers describe that exchange as involving competing perceptions of psychoanalysis, but the debate also covered mismatching approaches to critical theory and, more widely, to the ideals befitting a free polity. Lasch’s appeal to the traditions of the American past faced off against Benjamin’s advocacy of a substantial social change whose fundamental (...) step was challenging the patriarchy.1 The ideas that each of the two authors put forth are often cited for reproaching the worldview associated with the other. Supportive scholars credit Benjamin with working psychoanalysis into a feminist perspective that questions traditional gender roles and the social order based on them, an order to which Lasch seemed committed.2 On the other hand, critics of the psychoanalytic turn to which Benjamin was central echo Lasch when arguing that the resulting relational theory marginalizes personal responsibility and belittles the significance of individual conscience.3. (shrink)

This paper expands on the political vision embedded in Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic work. It comments on Winnicott’s notion that individuality is produced by society, and adds that such production inevitably involves power asymmetry. It is argued that Winnicott values rights and property as communicative devices rather than as private enclosures held against society. However, it is also maintained that Winnicott thinks that social deliberation itself depends on a preceding objective instance that may be referred to as justice. Lastly, aspects of (...) Winnicott’s outlook that touch on ideas of welfare and distribution are examined, especially those concerning the relationships between the market and social agencies, and between the household and the state. It is suggested that these attributes point to an affinity Winnicott has with a progressive liberal trend dating back to Mill, the later manifestation of this liberalism being evident in the design of the 20th-century welfare state. It is concluded that it is for this polity that Winnicott wrote his psychological theory. (shrink)

The body of research on the social and political implications of Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory has been growing steadily in recent years. This has long been overdue, considering the preo...

The mid-century object relations approach saw the category of schizoids as crucial to its own formation. Rooted in a developmental phase where the perception of the mother as a whole and real person had not yet been secured, the schizoid constitution impeded relationships and forced schizoids to communicate through a compliant persona while the kernel self remained isolated. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip thought that schizoid features underlay many other pathologies that earlier, Freudian psychoanalysis had misidentified. To correct this, a move (...) to the attachment-oriented theory was necessary, triggering the development of the object relations perspective as a distinct and independent approach. While playing this role in the development of object relations theory, the schizoid category also attracted a note of disapproval. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip described schizoids as harmful to society through their everyday actions and through the ideas they propagated. This judgemental nuance highlights an aspect of the alliance between object relations theory and the contemporary welfare state ideology. Culminating in the Beveridge plan, that ideology framed citizenship as comprehensive engagement with society on multiple levels. Citizenship was not just a political activity but also a personally rewarding one, as it allowed expression to each person’s wishes in ways that benefited others. Inability to engage and be rewarded in this way marked obstinate classes and produced rigid and conservative ideologies that opposed the welfare state. Object relations theory described the schizoid condition along similar lines and castigated its consequences for similar reasons. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 16, Issue 7, Page 981-985, December 2011.

This article examines L.T. Hobhouse's views on gender and the family, placing Hobhouse within a larger history of the relationship between liberalism and feminism. While Hobhouse accepts J.S. Mill's earlier advocacy of female suffrage and property rights, he abandons Mill's suspicion of gender and the family as sites of power and repression. Instead, Hobhouse's concept of social harmony leads him to idealize the nuclear family and the respective gender differences within the framework of the welfare apparatus. Hobhouse is therefore one (...) of the seams at which the critical, liberal feminist perspective espoused by Mill came apart and so precipitated the construction of a separate, feminist perspective. (shrink)

George Orwell perceived the possibility of a postwar united Europe, based on regional integration along social-democratic lines, as a means of survival in a world struggle rather than as a preamble to peace. This was the logical conclusion of his understanding of political realism: his endorsement of its assumption that violence is endemic to social life and that the force-wielding sovereign cannot be done away with. Yet Orwell also had reservations about realism. He argued that a purely realist analysis that (...) was not normatively connected to any values outside itself would go astray because analysts would be unable to factor in their own positions and would thus lose the analytic distance from their objects of study. Orwell was thus as suspicious of a politics managed by experts as of the utopian anticipation of a violence-free world. His world-view, rooted in realist necessity while leaving room for the values of democracy and socialism, offered a vision of a postwar united Europe that fostered t... (shrink)

This article argues that the notions developed by post-Kleinian object relations psychoanalysis are continuous with a certain British political tradition. British object relations authors think that the healthy personality necessitates a social-democratic political environment. Their ideas follow both historically and logically upon a set of notions about human development that resemble those held by advanced liberals and social democrats since the nineteenth century. Social democracy and advanced liberalism perceive sociability and community as goods that complement traditional liberals? respect for autonomy (...) and individual difference. Much of this outlook evolved from an earlier preoccupation with the exclusive discretion of already-existing individuals over portions of their lives. This concern has been gradually transformed into an interest in enhancing the conditions under which the autonomous personality may form. (shrink)

J.A. Hobson is known for his views on economy and imperialism. He was also concerned with social psychology and especially with the phenomenon of crowds, which was much discussed at the beginning of the twentieth century. As crowd behaviour was both collective and apparently irrational, it could undermine liberalism. However, Hobson uses crowd phenomena to bolster his own brand of social-democratic liberalism. He perceives mass behaviour as a constituent of the social dialogue favoured by liberals since J. S. Mill, and (...) argues that alterity and festivity are themselves human traits that merit political and legal recognition. This expanded view of human nature grounds a perception of rights which includes entitlements to leisure and structureless sociability: the welfare measures which guarantee such entitlements are thus made constituents of a revised liberalism. His interpretation of the crowd also serves Hobson as a warning to social theory itself, which, he argues, should acknowledge its distance from the world it attempts to analyse. This perception of theory further acts to strengthen liberalism, as it points to the contingent, open-ended character of any view of society and hence favours dialogue and open expression of varying opinions. (shrink)

Liberalism is often criticized for its emphasis on order and system. The liberal phraseology is hallmarked by such concepts as individual rights and impartial justice. Relying on law and reason and using tight legal definitions, the polity advocated by liberals views itself as applying equally to all citizens within it. Though ostensibly concerned with protecting liberties, the mechanisms liberalism deploys to carry out this task betray an oppressive streak. Individuals are addressed as modular and homogenous legal personalities that carry identical (...) packages of rights. Personal identities are hence prescribed by a system that recognizes no difference. The law book encompasses all and is impartial to all, admitting no incongruity and no irony. It is blind to insights that are local and particular, intuitive, or non-verbal. It therefore suppresses agents that are seen as the carriers of such insights and significantly limits the depth of the liberty it offers. Liberalism, however, is not a monolithic abstraction. Several historical liberalisms are known, each spelling out its particular variation on the shared terminology. Problems raised by the notions of universal applicability and comprehensive knowledge are addressed differently by different liberals. This essay examines the effort made by one school of liberal thinkers to relate to questions of incongruity and difference. It focuses on the early-twentieth century British new liberal group. The essay begins by outlining some of the critiques that concern liberalism's systematizing attribute. This is followed by an attempt to show where new liberalism matches the critical description of liberalism as preoccupied with system. The text then goes on to examine the new liberals' attitudes to notions of disorder, and points out that these Edwardian theorists were aware of the problems implicit in integrating knowledge and society. The text ends with a look at the possible significance of the concepts of excess over system as developed by new liberalism. (shrink)