Liberalism and Relativism (Part II)

“The argument that people should value ideals beyond the pursuit of their self-interest and subjective opinion was an elitist way of looking at things, and De Tocqueville’s Americans would have none of it.”

Introduction

“Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.”—Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

In my last article in this series, I observed that Hobbes’s thinking about the nature of desire and the good laid the foundation for forms of relativism which would later emerge in liberal doctrine. In this brief essay, I am going to elaborate on how this position would later be radicalized or tempered by various authors within the liberal tradition, some of whom seemed to implicitly recognize the theoretical and ideological pitfalls of Hobbesian doctrine. Despite this, liberalism has never entirely resolved the difficulty of moving beyond relativism, and many argue that with the advent of neoliberal society, the problem has only gotten worse. Indeed, I see the advent of postmodern culture and postmodern conservatism as very much a product of this deeper quagmire within liberal doctrine. To get past it will require both substantial imagination and the will to conceive of and implement constructive alternatives.

The Subject in Liberal Capitalism

In the Leviathan, Hobbes makes the striking claim that the root of goodness lies in the desires of human subjectivity. What is good is what one wants because it brings pleasure, and what is bad is what one disdains because it brings no pleasure or even pain. With this striking maneuver, Hobbes established the subject as being central to political theory and praxis, breaking sharply with more ancient theories, which made the natural order or God more important than humans and their fickle passions. For many religious conservatives at the time, such as John Bramhall, this was a horrifying development. Hobbes’s materialistic world was one where objective value could have no place, coming not from God or nature—but only from transitory desire. But for many others, most notably Locke, Hobbes’s philosophy of the subject was extremely liberating. The latter was only to be criticized for refusing to spell out the radicalness of his principles. For Lockeans, Hobbes tried to temper the subjectivism of his philosophy by calling for an absolute state, which would have the power to control and temper competing interests. The author of the Second Treatise on Government would have none of that. For Locke, the foundation of government became the way in which it advanced the private interests of its members, primarily through protected their rights to property and to representation by sympathetic politicians.