A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles Read online

  The great evils of the world- war, poverty, and crime, for example- are seen in completely different terms by those with the constrained and the unconstrained visions. If human options are not inherently constrained, then the presence of such repugnant and disastrous phenomena virtually cries out for explanationand for solutions. But if the limitations and passions of man himself are at the heart of these painful phenomena, then what requires explanation are the ways in which they have been avoided or minimized. While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society. In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institutions, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.

  The two great revolutions in the eighteenth century- in France and in America- can be viewed as applications of these differing visions, though with all the reservations necessary whenever the flesh and blood of complex historical events are compared to skeletal theoretical models. The underlying premises of the French Revolution more clearly reflected the unconstrained vision of man which prevailed among its leaders. The intellectual foundations of the American Revolution were more mixed, including men like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, whose thinking was similar in many ways to that in France, but also including as a dominant influence on the Constitution, the classic constrained vision of man expressed in The Federalist Papers. Where Robespierre looked forward to the end of revolutionary bloodshed, "when all people will have become equally devoted to their country and its laws,"55 Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers regarded the idea of individual actions "unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good" as a prospect "more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected."56 Robespierre sought a solution, Hamilton a trade-off.

  The Constitution of the United States, with its elaborate checks and balances, clearly reflected the view that no one was ever to be completely trusted with power. This was in sharp contrast to the French Revolution, which gave sweeping powers, including the power of life and death, to those who spoke in the name of "the people," expressing the Rousseauean "general will." Even when bitterly disappointed with particular leaders, who were then deposed and executed, believers in this vision did not substantially change their political systems or beliefs, viewing the evil as localized in individuals who had betrayed the revolution.

  The writers of The Federalist Papers were quite conscious of the vision of man that underlay the Constitution of checks and balances which they espoused:

  It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?57

  To the Federalists, the evil was inherent in man, and institutions were simply ways of trying to cope with it. Adam Smith likewise saw government as "an imperfect remedy" for the deficiency of "wisdom and virtue" in man.58 The Federalist Papers said:

  Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.59

  To those without this constrained vision of man, the whole elaborate system of constitutional checks and balances was a needless complication and impediment. Condorcet condemned such "counterweights" for creating an "overcomplicated" political machine "to weigh upon the people."60 He saw no need for society to be "jostled between opposing powers"61 or held back by the "inertia" of constitutional checks and balances.62

  The constrained vision is a tragic vision of the human condition. The unconstrained vision is a moral vision of human intentions, which are viewed as ultimately decisive. The unconstrained vision promotes pursuit of the highest ideals and the best solutions. By contrast, the constrained vision sees the best as the enemy of the good- a vain attempt to reach the unattainable being seen as not only futile but often counterproductive, while the same efforts could have produced a more viable and beneficial trade-off. Adam Smith applied this reasoning not only to economics but also to morality and politics: The prudent reformer, according to Smith, will respect "the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people," and when he cannot establish what is right, "he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong." His goal is not to create the ideal but to "establish the best that the people can bear."63

  But Condorcet, expressing the unconstrained vision, rejected any notion that laws should "change with the temperature and adapt to the forms of government, to the practices that superstition has consecrated, and even to the stupidities adopted by each people. . . . "64 Thus he found the French Revolution superior to the American Revolution, for "the principles from which the constitution and laws of France were derived were purer" and allowed "the people to exercise their sovereign right" without constraint.65 Related to this is the question whether the institutions of one society can be transferred to another, or particular blueprints for better societies be applied to very different countries. Jeremy Bentham was noted for producing both specific reforms and general principles intended to apply in very different societies. Yet to Hamilton, "What may be good at Philadelphia may be bad at Paris and ridiculous at Petersburgh."66 Each of these conclusions is consistent with the respective vision from which it came.

  While the constrained vision sees human nature as essentially unchanged across the ages and around the world, the particular cultural expressions of human needs peculiar to specific societies are not seen as being readily and beneficially changeable by forcible intervention. By contrast, those with the unconstrained vision tend to view human nature as beneficially changeable and social customs as expendable holdovers from the past.

  Ideals are weighed against the cost of achieving them, in the constrained vision. But in the unconstrained vision, every closer approximation to the ideal should be preferred. Costs are regrettable, but by no means decisive. Thomas Jefferson's reply to those who turned against the French Revolution, because of the innocent people it had killed, exemplified this point:

  My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.67

  Belief in the irrelevance of process costs in the pursuit of social justice could hardly have been expressed more clearly or categorically. Yet, in the end, Jefferson too turned against the French Revolution, as its human cost increased beyond what he could continue to accept. Jefferson was not completely or irrevocably committed to the unconstrained vision.

  The relative importance of process costs has continued, over the centuries, to distinguish the constrained and the unconstrained visions. Modern defenders of legal technicalities which allow criminals to escape punishment who declare, "That is the price we pay for freedom," or defenders of revolutions who say, "You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs," are contemporary exemplars of an unconstrained vision which has historically treated process costs as secondary. At the other end of the philosophical spectrum are those who in essence repeat Adam Smith's view of process costs: "The peace and order of society is of more importance than even the relief of the miserable."68 The continuing battle between ideals and the costs of achieving them is only one part of the ongoing conflict of visions.

  SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

  Visions rest ultimately on some sense of the nature of man- not simply his existing practices but his ultimate potential and ultimate limitations. Those who see the potentialities of human nature as extending far beyond what is currently manifested have a social vision quite different from those who see human beings as tragically limited creatures whose selfish and dangerous impulses can be contained only by social contrivances which the
mselves produce unhappy side effects. William Godwin and Adam Smith are two of the clearest and most consistent exemplars of these respective social visions- the unconstrained and the constrained. Yet they are neither the first nor the last in these two long traditions of social thought.

  When Rousseau said that man "is born free" but "is everywhere in chains,"69 he expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision, in which the fundamental problem is not nature or man but institutions. According to Rousseau, "men are not naturally enemies."70 The diametrically opposite vision was presented in Hobbes' Leviathan, where the armed power of political institutions was all that prevented the war of each against all71 that would otherwise exist among men in their natural state, where life would be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."72 While the unconstrained vision of Condorcet led him to seek a society in which man's "natural inclination" would coincide with the social good,73 Hayek's constrained vision led to the conclusion that the "indispensable rules of the free society require from us much that is unpleasant"74- that is, man's nature inherently could not coincide with the social good but must be deliberately subordinated to it, despite the unpleasantness which this entailed.

  Given the wider capabilities of man in the unconstrained vision, the intentions which guide those capabilities are especially important. Words and concepts which revolve around intention- "sincerity," "commitment," "dedication"- have been central to discussions within the framework of the unconstrained vision for centuries, and the policies sought by this vision have often been described in terms of their intended goals: "Liberty, equality, fraternity," "ending the exploitation of man by man," or "social justice," for example. But in the constrained vision, where man's ability to directly consummate his intentions is very limited, intentions mean far less. Burke referred to "the Beneficial effects of human faults" and to "the ill consequences attending the most undoubted Virtues."75 Adam Smith's entire economic doctrine of laissez-faire implicitly assumed the same lack of correspondence between intention and effect, for the systemic benefits of capitalism were no part of the intention of capitalists.

  In the constrained vision, social processes are described not in terms of intentions or ultimate goals, but in terms of the systemic characteristics deemed necessary to contribute to those goals- "property rights," "free enterprise," or "strict construction" of the Constitution, for example. It is not merely that there are different goals in the two visions but, more fundamentally, that the goals relate to different things. The unconstrained vision speaks directly in terms of desired results, the constrained vision in terms of process characteristics considered conducive to desired results, but not directly or without many unhappy side effects, which are accepted as part of a trade-off.

  With all the complex differences among social thinkers as of a given time, and still more so over time, it is nevertheless possible to recognize certain key assumptions about human nature and about social causation which permit some to be grouped together as belonging to the constrained vision and others as belonging to the unconstrained vision. Although these groupings do not encompass all social theorists, they cover many important figures and enduring ideological conflicts of the past two centuries.

  Running through the tradition of the unconstrained vision is the conviction that foolish or immoral choices explain the evils of the world- and that wiser or more moral and humane social policies are the solution. William Godwin's elaboration of this unconstrained vision in his Enquiry Concerning Political justice drew upon and systematized such ideas found among numerous eighteenth-century thinkers- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, and Holbach being notable examples. This general approach was carried forth in the nineteenth century, in their very different ways, by Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and by George Bernard Shaw and other Fabians. Its twentiethcentury echoes are found in political theorists such as Harold Laski, in economists like Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith, and in the law with a whole school of advocates of judicial activism, epitomized by Ronald Dworkin in theory and Earl Warren in practice.

  By contrast, the constrained vision sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and unhappy choices available, given the inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings. For amelioration of these evils and the promotion of progress, they rely on the systemic characteristics of certain social processes such as moral traditions, the marketplace, or families. They conceive of these processes as evolved rather than designed- and rely on these general patterns of social interaction rather than on specific policy designed to directly produce particular results for particular individuals or groups. This constrained view of human capacities found in Adam Smith is also found in a long series of other social thinkers, ranging from Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, through Edmund Burke and the authors of The Federalist Papers among Smith's contemporaries, through such twentieth-century figures as Oliver Wendell Holmes in law, Milton Friedman in economics, and Friedrich A. Hayek in general social theory.

  Not all social thinkers fit this schematic dichotomy. John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, for example, do not fit, for very different reasons, as will be noted in Chapter 5. Others take midway positions between the two visions, or convert from one to the other. However, the conflict of visions is no less real because everyone has not chosen sides or irrevocably committed themselves.

  Despite necessary caveats, it remains an important and remarkable phenomenon that how human nature is conceived at the outset is highly correlated with the whole conception of knowledge, morality, power, time, rationality, war, freedom, and law which defines a social vision. These correlations will be explored in the chapters that follow.

  Because various beliefs, theories, and systems of social thought are spread across a continuum (perhaps even a multi-dimensional continuum), it might in one sense be more appropriate to refer to less constrained visions and more constrained visions instead of the dichotomy used here. However, the dichotomy is not only more convenient but also captures an important distinction. Virtually no one believes that man is 100 percent unconstrained and virtually no one believes that man is 100 percent constrained. What puts a given thinker in the tradition of one vision rather than the other is not simply whether he refers more to man's constraints or to his untapped potential but whether, or to what extent, constraints are built into the very structure and operation of a particular theory. Those whose theories incorporate these constraints as a central feature have a constrained vision; those whose theories do not make these constraints an integral or central part of the analysis have an unconstrained vision. Every vision, by definition, leaves something out- indeed, leaves most things out. The dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions is based on whether or not inherent limitations of man are among the key elements included in the vision.

  The dichotomy is justified in yet another sense. These different ways of conceiving man and the world lead not merely to different conclusions but to sharply divergent, often diametrically opposed, conclusions on issues ranging from justice to war. There are not merely differences of visions but conflicts of visions.

  Chapter 3

  Visions of Knowledge

  and Reason

  she constrained and the unconstrained visions tend to - differ in their very definition of knowledge, as well as in their conceptions of its quantity, concentration, or dispersal, and its role in the social process. Reason likewise takes on entirely different meanings in the two visions.

  THE MOBILIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

  The Constrained Vision

  In the constrained vision, any individual's own knowledge alone is grossly inadequate for social decision-making, and often even for his own personal decisions. A complex society and its progress are therefore possible only because of numerous social arrangements which transmit and coordinate knowledge from a tremendous range of contemporaries, as well as from the even more vast numbers of those from generations past. Knowledge as conceived in the constrained v
ision is predominantly experiencetransmitted socially in largely inarticulate forms, from prices which indicate costs, scarcities, and preferences, to traditions which evolve from the day-to-day experiences of millions in each generation, winnowing out in Darwinian competition what works from what does not work. Friedrich A. Hayek expressed this view when he said:

  The growth of knowledge and the growth of civilization are the same only if we interpret knowledge to include all the human adaptations to environment in which past experience has been incorporated. Not all knowledge in this sense is part of our intellect, nor is our intellect the whole of our knowledge. Our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools, and our institutions- all are in this sense adaptations to past experience which have grown up by selective elimination of less suitable conduct. They are as much an indispensable foundation of successful action as is our conscious knowledge.1