The (Re) Birth of Liberalism from the Rubble of History? Notes on "Truth, Contingency, and ...

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The (Re) Birth of Liberalism from the Rubble of History? Notes on "Truth, Contingency, andModernity"Author(s): Loren KrugerSource: Modern Philology, Vol. 90, Supplement (May, 1993), pp. S125-S133Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/438428Accessed: 09/09/2010 17:33

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The (Re)Birth of Liberalism from the Rubble ofHistory? Notes on Truth, Contingency, andModernity

LOREN KRUGERUniversity f Chicago

In Truth, Contingency, and Modernity, Albrecht Wellmer attemptsto negotiate the narrow straits between twin perils. On the one handhe registers a universalist attachment to necessary idealizations offreedom and solidarity that function as maxims guiding collective andindividual action; on the other hand there is the relativist dismissal ofsuch idealizations as metaphysical notions which inhibit recognitionof the contingency and also the local persuasiveness of any given 'finalvocabulary' of liberty and equality. Roughly speaking, Wellmer iden-tifies the first position with the communication theories of HilaryPutnam, Karl-Otto Apel, and Jiirgen Habermas;l he identifies thesecond primarily with Richard Rorty's evasion of philosophy in thename of describing how liberal and democratic institutions work.Wellmer argues for a third alternative that would acknowledge thecontingency of any institutions historically described as liberal ordemocratic while offering a noncontingent justification of proce-dures that would permit, encourage, and perhaps even entail liberaland democratic practices.Wellmer's middle course hinges on combining acknowledgment ofcontingency with a principled formulation offering a weakversion ofa necessary idealization of what ought to be. His rationale for such acombination is his perception that liberal-democratic institutions aredefined and sustained by just such a dynamic. Wellmer seeks to in-terlock, in some underdetermined, nonprescriptive way, formal pro-cedures and institutions with informal [substantive] political andcultural discourse and praxis (p. S123). However, this very inter-locking undermines Wellmer's crucial earlier distinction between

1. See esp. Karl-Otto Apel, Understandingand Explanation:A Transcendental-PragmaticPerspective Cambridge, Mass., 1990); and Jiirgen Habermas, Moral ConsciousnessandCommunicativeAction(Cambridge, Mass., 1990).? 1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/93/9004-2010$01.00

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MODERN PHILOLOGYformal principle and procedure, on the one hand, and informal andhistorically specific realization, modification, or undoing of theseprinciples, on the other-what he terms the antinomy of truth(pp. S109-S110).Most obviously, Wellmer's proposed synthesis begs the question ofthe procedural, underdetermined character of institutions, which can-not be other than historically formed and, hence, socially and politi-cally bounded sets of practices. More pointedly, this entwinement ofprocedure and practice, formal validation and ideological legitima-tion, suggests a certain disingenuousness in Wellmer's charge of con-ceptual confusion directed against those-democratic socialists andother critics who would cast doubt on the universal claims of liberalprinciples by reference to the persistently parochial, undemocratic,and discriminatory habits of actually existing liberalism.2 For his ownformulations grant historically contingent institutions such as publicdebate (p. S121) or the market (his example, added ad lib in pre-sentation) self-evident validity over and above the particular relationsof power and money that substantiate them. His case for formal pro-cedures for the establishment of consensus depends, as his argumentrecognized only partially, on assuming a prior, if unspoken, consensusabout the meaning of these terms.The problem here is not conceptual confusion nor even, simply,circular logic but, rather, Wellmer's deflection of substantial and notmerely formal implications of his central presupposition. Like manyfellow liberals, Wellmer acknowledges the constraints placed by actualrelations of money and power in advanced capitalist societies in NorthAmerica and Europe on the full realization of liberal principles inthose societies and others aspiring to the condition of liberal democ-racy. He would probably also acknowledge that the historical associa-tion of liberal principle and capitalist practice has made it possible forcapitalist elites to defend their constraints on or indifference to free-dom and democracy in liberal language. A crass but telling examplefinds the U.S. government defending the opening of foreign marketsas free trade while arguing for local protectionism on the groundsof enhancing American competitiveness. More subtly perhaps, le-gitimate free speech tends, as Noam Chomsky has observed, to be theproperty of the experts whose articulation of the consensus of the

2. Wellmer made this charge first in response to a question from the floor: DavidBunn suggested that Wellmer's own commitment to pragmatism should lead him to testliberal-democratic principles against historical practices. This reference is taken fromthe Chicago Humanities Institute's tape of the proceedings.

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powerful translates as knowledge, whereas those who contest this he-gemony are condemned to the ghetto of special interests. 3 And fur-ther still, liberal democracies (including the United States and GreatBritain, self-styled crucibles of liberal democracy) cannot acknowl-edge that they have political prisoners within their borders, becauseto do so is to admit that they have curtailed the free speech of consci-entious individuals.The response to this charge of liberal illiberalism and the evidenceon which it rests usually asserts that such abuses are deviations fromprinciple and are best redressed on an individual basis by extendingthe realm of us to those previously excluded as them. This ap-pears to be one motive for Amnesty International's focus on the indi-vidual prisoner of conscience rather than the systematic oppressionof whole social, economic, or ethnic groups. Liberals are, however,reluctant to concede that socially legitimated limits on the appar-ently universal category of the free individual may operate as limitconditions constituting the liberal's defining sense of moral privilegeand that a move to extend this privilege on an individual basis onlysolidifies its exclusive character. In this connection, Wellmer's deep-est value attachments (p. S120) to liberal principles would obscurerecognition of the possibility that the association of liberalism andcapitalism is not contingent but constitutive. The appeal to a com-monsense consensus about deep attachments (Wellmer) or plati-tudes (Rorty) that members of a liberal community can take forgranted not only excludes those who experience this common senseas alienation but redescribes that alienation as a recognition (how-ever grudging or resentful) of the essential value of the liberal com-munity.4 Everything else-especially the argument that the liberalcommunity may not have the formal means or the vocabulary, letalone the will, to acknowledge the silence of excluded groups or theclaims of alternative communities for collective and not merely indi-vidual recognition (as persons )-is unreasonable or divisive. Inthe informal and incomplete comments that follow, I propose tomeasure the dimensions of this signal paradox of liberalism in termsof the tension between what is said by Wellmer or his chief interlocu-tors and what is left unsaid.

3. Noam Chomsky, Force and Opinion, in his DeterringDemocracy New York, 1991),p. 359. See also Population Control, in ibid., pp. 107-37. For further evidence of elitemanipulation of public opinion and public acquiescence, see Noam Chomsky, Neces-sary Illusions: Thought Control n DemocraticSocietiesBoston, 1987).4. Richard Rorty, PrivateIrony and Liberal Hope, in his Contingency, rony, Solidarity(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 76-78.

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In his account of the provisional character of liberal and democraticprocedures of dialogue and critique, Wellmer borrows Rorty's claimin The Contingency of a Liberal Community that a liberal commu-nity can be described as one that permits the formation and formula-tion of institutions we consider to be just and fair. But where Rortyinsists on the radical contingency of our practices and happilygrants the circularity of justifying them- mak[ing] one feature ofour culture look good by citing another 5-Wellmer is unwilling toabandon his attachment to the notion of general consensus as aregulative ideal, however abstractly or negatively defined. While heendorses the destruction of the intellectual bases of dogmatism, fun-damentalism, intolerance, and fanaticism enabled by acknowledgingcontingency (p. S117), he evinces a certain foundational turn in theambiguous claim that there is a deep and interesting relationshipbetween the arguments for contingency and the arguments for a lib-eral culture (p. S117).Wellmer never quite explains the nature or even degree of this

deep relationship, but he does indicate that he means to make sub-stantially more of contingency than Rorty's suggestion of radical un-derdetermination. In the latter's view, the recognition of contingencymay allow for liberal, democratic practices, but it in no way guaran-tees them. The value of practices which we identify as liberal anddemocratic does not derive from natural right or moral privilegebut emerges only in their use over time in historical comparison withother attempts at social organization. Wellmer resists the skepticalimplications of this radical contingency and tilts toward Habermaswhen he insists on justification, period beyond the pragmatist's jus-tification for us (p. S118). To be sure, Wellmer wants to preserve thecontingency of contingency by stressing the formal character of thisjustification, noting that a procedural consensus about metaprinci-ples may be all that is possible in the face of irreconcilable dissent(p. S123). His desire rather than his argument, however, motivatesthe following claim: It seems to me rather obvious that there is anoncontingent link between this self-reflexivity of liberal principlesarticulated in the procedures of public dialogue and reinterpretationand the recognition of contingency (p. S121). His desire to groundthe rarified metaprinciples of freedom, solidarity, and the like pullshim toward the quasi-teleological assertion that the deconstruction

5. Ibid., p. 57.6. Ibid., p. 53.

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Loren Kruger o The (Re)Birth of Liberalismof foundations makes the case for liberal institutions stronger(p. S121). Wellmer certainly means to say that such deconstruction isa necessary condition for free and equal interaction, but his sentenceseems also to extend a virtual guarantee that liberal institutions sogrounded will be true to a sort of original contingency or, as heputs it at another point, that these institutions contain a built-in ten-sion between what is and what ought to be (p. S118) which ideallyensures both their openness and their legitimacy as the only ones inwhich contingency and legitimacy can coexist (p. S122).Having thus invoked a critical tension between freedom and con-straint that is apparently contained in actually existing liberal institu-tions, Wellmer moves from a negative justification of the formalprinciples understood to safeguard freedom from constraint andproceeds to a positive claim about the obvious value of tried-and-tested institutions as a counterweight to teleological (read marxist )arguments for a future utopia. As I have already suggested, a quasi-teleology lurks in this move from the formal to the informal justi-fication of actually existing institutions as the only ones that canrealize liberal principles, and this distinguishes Wellmer's accountfrom Rorty's perhaps more modest observation that liberal insti-tutions as we know them have so far been the only ones to do so.7Yet, despite their different procedures, Wellmer's account convergeswith Rorty's in its move from describing procedures that function ac-cording to liberal-democratic principles to an appeal to apparentlycommon-sense attachments to the institutions held to realize thoseprinciples. Despite their formal differences, Rorty and Wellmer-and also, in this crucial respect, Habermas-share an informal at-tachment to the validity of their experience as privileged members ofliberal institutions, which they generalize as the historical fact of therelative superiority of these institutions and the social relations theyrepresent and reproduce. All agree that evident discrepancies be-tween liberal and democratic principles and the institutions that havehistorically claimed to realize them do not undermine the legitimacyof the principles themselves.What is remarkable about these validity claims is the unacknowl-edged tension between an internally justified validity and an exter-nally supported (but not necessarily grounded) legitimacy. Rortyevades this tension with the ethnocentric claim that legitimate in-stitutions are those that work for us.8 As for Habermas, his earlier

7. Ibid. See also Richard Rorty, Solidarity or Objectivity, in his Objectivity,Relativ-ism, and Truth(Cambridge, 1991), p. 29.8. Rorty, Private Irony and Liberal Hope, p. 57.

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analysis of the legitimation crisis in late capitalism demonstrated thatattempts to legitimate inequities in advanced capitalist societies byappealing to the regulatory power of institutions such as the marketand the vote serve to maintain consent to inequity rather than tomotivate social action to eradicate it.9 More recently, Habermas hastended to argue that the conception if not the practice of an ideallyfree, rational communication between equal partners can proceedonce systemic social or economic inequities are formally bracketed.10Wellmer is skeptical about the conceptual or practical value of idealcommunication. Nonetheless, he shares with Rorty and Habermas alargely unspoken faith in the inherent generosity of such liberal prin-ciples as the free exchange of ideas and constitutional democracy,even while acknowledging that the realization of those principlesmay be hampered or travestied by existing inequities.As I have suggested, this notion of generosity presupposes a gener-ous agent somehow possessed of the principles he (rarely, she) canthen share with others. It also presupposes an understanding of poli-tics that redescribes irreducible conflict between competing groupsand their definitions of community as willfully divisive behavior onthe part of the excluded group, who refuse to abide by proceduresthat those in power regard as neutral. As Nancy Fraser has demon-strated, women's reminders of the persistence of acts of violence suchas date rape or sexual harassment continue to be dismissed as divisiveor, worse, irrational and unreliable talk.11 Or, to take another ex-ample, the moral privilege of reasonable dialogue as the best way toresolve intractable political struggles is often invoked by First Worldstates to criticize locally legitimate liberation movements, such as theAfrican National Congress (ANC), on the grounds of allegedly univer-sal principles of nonviolent debate even though the collusion of localstate violence and international toleration of it effectually reducesthe means available to the ANC other than guerrilla tactics.These contradictions between present-day practice and ideallyuniversal principles in liberalism are complicated by the historicalassociation of liberalism and capitalism. Even if present-day liberalsacknowledge that their Enlightenment forebears often modifiedprinciples of universal freedom and equality in the interests ofprotecting newly won privileges from those-such as blacks and

9. Jurgen Habermas, LegitimationCrisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1973).10. Jurgen Habermas, Theoryof CommunicativeAction, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Bos-ton, 1984), pp. 1, 85-89, 104-5.11. Nancy Fraser, What'sCritical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas andGender, in her UnrulyPractices:Power,Discourse,and Gender n Contemporaryocial Theory(Minneapolis, 1989), p. 126.

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LorenKruger o The (Re)Birthof Liberalismwomen-excluded on the grounds of innate savagery, mental de-ficiency, and the like, they insist nonetheless that this historical in-justice can be redressed by a mature Enlightenment. Purged of itsmetaphysical attachment to moral privilege (Rorty) or its fundamen-talism (Wellmer) or simply its historically persistent discriminationbetween us and them, this mature liberalism is redescribed (inRorty's terms) as somehow designed o deal with contemporary radicalplurality.This appeal to some core of liberalism uncontaminated by its accu-mulated historical violations of democratic principles and the peopleit claimed to represent by sacrificing them to the demands of capital-ism and a property-owning minority has a significant contemporarycounterpart. This appeal does not differ markedly from attempts tosalvage a socialist essence from the rubble decried as utopianism byWellmer and others, while denying even to pragmatic socialists thevery piecemeal and informal defense of principle against previouserroneous practice that they quite reasonably employ.l2 To movefrom piecemeal comparison of social institutions that have histori-cally been susceptible of democratic extension-the franchise, forexample-to the claim that such institutions are designed to do soor that they are the only institutions that can do so (pp. S122-S123)is to move from description to prescription and to, precisely, the im-plicit claim of moral privilege that the radical recognition of contin-gency had presumably demolished.Curiously, Wellmer's defense of liberal institutions appeals to thearbitration of historical fact but leaves the historical content of suchinstitutions unexamined. Part of the problem is that he groups insti-tutions together with principles on the formal side of the equation(against informal practices and discourses). As a result, his defenseweaves a tangled skein of references to apparently self-evident andequally undesirable phenomena, the history of modern revolu-tions... [,] the experiences of totalitarianism, nationalism, racism,anti-Semitism, or religious and political fundamentalism, and coun-terposes the proper names of Locke, Kant, Tocqueville, Mill, orPaine (p. S120). Yet the significance of these abstractly named phe-nomena is not self-evident, nor do the thinkers to whom he referscomprise a united liberal phalanx against fundamentalist politicsrun amok. If nothing else, all of the named thinkers argued for their

12. Although Wellmer explicitly glosses 'utopianism' as socialism only in an oralaside to his written paper, his comments assume his audience's familiarity with currentGerman reflections on the end of utopia in the wake of the destruction of actuallyex-isting socialism. In this debate and especially in the comments of ex-socialists likeWellmer, 'utopia' is generally understood as synonymous with 'socialism'.

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MODERN PHILOLOGYchosen variant of liberalism in foundational terms, whether those ofnatural rights or moral imperatives. Moreover, it may be impossible(or undesirable) to group these variants: it is hard, for example, toreconcile Paine's radical democracy with Locke's condemnation ofantigovernment speech as seditious or to understand both, even inabstract terms, under the same rubric of free speech. It is likewisedifficult to assume that the freedom of free trade and freespeech is in any deep or non-contingent way related, when freespeech -redescribed as the giddy multitude, an excess of democ-racy, or, bluntly, communism l3 -has been consistently sacrificedto the multitude of capitalist relations of exchange yoked together inthe name of free trade. As examples, consider the range of charac-teristic institutions of the self-described free world from the BritishParliament in the eighteenth century to the Trilateral Commissionand the World Bank in the twentieth.

The aim of my informal objections here is not to demolish liberalismon principle but to excavate the substantive and substantial assump-tions about social and political agency and conflict that underpin andlegitimate formal procedure. I want to challenge the claim that formsof this sort can be internally validated without the (usually unstated)support of social relations favoring certain kinds of procedures andthe agents adept at using them. I want to argue instead that the mostinformally held values of a community represent a theory of com-mon concern that is not self-evidently or naturally common. In thislight, the implication that social(ist) theories of systemic inequity arethemselves divisive and dogmatic and the suggestion that such theo-ries should be swept away with the rubble of actually existing social-ism to be replaced by tried-and-tested liberal habits look like anattempt to bury an explicit theory of social affiliations, divisions, andcauses along with programs for their transformation under the theorythat all we need is untheorized and piecemeal tinkering with com-mon problems. This tinkering is problematic because it addressesneither the causes of social conflict nor its own emergence out of thedenial of the social as such-as an arena of collective experience thatcannot be reduced, as the liberals would have it, to the sum of per-sonal experiences. Such tinkering tends to redescribe conflict as amatter of individual effort (or failure) or as a natural catastrophe. Itthus silently excludes the option of collective action motivated by

13. Chomsky, Force and Opinion (n. 3 above), pp. 363-65.

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LorenKruger o The (Re)Birthof Liberalismanalysis of systemic social injustice. Wellmer's conclusion to his essaytacitly concedes my point. He ends with the admission that the habitsand attachments of the liberal individual may not be enough to dealwith the onslaught of social and ecological devastation, racial or eth-nic tension, the growth of violence, economic decline, or the conse-quences of economic imperialism and implies that the best liberalarguments can do is show us why we should not want this to happen(p. S124).In confronting catastrophe, liberal arguments offer remedies in thecircumscribed domains of individual self-creation and fellow-feeling,where politics is nothing more or less than ethical life and broadmovements for social change dwindle into isolated acts of individualcommiseration. If freedom is to be something more than choosing therules or procedures for the exchange of ideas or commodities, or forexploiting those who are not free, if solidarity is to be more than fra-ternity with one's own kind or an abstract and dubious substitution ofconcerned patterns of consumption for economic justice (in the man-ner promoted by green corporation advertising), then we need toacknowledge the ongoing relevance of theories and tactics of collec-tive social action. In Fraser's words, we ought to recognize that radicalpragmatism-openness to all potentially effective strategies for ac-tion-may be compatible with a wide variety of substantive politicalviews. 'p4 This variety encompasses variants of democratic socialismthat remind us of the historical effectiveness of systemic social analysisand collective struggle for social and economic justice together withindividual acts of charity or Enlightened government. This recogni-tion includes not only the practical value of collective action but alsothe critical importance of analyzing the strategies of hegemony andlegitimation that secure consent to subordination and of compre-hending the collective character of hegemony and of successive at-tempts to challenge it. When the dust settles on the demolition sites ofthe Eastern bloc, the legacy of socialist theory and practice and theprophetic pragmatism that Cornel West characterizes as a peculiarlyAmerican response to modernity may, in their critical engagementwith a solidarity beyond the free association of individuals, point theway beyond the liberal quietism which pervades Truth, Contingency,and Modernity.

14. Fraser, What'sCritical about Critical Theory? p. 106.

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