The West Removed. Economics, Democracy, Freedom: A Counter-History of Our Civilization 9788869770678

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MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL

POLITICS n. 3

Paolo Ercolani

THE WEST REMOVED Economics, Democracy, Freedom: A Counter-History of Our Civilization Foreword by Santiago Zabala

MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL

© 2016 – Mimesis International www.mimesisinternational.com e-mail: [email protected] Book series: Politics, n. 3 Isbn: 9788869770678 © MIM Edizioni Srl P.I. C.F. 02419370305

CONTENTS

Foreword by Santiago Zabala

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1. Myths to Discredit

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2. From J.S. Mill to Hayek: The Swinging Freedom

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3. The Myth of Free Market and the Rift of Liberalism

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4. F.A. Hayek: A Prophet of Our Time

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5. Two Liberalisms

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6. The Denial of the 20th Century

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7. Marx and Popper: Why We Can’t but Define Ourselves as Marxists, Too

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Notes

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References

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“The seeds burgeon once more, and talk is silenced by the solemn recurrences of history“ (G.W.F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right: § 324 A) “The problem of the history as a whole is unanswerable within its own perspective […] History as such has not outcome” (K. Löwith, Meaning in History: 191) “Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results“ (G. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: § IX)

FOREWORD by Santiago Zabala There are few young philosophers in Europe who are also public intellectuals. Paolo Ercolani is one of them. He belongs to a generation of thinkers who believe intellectuals must return to the engagement in social and public matters that they had in the 1950s and 1960s. The fact that today there are fewer thinkers willing to engage in public matters is a product of the specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge that Martin Heidegger predicted. Our responsibility in the twenty-first century is not simply to criticize the discrimination inherent in contemporary institutions and invite others to think differently but also to preserve the right to be a public intellectual. Ercolani is a professor of the history of philosophy and the theory of new media at the University of Urbino and the author of several books on Hayek, Tocqueville, and Marx, but he also writes opinion articles for major Italian newspapers (Corriere della Sera, Il Manifesto) and journals (MicroMega, Critica Liberale). In these articles he does not simply engage in political and cultural debates but he also encourages them because he believes that we are living in an age dominated by a neoliberal logic that demands that political differences and social alternatives be avoided. This is evident in the EU’s constant rhetoric

against the rise of populist parties throughout Europe, as if they were all alike,1 and in the West’s so-called war on terror, which has recently found a new impetus with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Against these simple, one-sided, and politically correct accounts of our world, Ercolani believes we must make an effort to question philosophical truths, historical myths, and social prejudices, regardless what unpopular territory this might lead to. For example, as he recently pointed out,2 supporters of ISIS are not simple Islamic fundamentalists but the result of social, economic, and cultural degradation created by decades of Western constraints. In line with his former tutor, distinguished historian Domenico Losurdo, Ercolani presents counter-histories of what Simone Weil once called the “Americanization of the world.” The seven chapters of this book cover a variety of concepts (liberalism, freedom, Marxism) and classic thinkers (Mill, Hayek, Marx, Popper) in order to disclose several myths we have become accustomed to take for granted in the West. He posits that exploration of these myths is crucial to understanding the essence of the West or, better, to seeing what has been 1

2

S. Zabala, “In Europe, Not All Populist Parties Are the Same” Al Jazeera America, 2 December 2014, http:// america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/12/podemos-spainpoliticspopulismeurope.html. P. Ercolani, “Isis: guerra mondiale o miopia globale?” Il Manifesto, 22 November 2015, http://ilmanifesto.info/ storia/isis-guerra-mondiale-o-miopia-globale/.

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“removed” from the West as the title of this book alludes to. According to Ercolani, the central myth we must overcome is that of liberalism’s moral superiority over its rivals, i.e., socialism and Marxism. He recalls how frightened Mill was by the “tyranny of the majority,” in other words, by representative democracy. Mill believed that something had to be done to prevent democratic governments, which would be the expression of those growing working classes characterized by a low intellectual level. Against this danger Mill came up with a “series of exclusion clauses,” such as the election of the assembly only by those citizens who pay their taxes. These clauses assumed that the person endowed with superior qualities had more right to vote and that a vote cast from a position of intellectual superiority would naturally lead to the benefit of others. Ercolani also recalls how Hayek praised Switzerland, “the oldest and best democracy,” because “women were still excluded from the right to vote” and called America “the greatest democracy in the world” despite its racial discrimination toward blacks and Indians. Ercolani is right to emphasize how these “three forms of exclusion from the category of individual, wealth, sexual and racial,” have been the basis of foreign policy for many liberal countries during the past decades, policy now clear in the actions of Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Israel. If these nations are indisputable allies of the West, it is because they apply these exclusions for our financial and military benefit. In addition to this counter-history of liberalism, Ercol11

ani also brings forward a thesis that I consider to be the most interesting feature of his book: that our freedoms today are the result not only of classic liberalism but also of Marxism, that is that they emerged from the “dialectic clash” of those systems. This is why he believes it is important to remember how Marx has been helped by both Karl Popper and Bernard Russell since they showed both his internal contradictions and his indisputable intuitions. As I leave the reader to discover what these contradictions and intuitions were, I would like to emphasize that this book introduces only part of Ercolani’s brilliant philosophical, historical, and social investigations. I hope his other books will soon also be translated into English so everyone in the Anglophone world can also venture into what the West removed.

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1. MYTHS TO DISCREDIT

The century which we left behind ended with the peremptory belief that after liberalism’s victory on socialism, Western society and the whole entire world could at last embrace their freedom. From the beginning, liberal theory has imagined this freedom to be valid for everyone, without racial, sexual and national discrimination. According to this assumption, all left-wing movements, which in various ways date back to the socialist or communist tradition, bared themselves of all antiquated clothes in order to wear liberalism’s clean clothes. This is what has been done, even though in different ways, but it has been an operation which was based on a mistaken premise and furthermore caused the extinction of some of the Left Wing’s basic values. These values have been necessary to the Liberal tradition which succeeded in interiorizing them, and nowadays they can be indispensable if conveniently updated in this era in which economics seem to exercise a totalitarian power over the human world. Let’s find out the winding, and at times contradictory, way of freedom through a critical analysis of the Liberal tradition. Liberalism is a philosophical political theory which has man’s freedom at the core of its speculation. This

liberty is negative when it assumes the restriction ruled by The Rule of Law that the government and other people can wield upon a person. There is also positive Liberty which establishes the individual’s freedom of speech and expression, his right of ownership and his possibility to undertake an economic initiative aimed at profit or autonomous sustenance. According to the Liberal theory the basic assumption is that “Everyone is the master of himself and none has any kind of rights on him but himself.” By virtue of which everyone is master of his own actions as well as of his work, perfectly able to aim at a form of selfrealization” in which he exercises his free thought and his freedom of choice that characterize humankind living an existence in which all needs are satisfied.1 At the end of the 17th century in parallel with the establishment of Liberalism as a social theory, a new conception of Liberty appears, that which Constant calls the “Liberty of the Moderns” based on the supremacy of individual freedom compared with political freedom (i.e. collective freedom, from which the clear opposition with the remarkable Jacobin-Socialist tradition). It is also based on a tight connection with trade, which “inspires people a true love for the individual independence”, provides for their needs and satisfies their wishes without any intervention on the part of the authority, which is actually considered “an annoying and bothering element”.2 In spite of some anticipations which can be traced back to the Magna Carta and to Holland in the middle of the 17th century, the first government to be consid14

ered Liberal is the one that came from the Glorious Revolution in England in 1689, so called because it took place without the involvement of the masses and above all without the shedding of blood. The majority of the English Parliament chose to call William III of England to be Monarch, deposing James II and giving life to a Constitutional Monarchy in which the king did not have absolute power but was limited by the Bill of Rights that strictly controlled the sovereign and Parliament’s prerogatives. The most important thing was, above all, that it officially sanctioned the fact that the political power belonged to the people, called to express themselves in free elections of their representatives, since the real sovereignty belonged to the people, and not to the absolute power of the Monarchy. Theorizing also religious tolerance and the right to resist unjust sovereigns and laws, this new form of government, which was the English Constitutional Monarchy, was introduced as the “laboratory” for the beginning of the experimentation of the philosophicalpolitical ideal, Liberalism, which would lead all Western governments to those democratic regimes which today the West is so proud of, especially in comparison with other civilizations. Starting from these premises, many more contemporary liberals have painted a linear and problematic picture of the Liberal tradition: this picture essentially describes a clash between two remarkable currents of thought, the Liberal current and the Jacobin-Socialist one, a ferocious rival in the domination of the western world. The Liberal current is the bearer of those rights 15

and liberties which we benefit from today in our Western democracies while the second one is the bearer of a totalitarian centrality of power (or what Talmon called “totalitarian democracy”), which is full of violence, kills liberty and is bankrupt in terms of concrete social realization. Fortunately, the world is stating this intention of most orthodox liberals, the liberal tradition asserted itself on the Jacobin-Socialist current affirming all its requests and producing those revolutionary and reformatory events which have sown seeds for the garden of freedom that is our western world. Thanks to Liberal theory, therefore, while older civilizations declined or remained in a stationary condition before the achievement of the same degree of development reached by our western civilization, the latter managed to reinforce social relationships between people and between populations more than ever, making all of those marvelous conquests, which characterize our standard of living and have to be ascribed to the good outcome of Liberalism and Capitalism, possible.3 According to Mises, historical balance is idyllic and apodictic, whereas his student Hayek, who is considered to be the greatest Liberal of the twentieth century, went further, affirming that “even if there are rigorous limits the material equality that can be achieved by Liberal methods, the battle for a formal equality, against every kind of discrimination based on social origin, nationality, race, faith, remains one of the most significant features of the Liberal tradition.”4 16

As Domenico Losurdo said at the conclusion of his Controstoria del Liberalismo, “the values of Liberalism are too important and too evident that there is no need to attribute others to it”.5 So that it is convenient to come out of hagiographic visions that the enthusiastic exegetes benefit from Liberalism, trying to reach the cornerstone of this fundamental school of thought without removing the serious and clear contradictions. A basic premise in order to hit the mark is to begin by discrediting the basic myth according to which in 1689 the first Liberal government based on peaceful and tolerant premises was born in England. Speaking of which, we should highlight the fact that the first big act of international policy put into practice by the new Liberal government was to tear off from Spain the “asiento”, which was the monopoly of the slave trade owned by Spain until that moment, not in fact a peaceful and symbolic “trophy” of individual liberty. The terrible condition to which affected Irish people were exposed cannot be removed. They are eloquently described as “the redskin of England” by various people; Locke defined them as a “population of bandits” and victims of the English police terrorism, which subordinated them, took advantage of them and forced widespread executions and drastic “war measures” as Marx had already denounced.6 These massacres were executed in the name of their membership to an unwelcome religion, disliked by the English people, the Catholic religion. Definitely all this was not consistent with the ideal of freedom. It 17

does not come as a surprise, considering that Locke himself in his A Letter Concerning Toleration excluded precisely Catholics and papists (along with atheists) from the benefit of this human virtue (tolerance). They were considered to be just like “snakes” toward which no “kind treatment” was needed.7 We have said that there is a unanimous opinion according to which at the core of the theory there is the person with his fundamental rights. If we abide by the definitions of the great classics of Liberal thought, this individual is taken into consideration without definite features, so that he is about a universal vision of himself. However this is not the case. This is because according to Liberalism’s theory, poor people, and everyone who did not belong to the ruling classes (upper classes) did not belong to the category of the individual, and they were not given specific political and social rights. Reading Constant’s pages, for example, we see that when he talks about political rights he reveals some clauses that do not recognize that everyone has the fullness of that individual sphere exalted with “pathos”. We can say that in our modern societies, the birth in a country and mature age are not sufficient conditions to bestow political rights on men. Those who indigence keeps in a condition of “éternelle dependence”, which condemns them to “travaux journaliers”, are no better than children in public affairs, and they are not more interested in national prosperity than foreigners. So according to the fact that only the owners are masters of their existence, 18

because they can refuse to work (“refuser le travail”), only those who own the necessary income to live independently from every other will, can exercise their political rights.8

If with Constant we are in the first half of the nineteenth century, it may be useful to refer to another great liberal: John Stuart Mill, with whom we are in the second half of the nineteenth century when the revolutionary events of 1848 had already happened, Socialism developed a cohesive and international organization and working class struggles and the extension of the suffrage were becoming more pressing.

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2. FROM J.S. MILL TO HAYEK: THE SWINGING FREEDOM John Stuart Mill was in many ways a liberal democratic. He was also an expert in the field of socialism (especially in his political economical writings) and the author of a famous essay in favor of women’s emancipation. In 1859 he wrote a celebrated essay of theoretical structure “On Liberty”, in which he focuses on two fundamental aspects: the defense of the educated and brilliant individual’s liberty as opposed to the majority, which runs the risk of exerting an overbearing power on a society that is increasingly exposed to the threats of homogenization and assimilation. The other argument is the defense of individual liberty of economic enterprise compared with the government’s power of disturbance, government that runs the risk of being the delegate of the poorer social classes, who are less intelligent and unable to distinguish themselves in society due to historical evolution.9 Mill’s concern was not to limit the government’s act itself but to prevent popular government: “the conception according to which population didn’t need to limit its own power on itself could seem an axiom when the popular government was an idea existing only in dreams, or something which had been read compared with remote epochs”.10 In those days the popular government was not the outcome of a dream; it was a real-

ity that could become dominant. Mill was frightened by the fact that the popular will meant the most numerous will, so that there was the threat of a tyranny of the majority.11 But what was there behind this familiar and proved concept: the democratic government as the expression of the majority? Why was the English philosopher so worried? We find the answer reading Mill’s work, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), which contains practical and consequential precepts compared with what had been theorized in his On Liberty: “There are two different kinds of danger incident to a representative democracy, the first one is the low intellectual level of the public opinion which perform a control on it, and then the danger of a class legislation by the side of the numerical majority composed of only one class”.12 Mill’s fear is clear: the rising of the working class, which represented the majority in the industrially advanced countries, was worrisome. The extension of the right to vote to the lower class would bring about the inevitable consequence of a government which would be the expression of those classes, a defender of their interests. The English philosopher, however, has the solution that consists in a series of exclusion clauses: first of all it is necessary that open education for everyone has to precede universal suffrage,13 then only the citizens who pay their taxes have the right to elect the Assembly, because if people who do not pay taxes could choose, in money matters there would be a waste of other people’s money.14 22

In spite of this, there’s another item on the agenda: the votes of different people are not necessarily equal. The person endowed with superior qualities has a more important right to vote. Being excluded from the right to vote and the granting of a more potential voice to people with more abilities for the direction of common interests are two different things. Mill specifies that he is not establishing a relationship between wealth and authority, but he refers to individual mental superiority admitting that this parameter is not always recognizable and in the absence of it the nature of a person’s occupation is some test, considering that the employer is more intelligent than a simple worker. And so on.15 Now it is simple to notice how at the time of the English philosopher, the possibilities to acquire an adequate culture were a prerogative of the upper classes. Establishing such a strict criterion, according to which an individual’s intelligence should have been established by his social position, meant to let what had been thrown out of the door come back in through the window: classism. Furthermore Mills restates every exclusion from the right to vote, and he considers a long list of exclusions is justifiable to him in view of the safety of the whole.16 Thus Mill excludes some categories of people (the majority of society at that time) from the political rights in view of the whole, the same whole for which liberals accused the Jacobin tradition of sacrificing individual rights in favour of. We have to recognize that Liberalism without a doubt has always supported the opposition, in spite of 23

some important exceptions at the end of the nineteenth century that led Engels to denounce the fact that in England “the aiding and the abetting of rich people is explicitly admitted by the law”.17 This fundamental political and social right was denied people who were not part of the gentry (landowning class), employees and those who did not have a high income and for that reason did not belong to the category of the individual, theorized by Liberalism. According to Locke, in case of destitution, their children should have been taken away at the age of three and sent to work (with their parents confined in the terrible workhouses in England and in the U.S.A.). It was Marx who strongly denounced “Herod’s rape executed by the capitalists at the beginning of the Factory system in the poor houses and in the orphanages, through which it incorporated human material void of will”.18 We cannot remove the other big discrimination which involves more than half of the world population. We are talking about the female gender who did not have the right to vote and they could not run for a public office in Liberal countries for almost all of the twentieth century. We can mention the most paradoxical case, that of the so-called greatest liberal of the 1900s, Friedrich Hayek, who in 1960 defined Switzerland as “the oldest and best democracy”, because women were still excluded from the right to vote.19 To gender and wealth based discrimination, we have to add another type, which involves a great amount of 24

people: the racial discrimination which was seen in America, “the greatest democracy in the world,” during the most clamorous case of black slavery and the Native American massacre. This fact does not astonish us because if we hark back to the father of Liberalism, John Locke, we find out that in one of his writings regarding the Carolina Constitution (the reference is specifically to the U.S.A.), he wanted every free man’s right to exercise absolute power and authority over his black slaves, independent of their opinion and religion, to be sanctioned by the fundamental text of that country. Referring to English workers, Engels affirmed that he was “glad and proud” of having met those who “suffer a worse slavery than black people”, establishing a direct line between the fate reserved to the slaves by Liberal countries and later to the workers considered “wage earnings slaves”.20 These three forms of exclusion from the category of individual, wealth, gender and race, have been the basis of some discrimination that Liberal countries had as foreign policy towards a lot of people without it being a problem of contradiction compared with the idyllic theory of the individual’s right asserted by the classics of Liberalism.

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3. THE MYTH OF FREE MARKET AND THE RIFT OF LIBERALISM The contradictions of Liberalism do not stop at these three fundamental spheres because, as for the economy, we need to record a distance between what has been proclaimed by Liberal countries and what has actually been put into practice. In opposition to Adam Smith, who theorized competition free from any state’s intervention, it is necessary to remember with a modern scholar of “wealth and poverty of Nations” that England and the U.S.A., considered to be symbols of Liberalism, have been “strongly protectionist during the process of development of their own economies”, while, according to a modern Nobel Prize winner, the United States’ “government was instrumental in molding the evolution of the economy”.21 People who want to write “the true story of Capitalism” in relation to the recent developments of globalization have to take cognizance that England and the USA have been “the most protectionist countries in the world”, but their governments acted politically and militarily in order to guarantee worldwide predominance, based more on power (on the exploitation and enslavement of weaker countries) than on the outcomes of free competition. Nowadays, after centuries of Colonialism and Imperialism, rich liberal countries

dominate poorer, developing countries by the control of the big international institutions (FMI, International Monetary Fund, World Bank) through which they impose on them those policies that they first have abandoned far back and they have partially adopted. Thus, the role of liberal countries is that of the “bad Samaritan” who, through the imposition of rules valid not for themselves but for other countries only, have made worldwide competition a “game among unequal players”.22 The irony is that not only yesterday, in the case of the U.S.A. and Britain, but even today the two economic engines that have driven the world during the global recession, i.e. the USA and China, both acted like Keynesian states.23 Considering all of these contradictions, it is evident that for a full understanding of this philosophical political theory of the modern Occident, we cannot be pleased with the hagiographical and peaceful definition provided by the enthusiastic apologists of Liberal theory. Our Occidental civilization cannot be thought of as the result of the undisputed victory of Liberalism over its historical enemy, Marxism, from which came the strongest boosts so that all the rights that Liberalism assigned to a restricted part of the human race would be extended and universalized without distinction of wealth, race and gender. The most relevant and historical merit of Liberalism was to adopt democratic issues that formerly did not belong to it, showing a ductility and an ability to adapt to significant historical changes that other philosophi28

cal currents did not manage to involve. It is necessary to understand that this ductility has been made possible thanks to a dialectical conflict with the adverse political tradition, which has seen Liberalism as the protagonist of a rift that started between the 19th and 20th centuries with authors such as Hobhouse, Hobson and continued up to present day with philosophers such as Rawls and Popper. John Rawls stressed this rift in his most famous work where he proposes a conception of justice which nullifies the contingencies of social circumstances because “Free will in the world must be corrected”. The purpose of the American philosopher is clear: he wants to affirm the principle of impartial equality through the creation of a new justice system which guarantees “social mobility” to the less privileged.24 In 1931 British sociologist Tawney published an essay significantly called Equality that describes “the equality of conditions” as a generally accepted fact. He gave an unmistakable definition: “Actually, the equality of conditions is real only if each member of a community, independently from the origin, the profession, the social position, formally owns the same chances to use his own natural, physical, and intellectual talents”.25 The crash of 1929, the end of the gold standard, the end of the self-regulating market and the end of many cornerstones of classical Liberalism, which collapsed during the first half of the 1900s, led many liberal to take cognizance of the paradigm transformation which stood out on both theoretical and social plan. 29

The case of the philosopher Ortega Y. Gasset is significant. Strongly individualist, he theorized “a society ruled by a minorìa selecta”, but he approved and supported an “intentional and planned state intervention” in order to guarantee “economic equality” and social justice. The Spanish Liberal knew that society would never be as its name proclaims because it includes elements of “dissociations” and elements of “repulsion between people” which make it a deficit and reality. If archaic societies needed frequent intervention by public authority, a violent intervention, now, even if they have developed, they still need a “special set of rules in charge of making that authority work in an indisputable way”: this special system is usually called “Estado”.26 Let’s move to a much more typically socio-economical level and read Keynes, nowadays a forgotten or even cursed author, who writes in his main work that, when the liberal system underwent a full crisis with the breakdown of 1929, “the classic theory” (that of unrestrained individualism, that of laissez-faire, that of the non-intervention of the state in economic issues) represents “the way we would like our economy to behave, but presuming it actually does so means not to consider at all the great troubles in which we are right now”. These considerations lead the New Deal theorist to conclude that “the state intervention”, for example to promote and support new investments, is “the only way out of an extended and, maybe, endless depression”.27 What Keynes understood as an economist was already theorised, approximately twenty years earlier, 30

by Hobhouse on a purely philosophical-political level. Criticizing the classic “nineteenth-century” liberalism and its strong limitations in the true fulfilment of equal freedom for everyone, he promotes a new liberalism that guarantees the welfare of individuals and the real presence of rights which can make possible the full realisation of all the members of society. To achieve this, Hobhouse points out, there is no need at all for a revolutionary change in the political and national organization, but a government in which “the system in general has a certain sovereignty over possessions and has the supervision over the industry”. A similar principle of economic sovereignty, he concludes, can be established alongside with that “economic justice” which the author considers equally fundamental for a true economic liberalism.28 Even more important is that Hobhouse, starting from a premise that shakes up the cornerstones of classic liberalism (“freedom implies equality”), criticizes the assumption according to which “the possibility of the individual to act without restrictions is the basic principle of every progress” and condemns as “shallow wit” that of his own time, in which liberalism is accused of incoherence with its own values in promoting, at the same time, an economic protectionism for companies and protective legislation for workers: the two actions have nothing in common, according to Hobhouse, and it would be an understatement to say that they hinder the values of classic liberalism. However, they certainly work for the sake of community, based on the principle according to which “good 31

freedom” is not that of a single person profiting at others’ expense, but that which can be benefited by all the people that live together.29 It is usually omitted in the conventional historiography that this internal rift inside liberal tradition originated precisely where liberalism was born, that is to say, in England, but it is a feature that characterized the movement for the whole twentieth century, which made it possible to achieve those democratic and social conquests that classic liberalism fought against as long as it could. For this reason, one of the most classic examples is that of Karl Popper that, although included in monolithic and faint liberalism, totally represented this second liberalism born from the rift mentioned above, on the one hand recognizing that the welfare state had a fundamental role in fighting phenomena like poverty, unemployment, strict class differences and so on; on the other hand, although warning about the risks of a hypertrophy of the role of the government (defined as a “necessary evil”) and foreseeing a series of limitations, he clearly stated that “the economic power cannot be allowed to rule over the political power, and on the contrary, if necessary, should be fought and subdued by the political one”.30 The metamorphosis of liberalism is clear to such an extent that an intellectually honest liberal of the twentieth century came to a point of even questioning the existence of the “entity” liberalism, single and ideologically coherent in itself, acknowledging that in the main western countries “liberal” parties in charge, 32

especially in the twentieth century, have promulgated legislative actions that can be defined as “welfarist” and “socialist”, thus denying a wide range of what the “liberal doctrine” meant in the past centuries, which is nowadays explicitly referred to by the conservative and reactionary trend of liberalism (“neoliberalism”), whose main representative is Friedrich Hayek.31

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4. F.A. HAYEK: A PROPHET OF OUR TIME

It is essential to analyze Hayek to understand the grammar of the world we live in. Indeed he is, at the same time, the chief ideologue of neoliberalism, which has triumphed in our time, and the greatest advocate of a return to conservative and reactionary liberalism. The question of whether or not one is a conservative is raised by Hayek himself in his Postscript to the Constitution of Liberty. Why I am not a conservative. The answer that the author provides – and that will be examined later, at length – contains at least two real difficulties: the first of these is regarding why a fiercely liberal thinker feels the need to keep his distance from conservatism, theoretically different from his political and philosophical beliefs. The other is implicit in the answer itself. It is more effective in clarifying why the author himself does not want to be defined and less effective in building a positive identity keeping abreast with changing times. In order to attempt an analysis of this first difficulty, it might be useful to try and understand the contemporary world and the evolution of liberalism in the way which Hayek himself interprets them. In this way, we are able to clarify the overall position of the philosopher and shed more light on the second difficulty.

The Austrian thinker traces the history of liberalism through a rather sharp dichotomy: on the one hand, he sees the development of liberalism as “evolutionary”, thinking back to the ancient tradition of the English Whigs, whose supreme values lay in the “negative” concept of individual freedom and the protection by law against any form of coercion and arbitration. On the other hand, he identifies liberalism that goes back to the “continental tradition”, in which the highest place in each group is occupied by the claim of self-determination, leading to the formation of the government.32 The tradition of evolutionary liberalism, or Whiggism, is defined as one’s own concept of “negative” freedom, in the same way that concepts, such as peace and justice, refer to the “absence of evil” as an open possibility that does not guarantee definitive advantages. The freedom claimed by English liberalism requires the removal of all social conflicts that affect individual power. However, it does not require, and indeed sees as a hindrance, the fact that the community or the state can provide particular goods.33 It is no coincidence that the founder of economic liberalism, Adam Smith, spoke about individual enterprises that are able to improve one’s economic condition just like a “natural effort” that, left to act with both freedom and security, is not only able to ensure the wealth and prosperity of the company itself but is able to overcome the many unannounced impediments with which the “folly of human law” often hinders its actions.34 36

Society and the government then, as already stated by Paine on the other side of the ocean, must be clearly separated and not at all confused because society, in all its forms, is a “blessing”, while the government, in its best form, is nothing but an “unavoidable source of evil” and the “symbol of lost innocence”.35 The decline of the liberal Whiggist doctrine, which began according to Hayek in 1870, is closely associated with a re-interpretation of freedom as the vehicle to get through state intervention with the necessary means to achieve a variety of particular objectives.36 This analysis of Hayek does not help to clarify matters. First of all because the “geographical” distinction between evolutionary ‘English’ liberalism and constructivist “Continental” liberalism has significant limitations and exceptions. The philosopher admits that these limitations and exceptions were present between constructivists Hobbes and Bentham and among evolutionists Montesquieu and Tocqueville, just to name a few. But if we delve more deeply into the specifics, we see that the dichotomy Hayek speaks about, does not stand for anything. Let’s take into consideration two central figures of the nineteenth century liberal movements: Frenchman Frederic Bastiat and Englishman John Stuart Mill. Well, it is the French author who gets closer to the concept of evolution and liberalism, expressed by Hayek, by identifying competition with freedom and going as far as to define the first as “the democratic law for excellence,” the most “progressive and egali37

tarian” and even the “most communist” of all those to which Providence entrusted the progress of the society.37 Free competition, apparently not affected by the intervention of the state, coincided with the “best interests of humanity.”38 On the other hand, Stuart Mill moves away completely from the ideas of Bastiat (and Hayek), establishing the distinction between the laws and the conditions of the production of wealth, which “involve the true test of character” and in which there is nothing voluntary or arbitrary. The “distribution of wealth” is a matter that can only be addressed by humans themselves.39 It is based on this distinction that Mill exceeded the classical concept of economic laws, believed to be true and irrefutable, like natural laws, and then completed an evolutionary order that had to remain free from humans. This was to promote direct intervention between man and the government in order to establish conditions of greater social equity. Property laws, wrote the English philosopher in 1848, did not ensure a “fair balance” between human beings, but only overloaded some with obstacles, reserving benefits for others. They fuelled inequality and prevented all men from starting a life with equal Opportunities.40 Mill’s conclusion is unequivocal: government intervention in social affairs is extremely necessary in many issues, due to the fact that narrow-minded, private companies are not able to provide for the common people. In this sense, a good government, far from qualifying as an entity that does not intervene 38

in the free play of individual competitors, must carve out a very active role, aimed not only at removing obstacles and impediments to free enterprise, but also at helping private parties by “providing all possible active support, such as encouraging and nurturing every single aspect of individual activity so that it assigns financial means”.41 It is therefore evident, even with these few examples, that the dichotomy established by Hayek between “continental” liberalism and Anglo-American liberalism suffering from constructivist spirit (as opposed to the English-promoted evolutionary vision) did not stand up to the facts. French Bastiat was himself a student of another great “evolutionary” economist and advocate of free competition – Jean Baptiste Say. Meanwhile John Stuart Mill revealed himself as the founder and forerunner of a number of Englishspeaking authors who, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, helped promote the line of thought, especially in the twentieth century, which was to break the internal split of liberalism. It was also to give way to its vision of an interventionist state leading in several directions, which had the task of ensuring social justice among all citizens as much as possible. This is the case of the Englishman, Hobhouse, who was heavily criticized by Hayek,42 and who in 1911, starting from a premise that revolutionizes the tenets of classical liberalism (“freedom implies equality”43), criticized the assumption that “the possibility of the individual to act without restriction” is the basic principle of all progress and blamed as the weak spirit, 39

those who reproached liberalism’s inconsistency with its values, when it promoted both an economic protectionism for companies and a protective legislation for workers: the two actions had nothing in common with each other, according to Hobhouse, and nothing short of contrast with the values of classical liberalism. However, they certainly operated in the public interest, based on the principle that “good freedom” is not that of one who earns at the expense of others, but one that can be enjoyed by all who live together.44 But we can go stateside, to a country that ideologically and economically lives on the legacy of Victorian England, to find the most important American philosopher, John Dewey, who, after studying the concept of individualism, began to assert a new liberalism, based on the merciless criticism of the old. Individuality, wrote the American philosopher, has two sides which are inseparable: on the one hand, there are certain inclinations, skills, temperaments and principles at the disposal of the individual, but on the other hand, there are particular “social conditions”, limitations, opportunities and environmental factors. The individual is the product of both a “specific capacity”, as well as a “particular social environment”, so, considering one of these two aspects, completely disregarding the other, would be to refer to a “mere abstraction” without concrete findings.45 Dewey supports the thinking that the individual is also the product of his surroundings, circumstances and opportunities which are founded by the company. Being able to guarantee him all this, is tantamount to 40

rejecting the abstract vision of the individual. The individual was characterized by the old liberalism, which Hayek wants to revive. To hold an overall view of the individual, as a single entity but inevitably in connection with other individuals and with the social environment, is to tell the American philosopher that we need a “new liberalism” that knows its energies to assert its old, renewed order (the promotion and development of individuality). Thus it is important to establish a “social order” that cannot be based on an “unplanned convergence and external actions of separate individuals.” In short, it is the concept of spontaneous order (or an “invisible hand”), so celebrated by Hayek and classical liberalism, which is questioned by Dewey, who considers it the “Achilles heel” of the old liberalism. In contemporary society – the American philosopher penned these thoughts in 1935 – the realisation of the purposes for which the Liberals fought, can only be achieved through “organised social planning,” which aims at establishing an order that, far from being spontaneous, expects the industry and finance to be “socially controlled in favour of institutions that ensure the material basis for economic and cultural liberation and the development of individuals”.46 With Dewey, moving forward is no small matter. Not only, in fact, is it yet another confirmation of the imprecision and superficiality of the dichotomy between Hayek’s European-constructivist liberalism and an English/American evolutionist liberalism, but also with the American philosopher’s witnessing of a more realistic view of the society of the twentieth century. 41

In this contextualized-historical organization, the reference to the concrete conditions and the rejection of abstract ideas (a certain individualism, as opposed to the company as a collective entity) are presented as elements, which are far more profitable and are effective in order to understand the contemporary world and Western societies. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in short, we were able to witness a split in the liberal world that was not just about the ideal plan, but also and above all, had to do with the transformation of Western nations, who were no longer able to progress, relying only on an economy without the intervention of governments and politicians.47

42

5. TWO LIBERALISMS

The fundamental state intervention in economic matters became, with the end of the 19th century, an action which was indispensable both to the theoretical and also actual policies. In this regard an English historian, at the turn of the twentieth century historically recorded that in Germany, Bismarck had led the way to revive conservative opinion. He was to take action for social reforms funding them through tax policy. Other European countries followed the example of the German Chancellor in order to oppose British dominance in exportation, but also to give power to large industries that were springing up in individual countries. Europe’s major industries were developed after these protectionist policies, but also the United States adopted a strict system of protection in 1890 (MacKinley Tariff). The trend was now widespread in liberal reforms, such as the Old Age Pension Act of 1908 and the National Insurance Act of 1911. They existed to vindicate the importance of social legislation in economic matters, so much so that in 1892 the leader of the British Conservatives, Lord Salisbury justified the tariffs. More generally, there had been a change in the not insignificant slogan of the Conservatives: no more “free trade” but “fair trade”, although officially it con-

tinued to proclaim the free market as an ideal which was still relevant.48 Compared to this trend, France was not an exception. It escaped the global economic crisis of 1873 that hit countries like the United States and Britain, due to customs barriers cleverly established by Thiers.49 Then, even more so with the arrival of the twentieth century, it became obvious that liberalism had to leave huge economic and social strengths in the wake of historical upheavals. The two World Wars, punctuated by the great economic crisis of 1929, with the explosion of mass unemployment and the end of the self-regulating market, marked the first crisis of the classical, liberal model, which from that period would become so transformed as to be almost unrecognizable. It is important to note that this was not only a transformation due to external factors (wars, the extension of the suffrage movement with the relative influence of the socialist parties, social legislation and the development of citizenship rights), but also endogenous to liberalism itself. The domain industry increasingly made by a small number of corporations changed the character of the economic sphere to produce processes of centralization and concentration as well as the initial institutional mediation of political power in capitalist society. This then resulted in a real “programming” of the market by the state. These programs have led most authors to speak of “post-capitalism” and to wonder even if the result of the great crisis could still be called a capitalist society.50 The world was changing with breath-taking speed – we use the synthesis of Arrighi – while the very scope 44

of the upheaval rendered anachronistic instances of classical liberalism. The economic downturn started in America with the collapse of Wall Street in late 1928 and with the consequent diversion of funds from foreign borrowing to domestic speculation, along with a request from US banks for the repayment of European credits. This increased the crisis of the European countries, already beaten by mass unemployment and increasingly frequent social protests. Thus, continues Arrighi, “one country after another was forced to protect its currency through the use of devaluation or exchange controls.” The suspension of gold convertibility of the pound sterling in September 1931 led to the final destruction of the only network of commercial and financial transactions worldwide on which were based the fortunes of the City of London. Protectionism raged, while capitalism was closed in the “igloo” of the economies of its nation states. “It was a real world revolution” is the conclusion of the effective reconstruction made by the Italian scholar, and its main features were the disappearance of high finance from the political world, the collapse of the League of Nations for the benefit of the autarchic empires (and nation-states), the rise of Nazism in Germany, the fiveyear plans in the Soviet Union and the US launch of the New Deal.51 The split within the liberal world, in short, was taking place in those years of great crisis and would last throughout the twentieth century to the present day. A break in the theoretical level, with major authors’ liberal interventionism, was deployed to the state in 45

economic matters (Hobhouse, Dewey, Ortega y Gasset, Popper, Rawls, etc.). This opposed the theologians of the free market, nostalgic for nineteenth-century capitalism (Mises, Hayek himself, Friedman, etc.), but there was also a break on political and social levels, with all the Western nations committed to adopting interventionist and protectionist policies, and affirming “social justice”. From this point of view, therefore, it certainly seems sensible to speak of “two liberalisms” as Hayek does. However, despite this, no one can deny the geographical and cultural distinction (continental liberalism vs English liberalism). Rather, the formation of two distinct liberalisms, characterized by cornerstones, in many ways very distant, is the result of a historical evolution that, especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, sees liberalism bifurcate between a party that accepts and promotes the achievements that were changing the government of Western societies in a more democratic way (universal suffrage, equality of opportunity, social legislation, welfare state, etc) and another which shows nostalgic classical liberalism, reluctant to take on a “universalization” of the Liberals’ values and indeed determined to keep those “exclusion clauses” that deny certain political and social rights to all human beings. But it would be a mistake to think that it was a smooth and peaceful process that resulted from the practice of the old liberalism, the affirmation of the new, characterized by a large-scale extension of rights, previously conferred only to certain groups of the hu46

man race, as it would be wrong to conclude that this transformation was a kind of handover between the two liberalisms. In fact, the historical process which resulted in the advent of “democracy”, happened, thanks to social struggles, sometimes extreme, and the affirmation of cultural needs, led by socialist Jacobin, all of which was unavoidable if you wanted to understand the identity of the democratic West in its thoroughness and objectivity.52 In this context it is understandable that, as a historian, Hobsbawm can reconstruct the “golden years” (1945-1975). They are characterized by a surprising and steady recovery of Western economies after World War II, attributing the merit to “post-war capitalism” which was defined as a sort of “marriage between economic liberalism and social democracy, with substantive aspects borrowed from the USSR, who first promoted the idea of a planned economy.”53 Even liberal Berlin, quoted by most, only for his distinction between “positive” and “negative” freedom, was adopting this reading of the West and contemporary liberalism. If the origins of liberalism appear as a “single, coherent” movement which has undergone slight modifications during almost three centuries, writes the philosopher, the “consciousness of history” that developed in the nineteenth century, changed the “simple and austere” design of the classical liberal theory. It was understood that human progress was influenced by factors that were significantly more “complex” than had been drawn at the dawn of the “liberal individualism”. The nations were converted gradually 47

to a “conscious planning of the company”, Berlin continues, so that “the twentieth century, which has met many of the aspirations of the Victorian period, was in fact witnessing an impressive improvement of the material circumstances of most people in Western Europe, largely due to the energetic social legislation that transformed the social order”. All this, says Berlin, was at a time when liberals themselves were beginning to acknowledge the need for some corrections and some control of social life, even on the part of the “hated State”, at least to mitigate the inhumanity of an unbridled ‘private enterprise’, to “protect the freedom of the weak and protect those human rights principles, without which there could be neither happiness nor justice, nor even freedom to pursue the things that make life valid, to be lived.”54 The biggest portion of liberalism that came out of the two World Wars, in short, based its assumptions on foundations which were completely reconstructed: one side is aware of the complexity and danger of the postindustrial society, for which it condemned the fact that the individual is left to deal with his own resources; the other promotes liberalization in a new way of understanding the state, so that the protective action of this is compatible with the autonomy of civil society. It is no coincidence that a scholar of contemporary liberal theory, analyzing these transformations, speaks of “reformism socializing”, and specifies that it “is not the negation of liberalism, but rather the condition of its perpetuation.” It is an “advanced liberalism” in 48

which, so to speak, it is better to have a roof and renounce destroying the house. Better to proceed instead of making adjustments.55 In light of the facts, in short, we can reach the economic position of Hayek, as part of thought in contemporary political philosophy, avoiding his vision of a “dichotomous” English liberalism vs. Continental, and instead make our historical, concrete analysis which identifies an evolution within liberal thought and practice.

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6. THE DENIAL OF THE 20TH CENTURY

By questioning these facts and analyzing the main points separating classical liberalism from “Advanced” liberalism (taking into consideration all of the political and economic changes which we have discussed), we can understand how Hayek, far from being a thinker who maintains and continues the tradition of the alleged English liberalism, reveals himself as an author who refuses clearly many achievements and social changes towards democracy that characterize modernity and liberalism itself. Universal suffrage, union representation, government intervention in economic matters, the rejection of the philosophical view that human society should be left to the control of spontaneous laws, the assertion of policies aimed at social justice and the search for equality, the overcoming of economic individualism with the recognition of social issues (which Hayek called ‘collectivist’), characterize the main changes that Western liberal states have witnessed in the twentieth century and these are all constant targets of speculation by the Austrian philosopher. With this in mind, you can guess why Hayek feels the need to keep a distance between his position and that of a conservative. He is well aware, in fact, of de-

fending an extreme liberalism that no longer exists or is already fading away after World War II, a liberalism that has been transformed and overcome by the political and social history of Western countries. The process of the democratization of liberalism together with the acceptance of measures which had previously been rejected, has created a milestone in the gradual overcoming of racism, gender inequality and censorship. These are all things which had characterized liberal governments until the early decades of the twentieth century. As a result of this process, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN in 1948. The “universalization” of individual rights, regardless of race, wealth and sex, was the final step of the process that created the breakdown of liberalism. This Declaration is branded by Hayek as an “attempt to merge the rights of the Western liberal tradition with the completely different views and conceptions of the Russian Marxist revolution”.56 In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hayek was able to see the culmination of the “decline of the liberal doctrine” that started in 1870 (with the popular uprising in the city of Paris). He closely connected this to the re-interpretation of freedom as the “availability of means, guaranteed by the state, which allowed us to obtain a wide variety of special things”.57 The period which stands out for Hayek between 1870 and 1948 is one which he referred to as the abandoned road. This was stated in the opening chapter of his first political essay. It spoke about the abandon52

ment of certain ideas of the nineteenth century (in which there was the principle of laissez-faire), which had been introduced in England and the United States from 1931 and after Germany, Italy and Russia had led the way to socialism. It had been implemented in a manner so clear and decided, as to remind us what liberalism actually was in these countries and particularly to remind those whose memories were able to reach back to the few years before the start of the First World War.58 The reaction of the Austrian economist to the achievements of the twentieth century is clear and remains constant over time. In fact in 1967, when it was impossible to attack the Declaration of Human Rights, he spoke against the “mixture of ideals” that under the name of “welfare state” had largely replaced socialism as the goal of reformers. This required a thorough analysis to determine whether its results were similar to those generated by real socialism (very similar to those of full-fledged socialism).59 As a result of this, the argument that Hayek promotes, in order to answer the question regarding the conservatism of these ideals, exposes the contradictions that undermine the very coherence of his thought. Hayek categorically rejects the definition of conservatism, preferring to state that the period in which he was writing was characterized by an alliance between the “defenders of freedom” and the “true conservatives”, as opposed to developments which threatened the same way as their different ideals (there is a clear reference to socialism and its assumptions, many of 53

which were gradually made right by liberal societies).60 But the alliance against the common “enemy” denies the fact that liberalism differs from conservatism in many important ways. The latter, in fact, could be defined as “not offering an alternative to the direction towards which we are moving”,61 while the essence of liberalism is “the need to move forward and not stand still”.62 Conservative thinking is also characterized by the “fear of relying on uncontrolled forces of society”, because it is closely linked to the “passion for authority” and the “lack of understanding of the economic forces”, aspects that contrast dramatically with Hayek’s theory. Finally, the “distrust for abstract theories and general principles” prevent conservatism from understanding and trusting the “spontaneous forces” of society, thus giving more emphasis to the authorities and a strong central power, which result in making it look like socialism.63 The distinction, which is explained by the philosopher, leans towards his views as a teacher but is not reinforced on a practical and political level, as is clear from the conclusion of his argument. Hayek believes it is necessary to point out that nowadays “what I called liberalism has little to do with the political movements which bear that name.” He wants a “party of life”, which encourages free development and spontaneous evolution, just as the British Whig Party practiced in the late 1700s. This inspired the colonists in America and allowed them to advance with the drafting of the Constitution.64 54

But since the French Revolution, with its “totalitarian democracy” and its “socialist leanings”, the noble tradition of Whiggism slowly became lost to society until, Hayek concludes, “liberalism” as we know it today (an idea that is not based on its original assumptions to make a socialist and democratic case) replaced the Whig concept, but not before the first movement of liberty had absorbed the “crude and militant rationalism” of the French Revolution. The task of Liberals today, according to Hayek, is to just steer the party away from the freedom of socialistic ideas and hyper-rationalists who have been arbitrarily introduced into liberalism. It is for this reason that Hayek defines liberalism with reservations. First of all, it is necessary to recover the origins of liberalism: “Whiggism is the correct name for the ideas I believe in. As life goes on, I realize that I am nothing but an unrepentant Old Whig, emphasizing the word Whig”.65 On the one hand, Hayek rejects the twentieth century on an ideological level, wanting to recover the “old liberalism”; but on the other hand, he rejects it from the point of view of political and social practice, coming to negate many of the democratic gains obtained during the twentieth century. The most striking case is that of universal suffrage, which the Austrian philosopher still rejected in 1960. Moreover, it was significantly noticed by many of his critics, especially those in Italy,66 in exactly the same publication in which Hayek decided to write about his distance from conservatism. 55

In The Constitution of Liberty, after noticing that “Equality before the law” is what unites traditional liberalism and the democratic movement, Hayek already felt the need to point out that “equality before law” does not require that all adults should have the right to vote, as the “ideals of democracy” could be better served if all civil servants were to be excluded “along with those who benefit from public charity”.67 These theoretical statements were “coded” over twenty-five years later in Law, Legislation and Liberty, the work in which the Austrian philosopher speaks out against the modern Western democracies. They were guilty, in his eyes, of encouraging the tyranny of the majority through policies of social justice that punish productive minorities and serve the interests of the current political majorities. To combat this inadequacy of modern “totalitarian democracy”, Hayek (in 1986!) proposes and describes in minute detail a constitutional system, which he calls Demarchy, in which universal suffrage is not contemplated and the privilege and the opportunity to establish the laws and the control of governmental activity is reserved for a minority of individuals.68 Not to mention the fact that Hayek, by building a constitutional system from scratch and establishing more privileges and discrimination between citizens, contradicts all of his most important theories (anticonstructivism, spontaneous order, individual liberty, the law that is really such, only if general and valid for all, by abstract considerations) and instead opts for the reaction which was created by the process of democra56

tization and social justice and which characterizes the Western countries in the twentieth century.69 His strong bond to the “old liberalism” clearly emerges in his political proposals, making anachronistic comparisons to the evolution that the liberal theory itself has experienced in the twentieth century.70 But above all a “central flaw” emerges that undermines the foundation of the solidity of Hayek’s political theory: namely the lack of a “substantial concept of individual rights,” which is not reflected in the practice of the society, foreshadowed by the philosopher and this remains as more of an ideal.71 If this lack of substantiality and universality, in theory (and practice) of freedom could be and in fact was tolerated without problems in liberal societies of the nineteenth century, it is difficult to accept that in the second half of the last century certain achievements had been taken for granted for some time. For an author who wants to call himself liberal and, above all, who wants to distance himself from the definition of “conservative”, it is considered quite a serious setback to befall the theory of Liberty which now in the twentieth century is meaningless, if it does not meet the parameters of ‘”universality” and “solidity”.72 If the theory of freedom constitutes the fulcrum of any liberal sanction, it is clear that theorizing a form of freedom that excludes a good number of individuals from the enjoyment of rights granted to others, like the example made by Hayek, constitutes a step back in the transformations that characterized contemporary liberalism. 57

That is why authors – and especially those who study the historical evolution of liberalism – have no difficulty affirming Hayek’s membership to the rank of the conservatives (this is called “libertarian or individualistic conservatism”), that is, to the ranks of those, nostalgic for the classical liberalism, that at some point felt frustration over the fall, as well as those who felt passion towards anti-communism and who primarily worked to reject the “new liberalism” of the New Deal, opened by state intervention and an engineering policy in view of a more pervasive social justice.73 Weighing up the ideas present in our research, we can see that the distance that the philosopher keeps from conservatism is not very convincing, but if we rely on the definition of “reactionary thought” which is present in the unexpected and liberal Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (a reactionary is one who “not only resists change, but also tries to turn back the clock to regain some sort of ancient social order”74) we must conclude that Hayek is something more than just a conservative. His ideas have been defeated for the greater part of his life. Nevertheless, he was the leader of the long march that led the neoliberal ideas towards the conquest of the contemporary world. In the work of this author we can find the fundamentals that led neoliberalism to be regarded as the exclusive guarantor of freedom.75

58

7. MARX AND POPPER: WHY WE CAN’T BUT DEFINE OURSELVES AS MARXISTS, TOO In view of all this, it is crystal clear that the path for freedom has been winding and conflicting, full of contradictions that prevent us from attributing the fatherhood to the sole liberal tradition, but we cannot deny the fundamental contribution that it has provided to the ever increasing expansion of the possibilities and rights among humankind. Even more so, considering that liberalism itself cannot be framed in the same manner as a monolithic and steady in time reality because a vast and essential part of it managed to seize many of the theoretical and social issues conducted by the democratic and socialist traditions, inside of a certainly conflicting dialectic debate but one that was also considered to be prolific and clever. In short, in our West the freedom of the contemporaries is the daughter of liberalism as much as that of Marxism. Or rather, the freedom and democracy of our countries have emerged from the dialectic clash between liberalism and Marxism. We would like to try and prove how Marx is part of western DNA, how his theories and his work have contributed to sketching the liberal democracies in which we live. Furthermore, we would like to try this short operation of comparing him with the person who

is almost unanimously considered the most significant critic of Marx and everything that refers to him. We are talking about Karl Popper. Yes, because he, who was so successful in showing the limits and contradictions of Marxist thought, was also the one who helped place Marx in the pantheon of Western masters, at times explicitly, at times in a more subtle way. For example, just think of the remarkable differences with authors like Mises and Hayek. The first referred to “the sociologist and philosopher of history” Marx as to an author “that never represented anything more than a skilful agitator that wrote for the daily needs of his party”, while Hayek wanted to dispel the “supreme myth”, that true “legend” that tells about the “worsening of the working classes consequently after the birth of capitalism (or ‘industrial system’)”. Who has never heard of “the horrors of the first capitalism?”, asked Hayek contentiously, according to whom this production system had, instead, gradually but constantly, improved the condition of every human being, belonging to any social class whatsoever.76 Popper distanced himself completely from these ideas, at first recognizing that precisely Marx as a sociologist has “opened our eyes and made them sharper”, to the point that “returning to a pre-Marxist social science is inconceivable”; thus fully recognizing that, in Marx’s time, capitalism was characterized by “ruthless exploitation”, thus letting “unrestrained capitalism” make way to the “political interventionism”, modifying western societies so much as to consider 60

it completely “unreasonable to identify the economic system of modern democracies with the system that Marx called ‘capitalism’”.77 The distance between Popper’s and Hayek’s positions is evident: Popper recognized the conditions of the ruthless exploitation in which the workers lived in Marx’s time and rejoiced at the changed conditions and times, while Hayek sustained that capitalism had improved the workers conditions since the beginning and still in the second half of the twentieth century offered a constitutional system, different from democracy, through which one could actually exclude diverse social brackets from the voting right, such as all the public sector workers (including, one may think, university professors).78 Not to mention the huge importance of the fact that Popper, in Open Society, used precisely the ten programmatic points explained by the German thinker in the Manifesto to mark the difference between the exploiting capitalism described by Marx and that of the second half of the twentieth century: he could not but notice how many points were and are entirely fulfilled in western democracies, such as the progressive or proportional tax on income, State controlled public mass media and transportation, the increase of businesses and means of production belonging to the government or shared by it, free education for all children in public schools and the abolition of child labour in the inhumane and terrible forms that took place in Marx’s time.79 We should not forget the great commitment lavished by Marx to all that could lead to universal suffrage and 61

to the expansion, broadly speaking, of democracy, as one can easily infer from his political biography: at the chartist’s side in the fifties, against the despotic rule of Napoleon III with hundreds of articles, against the Caesarism and its instrument, the Prussian state; strongly in favour of the antislavery North during the American Civil War (1861-65), in favour of the Paris Commune (1871) and everything it represented, from the election of the governing body through universal suffrage to the economic emancipation of work. So, an author, the philosopher from Trier, whose two separate ideas of “democracy” and “communism”, annotated Maximilien Rubel, defined two stages of the same movement, made of political revolution (the working class conquering democracy) and social revolution (the abolition of social classes and political and government power).80 For this reason Luciano Canfora’s note is most relevant and enlightening; as a historian, he suggested contextualizing the period in which Marx spoke, pointing out that “the conquest of democracy” by the proletariat, in those years, meant as a conquest for “the great majority of population: that’s why equal suffrage is so important, and that’s why it is so feared on the other side”.81 And neither we can think, to complete the picture, of excluding women from Marx’s overall project, women who didn’t benefit from the same rights as men did in every liberal country and who will have to wait for John Stuart Mill to read of a liberal speaking in their favour. 62

In fact, you just have to open the works of Marx and Engels to read the revolutionary pages where were the two authors talked about women’s condition of enslavement in the bourgeois family, in which the wife is treated as “a mere production instrument”: it is precisely this woman’s condition that the two revolutionary authors wanted to abolish, together with many other situations, through the communist revolution. This is because the emancipation of women is “a measure of the universal emancipation”.82 It is no coincidence that, exactly a century later, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, although criticizing the point of view of the two revolutionaries, considered to be too strict, recognized the lesson of “historical materialism” to explain that the subject situation of women is a consequence of the economical structure of society, that “domestic tyranny” to which she is subdued is a form of “social oppression” that is a plain consequence of “economical oppression”: women’s condition, as it happened to workers, black slaves and colonized natives, was that of “an eternal child”, compelled to accept the truth and the laws without arguing, proposed usually by other men in a paternalistic and hypocritical way.83 But let’s go back to Popper. We already reported that he certainly recognized the high sociological value of historical materialism, even if, and we are going to see it with a concrete example, he focused exclusively on the second feature of the dichotomy, forgetting that adjective (“historical”) which actually represents the sinew of Marxist theory, that was primarily theory of, and for, his time. 63

A mistake, the one made by Popper, that happens when he focuses on what he believes to be Marx’s great limit, for which he thought of considering him a “false prophet”: to think that those same historical results, that, according to Popper, occurred in a gradual and peaceful way (sic!), happened because of a violent revolution made by cohesive proletariat that would have completely undermined the acknowledged order and established a communist society. “I believe that political violence is” – wrote Popper – “the most harmful element in Marxism politics perspective”. According to Popper, violence could be justified only if used to establish a democratic government where it is absent, a government whose main characteristic is that of being peacefully replaced by people through free general election. Still in 1988, in an essay specifically dedicated to democracy, Popper wrote that it is worth it “to fight and die” (and thus, as a logical conclusion, to kill, I would add)84 even for a flawed form of democracy. Now, the heavy contradiction stands out precisely if you focus on the “historical” feature (the adjective removed by Popper): in fact, one just needs to think what democracy was there in the liberal states in Marx’s time to understand that there were more than strong reasons to imagine actions, even violent ones, with the purpose of confirming those conquests in democracy that the liberal governments of the time were far from granting spontaneously! Not only the great philosopher Bertrand Russell recognised that Marx’s ideas formed in an age when 64

democracy was still far from appearing, but even scholars of the connection between capitalism and democracy acknowledged that, for example, in England, the electoral reform occurred the same year as the publication of the first volume of Capital (1867), granting the right to vote to more or less 8% of the population, while still in 1911 less than 30% of the adult male population could vote, and this was true for all the countries run by liberal governments.85 To be rigorous through and through, we should call into question also the charge of “false prophet” that Popper addressed to Marx, that is to say the significant critique directed at Marxist theory, incapable of understanding the development “rules” of the capitalistic system, according to the Austrian philosopher. In fact, if the mature capitalism described by Marx should have caused recurrent recessions, due to an increased addiction to technology and to the development of great societies of almost monopolistic nature, it seems that a capitalistic form, very much in accordance with the old Mole’s intuitions, has established itself as never before. Now, it would be wrong and even silly to require one to start from these factual data to overturn the historical opinion about the defeat of Marxism by the hands of liberalism. But I think that without a doubt, up against the explained considerations, it is necessary to be more cautious when mentioning no less than the category of “breakdown”86 when speaking of Marx. If the idea of breakdown, in fact, involves that of a complete failure without appeal, it does not seem the case 65

with the old Mole (while we could discuss a lot about his imitators), capable as few others to put his own time under a discriminating lens and develop political and social solutions, most of which have been extensively performed. Thus giving an unavoidable contribution to the western civilization photo album. But this is the past history of the West. It is useful to understand that the political government on the economy, and thereby democratic control of the market, are necessary conditions for the development of an effective freedom from which no one is potentially excluded. Today, the neoliberal ideology is bringing back the clock and our societies. The return to an out of control capitalism has produced inequalities and injustices because it defends the particular interests of the strongest and has no reason to consider public interest, causing a clear separation between the increase in profits for the benefit of the few and the growing unease of most people. It is no coincidence that the most careful scholars argue that political control of capital, but also economic and financial transparency, have to do with the protection of democracy.87 History, especially the history of the West often removed, has already shown us this film. A film in which there is no happy ending. The problem is that history has few students willing to take advantage of her hard lessons. In this way, we are condemned to relive a past that we should not see anymore. Because history does not end, but continues to give lessons that man ignores at his own expense. 66

NOTES

J. Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1963, II, §§ 27 and 44; J. Gray, Liberalisms. Essays in Political Philosophy, Routledge, London – New York 1989, p. 224; L. Jaume, La liberté et la loi. Les origines philosophiques du libéralisme, Fayard, Paris 2000, pp. 140-8. 2 B. Constant, De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes, in Id. De la liberté chez les modernes. Écrits politiques, Hachette, Paris 1980, pp. 599 and 409; C. Audard, Qu’est-ce que le libéralisme. Éthique, politique, société, Gallimard, Paris 2009, pp. 107-118; F.P. Benoit, La démocratie libérale, PUF, Paris 1978, p. 252. 3 L. Von Mises, Liberalism. A Socio-Economic Exposition, Institute for Human Studies, New York 1978, p. 188. 4 F. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, Routledge & K. Paul, London 1978, p. 142. 5 D. Losurdo, Controstoria del liberalismo, Laterza, Roma – Bari 2005, p. 340. 6 J. Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1963, I, § 137; K. Marx and F. Engels, Werke, Dietz, Berlin 1955-1989, vol. XVIII, p. 136 and vol. XI, p. 392 (footnote). 7 J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration, in Id., Political Writings, Penguin Books, London – New York 2003, p. 202. 8 B. Constant, Oeuvres, Gallimard, Paris 1957, pp. 1105, 1146 and 1149. 9 J. Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Id., The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XVIII, University of Toronto Press – Routledge, Toronto – London, 1977, pp. 274-5. 1

Ibid., p. 219. Ibid. 12 J. Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government, Dent & Sons, London 1972, p. 256. 13 Ibid., p. 280. 14 Ibid., p. 281. 15 Ibid., pp. 283-5. 16 Ibid., p. 283. 17 K. Marx and F. Engels, Werke, Dietz, Berlin 1955-89, vol. I, p. 590; C. Audard, Qu’est-ce que le libéralisme. Éthique, politique, société, Gallimard, Paris 2009, pp. 196-211; D. Losurdo, Controstoria del liberalismo, Laterza, Roma – Bari 2005, cap. VII; P. Ercolani, Il Novecento negato. Hayek filosofo politico, preface by Domenico Losurdo, Morlacchi, Perugia 2006, capp. III and VII. 18 K. Marx and F. Engels, Werke, Dietz, Berlin 1955-89, vol. XXIII, p. 425. 19 F. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge & K. Paul, London 1960, p. 542; P. Ercolani, Contro le donne. Storia e critica cel più antico pregiudizio, Marsilio, Venezia 2016, pp. 178-182. 20 J. Locke, Political Writings, Penguin Books, London – New York 1993, p. 196; K. Marx and F. Engels, Werke, Dietz, Berlin 1955-89, vol. II, pp. 229 and 400. 21 D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Abacus, London 1998, pp. 265-6; J. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, Norton & C., New York – London 2002, p. 21; F.P. Bénoit, La démocratie libérale, PUF, Paris 1978, pp. 230-6. 22 H.J. Chang, Bad Samaritans. The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2008, pp. 17 and 219; D. Losurdo, Marx e il bilancio storico del Novecento, La Scuola di Pitagora, Napoli 2009, chap. II-3 and II-4; P. Ercolani, La storia infinita. Marx, il liberalismo e la maledizione di Nietzsche, Introduction by Luciano Canfora, La Scuola di Pitagora, Napoli 2011, I-I, 10 and II-III, 5; P. Ercolani, Liberalismus II, in 10 11

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Haug W. F. et al. (eds.), Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (HKWM), Argument – Verlag, Hamburg 2013. 23 D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford – New York 2005, p. 152. 24 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1971, pp. 15 and 141; Id., Social Unity and Primary Goods, in Id., Collected Papers, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1999, p. 364. 25 M. Canto Sperber and N. Urbinati, Le socialisme libéral. Une antologie: Europe-États-Unis, Esprit, Paris 2003, pp. 189-190. 26 T. Mermall, Introducción biográfica y crítica a J.O.Y. Gassett, La rebelión de las masas, Clásicos Castalia 1998, pp. 26-7; J. Ortega y Gasset, El hombre y la gente, Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1958, p. 312. 27 J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan, London 1949, p. 34; Id., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (30 vols.), Macmillan, London 1971-89, vol. XXI, pp. 59-60. 28 L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, Oxford University Press, New York 1964, p. 108. 29 Ibid., pp. 17, 27 and 41. 30 K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1974 (fifth revised edition), p. 370; Id. (1945), The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1973, vol. II, p. 126. 31 K. Minogue, The Liberal Mind, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis 2001, p. 12; P. Ercolani, Perché Hayek è un conservatore. I due liberalismi e la negazione del Novecento, in “Filosofia politica” (Il Mulino), 2008, 2; Id., Hayek e la parabola del libero mercato. Liberalismo, liberismo e globalizzazione, in “Fenomenologia & Società” (Rosenberg & Sellier), 2008, 2. 32 F.A. von Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. 119-20; L. Robbins, Politics and

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Economics, London, Macmillan, 1963, p. 92, both confirmed that “the notion of freedom of Hayek, in the wake of the great liberal thinkers of the past, is developed in terms of the absence of arbitrary coercion” and as such can be understood as “negative”; see. also J. Gray, Liberalisms, London – New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 90. For a more complete discussion of these issues, as well as a complete analysis of the political philosophy of Hayek, refer to P. Ercolani, Il Novecento negato. Hayek filosofo politico, Perugia, Morlacchi 2006. 33 E. Burke, Works, 16 vols., London, Rivington, 1815-27, v. VI, p. 216, author celebrated by Hayek, had already said that it should not be the state which intervenes in the physiological, social inequalities produced from acting, because one would have thought it should be, “the wisest, the most experienced and the richest” to guide, enlighten and protect “the weakest, the most ignorant and the least equipped to economic goods “(it is of the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs). 34 A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, in The Glasgow Edition of The Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 6 vols., London, Oxford University Press, 1976 e sgg., v. II,1, p. 540. 35 T. Paine, The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols., New York – London, Putnam’s Sons, 1894, v. I, p. 69. 36 F.A. von Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, cit., p. 134. 37 F. Bastiat, Oeuvres complètes, 7 vols., Paris, Guillaumin, 1862, v. VI, pp. 350-352. 38 Ibid., v. II, p. 177. 39 J. Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. II e III, Toronto – London, ed. by J.M. Robson, University of Toronto Press – Routledge, 1977, v. II, Book II, 1, § 1, p. 199. 40 Ibid., Book II, 1, § 3, p. 207. 41 Ibid., v. III, Book V, 11, § 16, pp. 970-971. 42 Hobhouse rather than Liberalism, Hayek writes in his latest work (The Fatal Conceit. The Errors of Socialism,

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London, Routledge, 1988, p. 110), should have named his volume in 1911, Socialism. It was obvious controversy against a liberal who was leaving the nineteenth-century liberalism ways, which were so loved by Hayek. 43 L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 17. 44 Ibid., pp. 27 e 41. 45 J. Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, in The Early Works 1882-1898, v. III, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990, pp. 301-302. 46 J. Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action, in The Later Works 1925-1953, v. XI, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990, pp. 39-40. 47 See Chapter 1 48 D. Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century (18151914), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1950, p. 194. 49 P. Miquel, Histoire de la France, Paris, Fayard, 1976, p. 426. 50 Cfr. A. Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies, London, Hutchinson & Co., 1972. 51 See G. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, London – New York, Verso, 1994, pp. 282-3. 52 For the analysis of the “exclusion clauses” that have characterized classical liberalism and for the historical reconstruction of the stages that have seen the clash between traditional and radical liberalism (and socialist Jacobin), as well as the approach to democracy only in the twentieth century (and only in Western countries, often at the expense of other people and ethnic groups), I refer to D. Losurdo, Controstoria del liberalismo, Roma – Bari, Laterza, 2005, particularly chaps. X,5 and X,6. 53 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London, Abacus, 2003, p. 270. 54 I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, London, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 8-12. 55 G. Burdeau, Le libéralisme, Paris, Seuil, 1979, pp. 261 e 263. 56 F.A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, London, Routledge, 3 vols., v. 2, p. 103; cfr. D. Losurdo, Marx e il bi-

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lancio storico del Novecento, Gaeta, Bibliotheca, 1993, pp. 10 e 21. 57 F.A. von Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas, cit., p. 134. 58 F.A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1944, p. 9. 59 F.A. von Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1967, p. 221. 60 F.A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960, p. 397. 61 Ibid., p. 398. 62 Ibid., p. 399. 63 Ibid., pp. 400-401. 64 Ibid., p. 408. 65 Pp. 408-409. The indictment of Hayek against liberals of his time, who was guilty of having given up many points to socialists and had in fact distorted the origins of liberalism, is very similar to that, heartfelt, uttered by R. Aron, Démocratie et Totalitarisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1977, p. 442, in respect of Western “decadence”, where now “men and parties that rule, no longer show any attachment to the liberal economy, or to the mechanisms of the market or to the individual ownership of the means of production.” Aron is less combative than Hayek and concludes sadly that “probably European societies must inevitably evolve towards a form of socialism”. 66 Based on the criticism of Hayek from many Italian interpreters in the Introduction of P. Ercolani, Il Novecento negato. Hayek filosofo politico, Morlacchi, Perugia 2006. 67 FA von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, cit., pp. 103 and 105. In a note to p. 443 of the same work, Hayek uses examples to express their longing compared to the days when women were excluded from voting and the same suffrage was limited to “landlords”. 68 I have analysed the issue in detail in P. Ercolani, Il Novecento negato. Hayek filosofo politico, Morlacchi, Perugia 2006, pp. 152-155.

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P. 156. Similar considerations, while highlighting the legal peculiarities of the constitutional system proposed by Hayek, can be found in G. Pecora, Il liberalism anomalo di Friedrich August von Hayek, Soveria Mannelli, Rubettino, 2002, pp. 54 ff. 70 Certainly the complex transformation undergone by the liberalist thought (and practice) and, with it, the contradictory position of Hayek as significant within the same political theory, especially in the twentieth century, cannot be understood if, as often happens in Italy, it indulges in statements that define the philosopher, as one who is “widely recognized as the most liberal theorist of the twentieth century” (L. Infantino, Preface to F. A. von Hayek, Liberalismo, Roma, Ideazione, 1997, p. 7). It is enough to address the critical literature of foreign authors to find that liberals are even far from applying to Hayek’s definition of liberal tout court, let alone that of the “most” exponent of liberalism. 71 J. Gray, Liberalisms. Essays in Political Philosophy, Routledge, London – New York 1989, p. 99. A page after the same, Gray concludes that none of the arguments that Hayek advances in favour of his own conception of freedom “guarantees the universality and the assurance that he seeks in liberal principles”. 72 Anachronism of the old liberalism, the creator of a concept of freedom applies only to the “privileged classes”, and the need, in modern times, to ensure even the “masses” a “concrete freedom” already spoken by R. Aron, Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente, Laffont, Paris 1965, p. 355, an author certainly not be suspected of anti-liberal ideas. 73 A. Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Cambridge (Mass.) – Harvard University Press, London 1998, pp. 282-284. 74 A. Bullock – O. Stallybrass, The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London, Fontana/Collins, 1977, p. 526. 75 D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford – New York 2005, p. 40. 69

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L. von Mises, Socialism. An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Yale University Press, New Haven 1962, p. 460; F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Chicago University Press, Chicago 1967, pp. 204-5 e 1944: 12. Cfr. P. Ercolani, Popper e le aporie dell’Occidente, in «Critica marxista», 2-3, 2005. 77 K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1973, v. 2, p. 82. 78 Cf. P. Ercolani, Il Novecento negato. Hayek filosofo politico, Morlacchi, Perugia 2006: chap. VII. 79 Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1973, v. 2, pp. 140-1. 80 M. Rubel, Marx critique du marxisme, Payot, Paris 1974, pp. 177-8. 81 L. Canfora, La democrazia. Storia di un’ideologia, Laterza, Roma – Bari 2004, pp. 106-7. Up ahead (p. 133), the same author reminds us that the achievement of the political democracy identified with its principle instrument, universal suffrage, is at the core of the “proactive part”, immediately operative, of the Manifesto». 82 K. Marx and F. Engels, Werke, Dietz, Berlin 1955-89, v. IV, pp. 478-479 e v. XX, pp. 242, 583. 83 S. De Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, 2 vols., Éditions du club France Loisirs (avec l’autorisation des Éditions Gallimard), Paris 1990, v. 1, p. 56 and v. 2, p. 231; P. Ercolani, Contro le donne. Storia e critica del più antico pregiudizio, Marsilio, Venezia 2016, pp. 146-147. 84 K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1973, Nota 84: v. 2, p. 151 and K. Popper, After the Open Society. Selected Social and Political Writings, Routledge, London and New York 2008, p. 364. 85 B. Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom. Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism, Henry Holt & C., New York 1919, p. 30 and S. Bowles – H. Gintis, Democracy and capitalism, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1986, pp. 43 and 217-8. 76

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86 87

F. Wheen, Karl Marx, Fourth Estate, London 1999, p. 299, stresses this aspect. T. Piketty, Le capital au XXI siècle, Seuil, Paris 2013, pp. 937-8 e L. Boltanski – E. Chiapello, Le nouvelle esprit du capitalisme, Gallimard, Paris 2011, pp. 681-2; D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford – New York 2005, p. 205, stresses «the profoundly anti-democratic nature of neoliberalism» and speaks of political representation «compromised and corrupted by money power».

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