Liberalism Has Been Exhausted: A Mazzinian Response to Acemoglu

Daron Acemoglu’s new book “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” hits on the right mistakes made by liberals, but misses the point of what the future of politics needs to be.

Immediately after reading his article in Foreign Policy promoting it, I had to read Daron Acemoglu’s latest book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Given the article was peppered with many terms that piqued my interest: “freedom as non-domination”, “soft-communitarianism”, “working-class liberalism”, I was curious to know what the Nobel laureate had to contribute to the raging debate between liberalism and postliberalism. And, as a non-liberal Mazzinian, I wanted to see how much convergence there was between his ideas and mine.

The book obviously comes at a difficult time for liberalism as a political ideal and organizing principle. As faith in liberalism has waned since the mid-2010s, many new, postliberal movements have rushed in to offer new political options. These movements, regardless of position, have put the old, cosmopolitan liberal order on the ropes and many populations are actively seeking some sort of radical change or rectification. While we are not quite at the point where liberalism’s fate has been definitively sealed, it is also true that liberals are no longer in a position where they can ward off postliberal ideas through dismissive rhetoric and ridicule. If liberals want to save liberalism, they need now to engage with postliberal critiques and reform liberalism to make it responsive to today’s problems.

The New Mazzinian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Acemoglu’s proposal to restore faith in liberalism is exactly this engagement. While many liberals have merely presented conservative, nostalgic pleas to return to a rapidly disappearing world, Acemoglu deals with the central challenge head-on: how can liberalism be reformed for today’s political scene to preserve liberal values? For all intents and purposes, Acemoglu’s book is a rallying cry for liberals to move away from liberalism’s atomizing cosmopolitan individualism to emphasize the more bottom-up, community-driven aspects of liberalism, disavowing elitism and social engineering.

To do this, Acemoglu engages with postliberal and non-liberal critiques of liberalism to help arm it against anti-liberal attacks, and to forward a positive form of liberalism for the future. He argues that liberals need to take working-class grievances seriously and reexamine liberal ideas for the postindustrial age in order to build new, extensive cooperation between labor and industry. He christens this new political doctrine working-class liberalism.

What Acemoglu Gets Right

As a Mazzinian and a democratic republican, I think Acemoglu hits on a great number of points that are in exactly the right direction.

In the first instance, Acemoglu opens with a direct call for revising the standard liberal conception of freedom as non-interference, invoking the neo-republican political philosopher Philip Pettit’s formulation of freedom as non-domination. While the liberal conception is to define liberty as purely negative (i.e. the state simply leaving you alone to pursue your own good), the neo-republican view is that this is insufficient. If a benevolent master could one day turn around and restrict your life without recourse, you do not possess true liberty. In order to be truly free, you must be free from all arbitrary will, whether in the public or private sphere. This is a foundation for modern republican thought1.

Here Acemoglu is not merely defending the old liberal ideal, but making a conscious, progressive effort to improve on it. This is a crucial move from a Mazzinian perspective. While many postliberal ideas argue that individual liberty has gone too far and must be restrained, this also means throwing away the progress that liberalism has made for humanity in elevating the sanctity of the individual. For the Mazzinian, the truly progressive postliberal answer ought to preserve individual liberty as the achievement it is while looking to expand on it. It also introduces a much more practical conception of liberty that is more compatible with the blurred lines between state and society today.

Another point that I really liked in the book was Acemoglu’s praise for liberalism’s capacity for social experimentation and community-based learning. Borrowing from John Stuart Mill’s “experiments of living”, Acemoglu constructs an almost romantic vision for communities working together to produce social and economic progress organically2. The idea is that free individuals, being capable of exploring new aspects of truth, produce “material and social betterment” through engaging in trial and error with different norms, policies, and local arrangements. For a Mazzinian, this is an attractive vision since it aligns with our conception of democracy as well as Mazzini’s view on historical progress for humanity.

These two ideas: freedom as non-domination and community-derived social experimentation—are complementary for Acemoglu’s working-class liberalism since the former stresses the need for democratic self-government, while the latter opposes technocracy and social engineering. The critique of this liberal tendency toward aristocratic paternalism is a major part of the book as well. Acemoglu does a very good job in diagnosing and calling out the liberal propensity toward these forms of postdemocratic governance, and he is unambiguous in his view that liberal values are in fact incompatible with this reality3. As an example of his vision for a non-paternalist liberalism, he cites the Irish referendum debate on abortion as a success case for the sort of bottom-up and organic resolution to social problems that can be arrived at through deliberation4.

For the Mazzinian republican, both these ideas are fundamental to how we criticize liberalism. Although we believe that these technocratic tendencies are not a deviation from liberal values but instead a contradiction that emerges in their application, Acemoglu’s effort in arguing for democratic practices against technocracy is greatly appreciated and in line with what we think.

Acemoglu gets a great number of other things right too. His critique of postindustrialism and the erosion of the “industrial compact” between labor and industry that guaranteed shared prosperity that sustained liberal democracy is incredibly valuable. I especially liked the ironic line attributed to British poet laureate John Betjeman: “Think of what our Nation stands for… Democracy and proper drains,” that Acemoglu turns into a positive summary for his political philosophy; I think it works very well.

Community Is a Risky Business

This being said, I finished the book entirely unconvinced of Acemoglu’s working-class liberalism for two key reasons: the first, more conceptual and the second, more existential.

In the first place, Acemoglu is trying to save liberalism from postliberal movements but invokes many postliberal ideals to do so. This is not immediately a logical problem since postliberal does not mean anti-liberal or illiberal. But utilizing postliberal ideas with liberalism instantly creates ideological tensions that he doesn’t quite manage to pull off. Confusingly, he invokes the postliberal ideas that are least likely to work with liberalism, while leaving alternatives unexplored.

The most salient example is his appeal to communitarianism. Communitarianism has become a popular response to liberal atomization since it provides a smooth conceptual solution to connect the individual to the wider community without erasing either. Communitarians see that individuals and societies are bound together through shared culture, rituals, family ties, and traditions that facilitate social life and provide stability. In its more innocuous forms, it is basic common sense and has become an important defense from the postliberal center against extreme individualism. However, it also has a darker side where stifling traditionalism, ethnic identitarianism, and separatism override individual liberty and unity. The former he labels soft-communitarianism—which he favors—while the latter he calls hard-communitarianism—which he rejects. By doing so, he seeks to avoid ontological individualism5 (i.e. the extreme varieties represented in libertarianism) while at the same time preserving normative individualism against a hard-communitarian “cage of norms”6.

While this appears to be a slick, centrist move, there are two important problems with Acemoglu’s appeal to communitarianism. First of all, there is an underlying tension between liberalism and communitarianism that he doesn’t synthesize sufficiently in his working-class liberalism. For instance, while he is sympathetic to working-class concerns about immigration, it is clear that Acemoglu continues to choose the liberal ideals. While the communitarian cautions against mass immigration that is society-altering, Acemoglu believes that the economic benefits of immigration—filling in labor shortages, growth, and wages—still outweigh these concerns on balance7. Consequently, when push comes to shove, the liberal values will almost always win out in working-class liberalism, making the communitarian element seem more superficial, rather than doing actual ideological work. The irony is that in trying to avoid the same ontological individualism as libertarianism, Acemoglu would be forced to pick liberal values over communitarian ones because of individualism’s greater ontological weight.

Second of all, regardless of how soft it is, by elevating community to a more salient position ideologically speaking, Acemoglu opens himself up to the darker aspects of communitarianism anyway. The issue with communitarianism is that, despite safeguards, it will invariably end up in its harder forms in times of crisis, becoming more ethnic and identitarian. No matter how loose you make it, you cannot remove communitarianism’s propensity toward group egotism and separatism, making them qualitatively similar to nationalism. Acemoglu, to his credit, tries to resolve this problem by cementing the “right to exit”8 as a fundamental principle of his soft-communitarianism, but it does not take away the overriding nature of communitarianism’s community for community’s sake. Indeed, in multicultural societies, this has led, paradoxically, to the rights of the group being justified with the same language as the rights of individuals, leading to sectarianized societies9. Acemoglu’s appeal to communitarianism is therefore an incredibly risky conceptual move.

The more obvious alternative for Acemoglu (already borrowing from Pettit’s republican concept of liberty) would have been some form of civic republican patriotism—like Mazzinian democratic nationality. Democratic nationality could have preserved his liberal and democratic values better than communitarianism, whilst also maintaining those conservative insights about society that he derives from it. Republican patriotism fosters a sense of unity and identity that is not exclusionary in an extreme way, and allows for the type of immigration that Acemoglu promotes by providing a confident, unambiguous route for integration. In this conception, an immigrant faces a conditional barrier to entry but is offered a reasonable path for joining through civic participation, which satisfies both sides.

Symptoms of an Exhausted Principle

The second reason why I remain unconvinced is because I believe that liberalism as a political conception has simply run its course. What I mean by this is not that liberalism has failed in the sense of it being wrong, but that it no longer has the capacity to generate political progress. Given this, unlike Acemoglu, I place myself firmly on the postliberal side of the debate.

This point is based on the Mazzinian conception of history. Mazzini believed that humanity progressed gradually through the fresh adoption of revolutionary principles. Each of these political principles, he argued, produced some moral and material advancement, and would add to the already-accumulated achievement as a non-utopian form of progress. For instance, while Mazzini fiercely opposed monarchy, he recognized that a unified monarch achieved progress through succeeding the old feudal societies by creating the nation-state10.

However, eventually, despite its good, monarchism also became exhausted and consequently produced its own problems: tyranny, personal power, and nationalistic expansion. These were then juxtaposed against the new revolutionary principle of liberal democracy, which emerged in the 19th century. What happens when a principle runs out of steam is that the malignancies already inherent start to stack up. While liberalism has emphasized the importance of individual emancipation, it has also constructed a political and social paradigm based on maximizing self-interest.

Given self-interest’s limitation to material resource, contradictions in conflicting individual interest have resulted in many economic and social problems. Globalization has produced vast inequality and economic disruption in many countries; mass migration has encouraged many people to uproot themselves from their homes to new societies where they have not been properly integrated; and the establishment of international institutions has taken a worryingly postdemocratic character. Social problems, such as general antisocial solipsism and rampant consumerism, have become more common and have caused enormous harm to mental health and social cohesion. All of these have been the direct products of liberal principles, not just liberal policies, and to resolve them will require basing a new political conception on something other than just self-interest.

But since 2016, we have been witnessing the vague development of a new principle. Due to financial crises, immigration, and postdemocratic creep, many Western societies have been in open rebellion against self-interest as a principle, in favor of something that resembles home or belonging. While often crude and ill-defined, the arguments based on immigration, sovereignty and, to some degree, trade, are abstract articulations of this new principle and have essentially created the ongoing debate between liberalism and postliberalism. The interregnum that began in 2016 is an argument over two questions: can liberalism be saved? And, if not, what should succeed it?

Let’s Try Something New

However, though I admit it is not a closed question, I think it is very likely that liberalism has been exhausted, and I believe that it is time we find a new postliberal doctrine that can help humanity progress forward.

The problem is that the postliberal debate today has been overwhelmingly dominated by the right. While there have been centrist, communitarian options offered by thinkers like Michael Sandel and David Goodhart, the postliberal political world is predominantly vulgarist and national conservative. But this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case since postliberal—as a neutral descriptive term—should stand for any political movement that seeks to move beyond liberalism, and could stand for a progressive vision of it. However, this does require a thinker to accept—even just abstractly—that this new principle of belonging is not just a valid grievance, but inherently corrective. And unfortunately, many on the current liberal-left are not enthusiastic about that, since it requires thinking more critically about immigration, cosmopolitanism, and self-interest, which come in direct conflict with liberal values. It also doesn’t help that the right is generally more open to postliberal principles11.

The goal of what might be called progressive postliberalism is to build a political doctrine that preserves the good of liberalism while accepting the new principle. Whether intentional or not, this is what Acemoglu has been essentially doing, though he falls short by not accepting the new principle. In trying to connect the two competing political paradigms, Acemoglu is trying to mix oil and water. He seems to be trying to hold onto the old world while straddling the new.

This is why I think he is arguing in the right direction, but it is also why I think his working-class liberalism is a bit of a conceptual mess. While he has borrowed insights from non-liberal and postliberal ideas, he is still fundamentally clinging onto the liberal principle of individual emancipation (which, as I have argued, ultimately rests on self-interest) and, as a consequence, working-class liberalism will likely end in the same situation we are in today. We need, therefore, to try something new, rather than trying to revive something old.

For me, a genuinely progressive postliberal response is already present in Mazzinianism. This is because Mazzinians accept the principle of belonging but interpret it in a progressive way. Unlike right-wing nationalism, Mazzinianism does not argue that the nation is the end, but a means toward humanity, providing a better basis for continuing liberal internationalism in a postliberal age. Mazzinian emphasis on class collaboration through democratic republicanism underpins the need for unity over conflict today. Mazzinianism strives to create a society based on nationality and overrides class- or sect-based interests through duties rather than the mere exercise of rights. I believe that Acemoglu’s working-class liberalism would be better served if it transformed itself into something like this type of democratic republicanism, and would address the key issues much better, especially the question of unity over ideological sectarianism.

All in all, Acemoglu presents a genuinely interesting artifact for how the evolution of political thought is occurring in our time. While I do not believe working-class liberalism is a solution, the ideals are latent within it are moving toward the new paradigm. The result is conceptually in limbo between these two worlds, but it still has plenty of good in it. Acemoglu titled his Foreign Policy article with: “Liberalism is worth saving. Here’s how.” The purpose of this essay has been to respond directly to this point with: “Liberalism is exhausted. Let’s try something new”.