After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State

by Paul Edward Gottfried

Book Overview

In this trenchant challenge to social engineering, Paul Gottfried analyzes a patricide: the slaying of nineteenth-century liberalism by the managerial state. Many people, of course, realize that liberalism no longer connotes distributed powers and bourgeois moral standards, the need to protect civil society from an encroaching state, or the virtues of vigorous self-government. Many also know that today's "liberals" have far different goals from...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691089825
• ISBN13: 9780691089829
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The Rise of the Managerial State.

_After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State_ by Paul Gottfried is a very powerful and important book which shows specifically how a discontinuity existing between nineteenth century liberalism and its twentieth century version has made possible the rise of a "managerial state". Such a state has made self determination an impossibility, given the rise of a managerial elite to safeguard the public from its own "authoritarian" tendencies. Gottfried traces the corruption and discontinuity in liberalism to such figures as Jean Jacques Rousseau (who felt that man must be "forced to be free"), John Stuart Mill (who ended up advocating socialist policies), and especially John Dewey - all of whom abandoned the free market principles of original liberals. The influence of Dewey among the educational establishment cannot be underestimated. In the twentieth century the two world wars brought out a conflict between three separate types of state: the fascist state of Mussolini (which had "gone beserk" allying itself with Adolf Hitler), the communist state of Josef Stalin, and the modern managerial/welfare state brought about through New Deal legislation by FDR. During the war, the communists joined the side of the Allies and destroyed fascism, only later to die a death of their own subsequently that century. This leaves us today with the managerial state, which seeks to spread a "global democratic faith" throughout the world, while negating and containing the influences of traditional sources of community, particularly religion. The new state is pluralistic and multiculturalist (meaning that any friction that arises between different races and ethnic groups must be curtailed in alignment with the "moralistic" teachings of the managerial elite). Also, the elite seek to redistribute income by means of democracy and stoking the flames of class warfare and envy. In the United States in particular, but even more so in the European nations, the nation has been coopted by elites as a global location for massive immigration from the third world (justified by appealing to the rhetoric of "human rights", invented by the New Class precisely for this purpose). Any attempt at dissent from the dominating paradigm is shouted down as "insensitivity" or worse as outright "fascism" - a term which is consistently abused and used to stigmatize all those who adhere to traditional notions of self government. According to Gottfried, both socialist Left and neoconservative "Right" adhere strongly to these principles regarding them as near articles of faith because they allow the two dominant parties of the elite to maintain their power. Gottfried also points to a Jewish-Puritanical influence which has sought to contain dissent, particularly through moralism (which amounts to preaching an anti-racist, sensitivity-based social gospel), and shows how all beliefs contrary to this value system are deemed to be a product of "mental illness", thereby giving a the

Sobering Assessment of the Therapeutic Managerial State

~After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State~ is a thoughtful and erudite work, which offers a sobering assessment of the therapeutic managerial state. First, Gottfried purports that there is such a thing and explains its evolution from the Welfare State of yesteryears. The managerial state is ruled by an entrenched oligarchy of administrative elites, judicial activists and social engineers. These for the most part unelected and unaccountable elites frequently promote economic and social policies (e.g. runaway immigration; multiculturalism) in sharp opposition to public opinion. They like progressive education proponent John Dewey hope to remold society with an egalitarian ideology, which has the effect of hyperatomizing the individual and tends to dissolute the traditional social bonds of civil society. Thus as conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet points out, the intermediary institutions between individual and state (e.g. community, church, civil associations, etc.) are weakened and destroyed in the process. The elites entrenched in the managerial state are philosophically the bastard children of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill. They warmly embrace Mill's crude utilitarian ethic to legitimize their cow-prodding the citizenry through dubious social experiments and Rousseau's concept of a "general will" where the inept masses are the "forced to be free." They couple their elitism with behaviorist psychology to manipulate the masses. The locus of legitimacy that the elites cling to is the apparent absence of an organized opposition. Thus Gottfried surmises that the traditional polity of nineteenth century liberalism has been displaced by a new regime of administrative elites, plutocrats, judicial activists and social engineers, which collectively subject the population to therapeutic managerial rule. In their world, political opposition is frequently classified as mentally ill or sick while the masses are made victims and dependents of the managerial state. Gottfried points out that what is today called liberalism has no fixed essence. But there is rather a great deal of discontinuity between classical liberalism, which emphasized the need to protect civil society from an encroaching and overbearing state, and conceptualized liberty as a negative prior restraint upon state action as opposed to state-guaranteed positive liberty. Thus, the classical liberalism of Frédéric Bastiat and John Locke is no more. What passes for liberalism in the twentieth century is of an altogether different character, hence the title of the book: "After Liberalism." The modern incarnation of liberalism perhaps may be distinguished by its other connotation of "progressivism," though it does exist in continuity with this movement. Gottfried traces the modern liberalism of today to the nineteenth century liberalism of John Dewey, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. He points out that one must contextualize liberalism to understand an

somber, learned, even-handed, effective

Gottfried methodically deconstructs what he terms the "pluralist ideology" of the Liberal state. He does this by:1.) Denying modern nominal Liberalism (mnL for future reference) the prestigious pedigree that it so often ascribes to itself and tracing it instead to Dewey, who was the first to synthesise the socialist/theraputic/secular/pluralist rumblings of his day into a coherent ideology identifiable as mnL. He painstaikingly and judiciously argues his vision against the competing vision that connects mnL to Enlightenment liberalism through the conversion of J.S. Mill. Fascinating intellectual geneology. Worth reading.2) Eviscerating and exposing the flagrant contradictions of mnL and treating the ideology as a Puritain-Jewish delusion that average citizens, if left to govern themselves, would quickly succumb to their "Authoritarian Personality" disorders and create a fascist state, which conveniently justified a massive re-education campaign and a strong federal Government (headed, of course by an educated Jewish-Puritain elite) to control their minds and lives. Sharp social commentary. Worth reading.3.) Lamenting the passivity of a citezenry that allows itself to be subjected to this rule so that it can keep its entitlements, which Gottfried sees as a tool of the elite to keep itself in power. He laments in the end that the people would gladly hand over all of their Constitutional protections for the sake of keeping the social security checks comming so that they don't have to support their parents. 4.)Tracing the stagnating political climate to the death of scholarship and the general hostility to new ideas, as well as the cultural uprooting of modernity killing any cultural resolve for self-rule. There is no more critical thinking. There is only the infantile politics of crying when Big Government removes its teat, clamering for more teat, crying when one is offended and demanding that Big Government nurture and heal their wounds. We are, in short, infants. The upswing is that the elites are infants with power.

Long live the managerial, therapeutic state

There has been a coup, but it was gradual and bloodless and we did not notice it. Paul Gottfried's "After Liberalism" announces that liberal democracy as we once knew it is now dead, slayed and replaced by the managerial (or administrative), therapeutic state. Of course the words "liberal" and "democracy" still exist, so Gottfried begins by explaining what those words mean in their "postliberal" and "postdemocratic" senses, and how their definitions evolved from the old to the new. Then he introduces the concepts of the managerial state and the therapeutic state.The managerial state emphasizes effective administration by "experts" (judges, public administrators, journalists) at all levels, macro and micro -- see the image on the cover of citizens as marionettes. It is a product of Progressive thought; one might think of John Dewey as its founding father. The moral justification for the managerial/administrative state is that its enlightened expertise offers what abstract concepts such as "natural rights" and "rule by law" could not: freedom from "inequality" and "discrimination." The ideology that places freedom from inequality and discrimination as the highest good is termed "pluralism." Of course, the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution of the United States were not pluralists, as the freedom they sought was not from "inequality" and "discrimination" but from government overreach.The therapeutic state is a product of social psychology, which turned "vice" into "dysfunctional behavior." The therapeutic state takes as its main priority the mental health of its citizens; it considers people who disagree with it to be not wrong but sick, and it engages in behavior and thought modification in the name of "healing." The phenomenon that people may now be arrested for being criminally insensitive is an invention peculiar to the therapeutic state.Intellectual consistency is not necessarily a hallmark of the new managerial, therapeutic state: for example, value relativism is axiomatic in such a state (otherwise discrimination might occur), but such relativism is not to be applied to certain key values like "sensitivity" and "equality." Yet Gottfried emphasizes that intellectual vulnerability does not imply political vulnerability. He neither predicts nor advocates the end of the managerial, therapeutic state (nor does he take up the question of whether people can be happy under such a state), but simply tells us where we are and how we got here. In providing that service, he has produced one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.

Brilliant

Paul Gottfried has written a fascinating work on the intersection between liberalism, democracy, and what is often called the "managerial state." As Prof. Gottfried tells us, many see contemporary democracy as a valueless search to balance competing group interests. One group jockeys against another with the result that a compromise agreeable to no one is reached. While this is a partial truth, it is certainly not the whole truth. Ever since liberalism ceased being liberal and became socialist, a managerial class has been intent on imposing its values on an often unwilling public. It is Prof. Gottfried's goal to analyze this phenomenon and tell us how it came about. There is a particularly profound chapter entitled "In Search of a Liberal Essence." Like Masons tracing their rituals and doctrine allegedly back to the Egyptians, contemporary liberals are intent on showing that their values go back to the Greeks. So John Dewey supposedly becomes a follower of John Locke and Socrates. Of course, free market liberals like von Mises are excluded from the pantheon of true liberals. However, it was Dewey and his fellow progressives who broke with liberalism and whose ideas marked a watershed. It is with them that planning became accepted by almost everyone. Even supposed conservatives do little to dismantle the welfare state once they take power. As Prof. Gottfried states at the end of this chapter, the search for the liberal essence is elusive. Prof. Gottfried's book is not narrowly academic. He provides a number of contemporary examples showing how the managerial elite imposes its values on society. For example, big business and the elites of the Left and the so-called Right tend to support high levels of immigration, although one would assume that their interests would be opposed. This is in spite of the fact that opposition to immigration is quite high among the public at large. Other examples are speech codes on campuses and the attempt to squelch all talk of inherited difference in intelligence as somehow reminiscent of Naziism.This is one the most interesting and well-written books I've come across in a long time.