After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State. [Paperback]

Paul Edward Gottfried (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Forum Books | Publication Date: September 1, 2001

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 those of their predecessors, aiming as they do largely to combat prejudice, to provide social services and welfare benefits, and to defend expressive and "lifestyle" freedoms. Paul Gottfried does more than analyze these historical facts, however. He builds on them to show why it matters that the managerial state has replaced traditional liberalism: the new regimes of social engineers, he maintains, are elitists, and their rule is consensual only in the sense that it is unopposed by any widespread organized opposition.

Throughout the western world, increasingly uprooted populations unthinkingly accept centralized controls in exchange for a variety of entitlements. In their frightening passivity, Gottfried locates the quandary for traditionalist and populist adversaries of the welfare state. How can opponents of administrative elites show the public that those who provide, however ineptly, for their material needs are the enemies of democratic self-rule and of independent decision making in family life? If we do not wake up, Gottfried warns, the political debate may soon be over, despite sporadic and ideologically confused populist rumblings in both Europe and the United States.

Editorial Reviews

Review

After Liberalism is no angry screed, but a dense, probing work full of insight from the author's seeming encyclopedic knowledge of Western thought. -- World



The central fact of the nineteenth century was the emergence of the working class. The central fact of the twentieth century is the emergence of a managerial "New Class" elite, reshaping all modern democracies in its own interest. Gottfried's is a gold-standard analysis of this extraordinary phenomenon, heavily encrusted with sparkling jewels of intellectual history. -- Peter Brimelow, Senior Editor, Forbes Magazine



Well-written, very learned, and informative. . . . -- Paul Seaton, Society

Review

Although I disagree with the author on many of his points, I strongly recommend it. Gottfried's thesis is refreshingly novel, strongly advanced, and clearly presented. Whether one is interested in the future of the welfare state or family values, or the economic and social future of America, this is a book one wishes to read. (Amitai Etzioni, author of "The New Golden Rule" ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691089825
• ISBN-13: 978-0691089829
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #906,977 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, June 24, 2001

By 

Steve Jackson "stevejackson100atyahoocom" (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State. (Hardcover)

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.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars somber political assessment, February 3, 2000

By 

G. W. Thielman (San José, Californai) - See all my reviews

This review is from: After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State. (Hardcover)

In this sobering analysis of the pluralist welfare state,Professor Gottfried castigates statists for dishonesty inexpropriating the term "liberal" from its original meaning as defending individual property rights and maintaining a civil order with culturally and religiously formed social expectations to marginalizing any dissent from the managerial welfare state and its deliberate undermining of once commonly shared moral precepts. He explains how democracy became subverted from community-based self-rule with restricted participation to a mass plebiscite that votes itself largesse from the public treasury. By diluting civic participation from direct involvement in community affairs to a universal right to vote without further responsibility, cultural insurgents were better able to elect demagogues who could promise something for nothing. And Gottfried warns the reader that despite some populist grumbling, the elitist nomenklatura controlling the levers of political power and media influence operate largely without significant opposition to the goals of transforming society from the independent and culturally homogenous bourgeois classes that honor values of thrift, industry and propriety with a motley crowd of peoples who share no common interest except demands for special favors bestowed by an ever expanding and intrusive centralizing government that deliberately blurs distinctions between state functions and public involvement in civic affairs.

After Liberalism describes the pedigree of traditional liberal political philosophy, which included support of a free market and restraints on undisciplined appetites, primarily by informal enforcement of social and cultural norms. The government was afforded the limited rôles of civil order and martial pursuits. Readers of Adam Smith, John Locke, Alexander Hamilton, Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek are aware of this expropriation of the term "liberal" to mean a therapeutic, intrusive, egalitarian and moral-relativist welfare state envisioned by J. S. Mill and John Dewey among others, although on occasion a natural harmony between democracy and market economy was alleged. Gottfried plumbs the minds of both advocates and critics of custodial pluralism.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Long live the managerial, therapeutic state, November 30, 2001

By 

David C. Moses (Taipei, Taiwan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State. (Paperback)

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.