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After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State.

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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.

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.

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.

This book is poignant and disturbing. It shows how modern liberals have created the "managerial state," which is author's euphemism for the "welfare state." This state has been expanding throughout the twentieth century, reaching frightful proportions. What is most troubling is not its recurring inefficiency, but rather the power that the state has acquired vis-a-vis society. The pretext is protection of the individual set adrift in the industrial society, the rhetoric is that of compassion and assistance, the reality--an ever more powerful state that crushes individuality.

The author notes how cunning the proponents of modern liberalism have been by not talking about things as they are and substituting the rhetoric of compassion for a plain statement of facts. "The uninterrupted exercise of its power may depend upon not talking plainly about such unclean matters. Yet, it is worth the effort to look beyond euphemism to see how political power is exercised. Behind the mission to sensitize and teach 'human rights' lies the largely unacknowledged right to shape and reshape people's lives. Any serious appraisal of the managerial regime must consider first and foremost the extent of its control--and the relative powerlessness of its critics." This assessment is right on target.

This book is written primarily for other scholars and graduate students, and the reading can get dense and heavy on proper names and references to ideological doctrines. Yet, the political bias in academia being what it is, I am a university press agreed to publish this book. I found this book perceptive, erudite, and enjoyable. Pick it up today.

~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 and trace its developments, and understand the present phenomenon of the managerial regime.

Gottfried offers a thoughtful analysis of the Populist Right's opposition to the therapeutic state in Europe and America. He gives a realistic look at the movement's strengths and weaknesses. He also makes it clear that there is resignation of a sizable part of those ostensibly on the 'Right' to the therapeutic managerial regime. For example, in the United States,the neoconservative camp composed largely of northeastern Catholics and former radical Jews from the Left, feel that the post-New Deal therapeutic state shouldn't be toppled, but we should merely utilize its machinery for purportedly 'conservative' ends. William J. Bennett endeavored to do just this as the national education czar. Since neoconservatism is the mainstream current on the American Right, we may infer the surrender of the American Right ipso facto to the managerial state. Gottfried remains somewhat dismal about hopes for mounting opposition to the managerial regime. In his essay, "Reconfiguring the Political Landscape," published in Spring of 1995 in Telos, Gottfried notes, "The restoration of genuine self-government requires structural decentralization and, above all, the derailing of the present political class. Without that, it is unlikely that there will be any accountability from insulated public administrators, rotating collectors of patronage, or judicial social engineers." Thus a campaign to dismantle the managerial state would require removing the entrenched elite, perhaps impeaching and replacing judicial activists on the bench and outright dismantling of various bureaucracies of the managerial state. Such a campaign would run concomitant with a restoration of the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. A concomitant devolution revolution would devolve power back to the states and the people. Such a political change would require Americans to rediscover the principle of subsidiarity, which is to say, a limited government that governs closest to home and closest to the constituent, in the end, governs the best.

_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 therapeutic role to the elite. Such a case is particularly emblematic of Adorno's post-World War II studies in the "authoritarian personality". With the rise of political correctness in the university system, coupled with a racist national policy of affirmative action, which can be arbitrarily extended, education has been subverted and all means of dissent have been stifled. Amazingly however, the populace does not support generally the goals of the elite, which has led many who are particularly disturbed by New Class social engineering to appeal to direct democracy. Gottfried also shows how populist resistance to the managerial state has built up and found expression in movements both in the United States and Europe. For example, Gottfried cites former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who appealed to the tradition of an isolationist, nationalist "Old Right" as well as traditional Catholicism, and the National Front of Le Pen in France which sought to deal effectively with the immigration problem for France. Also, Gottfried notes that "postmodernist rightists" such as Alain de Benoist in France successful criticize the current state, despite disgusting attempts by postmodernist leftists such as Jacques Derrida to entirely censor them. Indeed, Gottfried provides several examples of precisely how "anti-hate legislation" is used as a weapon of tyranny by the elite managerial class to maintain their power. Unfortunately, while populist resistance does exist, it has also been severely marginalized. Gottfried seems unable to fully predict the future of the managerial state, though he obviously supports populist resistance and secessionary movements. One issue that remains important though I believe is not fully dealt with by Gottfried is how to rectify calls for a completely free market with cultural conservativism and restoration of tradition. Afterall, a completely free market would presumably have no restrictions on such things as drugs, abortions, pornography, or prostitution, things which would have to be prevented by appeals to traditional morality and religion. Also, it is difficult to see how such a thing could avoid falling into outright barbarism. In sum, however, while the future for democratic liberalism and self-determination looks bleak, given the rise of an elite class who intend to enforce their values on all citizens, populist resistance is possible, and is perhaps the only way towards counter-revolution.

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.

*After Liberalism* is the best treatment yet published of the historical deformation of liberalism -- the replacement of bourgeois classical liberalism by the managerial socialism of modern liberalism. Anyone interested in how this substitution came to pass should read Professor Gottfried's book. In fact, reading it twice would be a good idea. This is a very compact, carefully constructed work that rewards close examination.

Some of the reviews of this book have been very far off the mark. At no point does Gottfried resort to cheerleading for anybody here; he maintains a critical distance from his material throughout. He analyzes the weaknesses as well as the strengths of conservative and populist thinkers and movements, while also giving left-liberals and postmodernists their due. Those who come to this book looking for partisan affirmation are going to be sorely disappointed. *After Liberalism* is, above all, scholarship, not special pleading.

The initial thrust of the book (the revisioning of the term "liberal") opens historical criticism for many set definitions that we now take for granted. Although liguistical studies and history have fallen by the wayside at the University level in favor of monetarily profitable programs (eg. business and pre-professional)Gottfried begs the reader to consider the danger in dismissing classical studies. The book is well researched and draws from a wealth of information translated by the author from various languages. Anyone not disturbed by this book, whatever their political affiliation, has fallen for the revisionism that Gottfried exposes.

Warmed over Weber. The usual "nice" distinctions between liberalism and democracy, and the endorsement of populism a la the neocons and Leo Strauss. You can almost mistake it for a postmodern lefty critique. And in many ways there are overlaps in the conservative agenda which celebrates localism and tradition, and the post-modern left which celebrates the same thing under different and catchier names. But there's a few early tip-offs that the map given in the intro is not the territory covered in the book.

There's the apparent acceptance of the bad science behind the "The Bell Curve" coming early on. It seems like muddy thinking or maybe just a slip. But then there's the discussion of Carl Schmitt's ideas. Gottfried's discussion of Schmitt makes him seem like an interesting theorist, but he never mentions Schmitt was a poster boy for the Nazis of the "good intellectual." Not an automatic disqualifier, but still something Gottfried should have mentioned. Then, the very careful discussion of Le Pen. Which I enjoyed and thought had some good insights, but still was not completely honest in its assessment of Le Pen.

I picked up this book partly because of the positive blurb by John Lukacs on the cover (and also quoted here I see.) I like John Lukacs as an historian and read his autobiography. One of the things I was attracted to in Lukacs was that he (as a European conservative) truly despised Reagan's policies.

I can see therefore why Lukacs would like some parts of this book, especially Gottfried's characterization of the therapeutic managerial state as an entity that both the Left and Right endorse and use to advance their agendas. In Reagan's case, the welfare part of the welfare state was squeezed, and the military-industrial part of the managerial state was given a big bonus. In either case, he used the mechanism of the managerial state to enforce his will regardless of ends -- the means of the managerial state is the same.

There's some thought-provoking stuff in here, and I appreciated the attempt to find some larger framework to discuss the biggest problem confronting politics today -- that no one is very interested anymore, a problem which Gottfried I think lays properly at the door of the managerial state. And I appreciated that he found some of the old lefty sociologists and historians of value such as C. Wright Mills and Christopher Lasch. But all in all except for the one insight of the existence of the managerial state fleshed out with the usual suspects, this is pretty thin gruel. Worth the $...I paid at a used book store, but just barely. If you really want to understand the history and power of the managerial state and its adoption of the therapeutic mode, read Kafka.