Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, June 24, 2001
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
somber political assessment, February 3, 2000
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Long live the managerial, therapeutic state, November 30, 2001
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
