Kenneth Minogue and Responsible Individualism

On Liberty and Its Enemies
by Kenneth Minogue, edited by Timothy Fuller
Encounter Books, 2017, 352 pages, $47.99
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To the astonishment of many, conservatism often reflects a sceptical disposition. Conservatives are typically dismissed as unqualified admirers of the past, people who tend to confuse the two notions of “old” and “good”. Such a cliche seems hardly plausible. Among political thinkers worthy of the word, as well as among common people, it’s rare to find any trace of nostalgia for slavery, open-air latrines or therapeutic bloodletting.

Some political thinkers, and common people too, call themselves “conservatives” not so much because they are unaware of the marvels of progress but because they deem a blind faith in the future to be as dangerous as a blind faith in the past. Theirs is not an idolatry of bygone ages, but a kind of prudence. And yet, in a time when enthusiasm gains you followers, being prudent requires true courage.

Kenneth R. Minogue (1930–2013) was a master of fearless arguments for political prudence. Minogue was born in New Zealand and lived with his family in Australia, where he studied at the University of Sydney without completing his degree. He later moved to England, resuming his studies at the London School of Economics, where he was to teach for forty years after Michael Oakeshott invited him back as a lecturer. It was a fortunate intuition. Minogue was a brilliant thinker and a gifted writer. He published fourteen books and more than 280 articles and papers, twelve of which are now properly collected in On Liberty and Its Enemies, which includes a much needed bibliography.

The London School of Economics provided a congenial environment for Minogue. Professors tend to complain about teaching and students, considered by many a duty to pay to pursue their own intellectual interests. From conversations we had during his retirement, I gathered that Minogue missed students. He loved and regarded highly the activity of teaching, which he also practised in the form of public conferences. Not surprisingly, then, he was a passionate defender of the traditional concept of academia, as a place for dispassionate inquiry and reflection where “no one has to come to a conclusion upon which a decision must be based” (The Concept of a University, 1973).

This hardly means that Minogue had no politics and no preference for some rather than other political figures. He certainly did. The editor of a book on Thatcherism, he admired and supported Margaret Thatcher. He exercised a benign influence on contemporary modern conservatism, together with other thinkers who coalesced around Shirley and Bill Letwin in their London salon. Bill Letwin was an economist and an LSE colleague of Minogue’s, Shirley Robin a philosopher who graduated at the venerable Committee on Social Thought at Chicago. In London the Letwins bonded with Oakeshott and became among the dearest of Minogue’s friends. Dinner parties at the Letwins were memorable; their influence on the development of contemporary British conservatism of the Thatcherite blend is a matter historians might profitably explore. Though Minogue was not a “joiner”, he generously helped and supported like-minded think-tanks, in England and abroad, and ended up being President of the Mont Pelerin Society, the group of libertarian scholars established by Hayek in 1947. He died on the way back from a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in San Cristobal, in the Galapagos Islands, in 2013.

Were he to be labelled a “conservative”, Minogue would not have complained. By the time of his death, he was hailed as “one of the world’s foremost conservative thinkers”. But while reading On Liberty and Its Enemies, it is hard not to wonder if perhaps another word is needed. These essays prove that, in a felicitous harmony of thought and character, Ken was an individualist. He, as Timothy Fuller notes in his Introduction, exemplified an approach to life that Oakeshott identified with “a disposition to prefer the road to the inn, ambulatory conversation to deliberation about means for achieving ends, the rules of the road to directions about how to reach a destination”. Minogue reached England by the sea, from Australia, working his way as a sailor. In his adopted country, he climbed the academic profession without the now indispensable requisite of a doctorate. It was a simpler and less formal world. But it took exceptional talent and determination to sail from New Zealand to the LSE, smiling at fainting snobs.

Such distinction between “a disposition to be ‘self-employed’” and “a disposition to identify oneself as a partner with others in a common enterprise” parallels Oakeshott’s dichotomy of non-instrumental rules that regulate interactions among citizens and rules that are instrumental to achieving some particular purposes. The two have merged frequently in the modern state, an ambiguous mix of what Oakeshott labelled the civic and the enterprise association.

For Minogue, the free society is one in which the government acts as a “civic association”, a traffic light of sorts that minimises conflicts among individuals but doesn’t tell them where to go, nor pursues autonomous projects. Our Western societies:

differed from other cultures by the moral practice of individualism, in which the wants and beliefs of individuals are recognised not as disruptive, but as valuable in themselves … Custom, rank and religion continued to be powerful elements in life, but alongside these universals of human experience something new had emerged: the recognition of difference as having a value of its own. — “Individualism and Its Contemporary Fate”

Freer societies see a transition “from status to contract”, as Herbert Spencer never grew tired of pointing out in quoting Henry Maine. In “status” relationships, individuals can’t but occupy the layer of society they’ve been assigned to. In contracts, they’re up to what they signed up for. We can thus say that the fundamentals of freedom lie, for Minogue, in individual responsibility: societies in which individuals can account themselves responsible for their choices are free, societies in which they cannot are not.

Fuller calls Minogue “a friend of liberty and the liberal tradition in its classical sense”, very aptly. This may surprise some readers, because Minogue’s best-known contribution is still The Liberal Mind. In its unforgettable first lines, that book compares liberalism with the story of St George and the dragon. More precisely, liberalism is a “St George, in the guise of Rationality” that:

appeared in the world somewhere about the sixteenth century. The first dragons upon whom he turned his lance were those of despotic kingship and religious intolerance. These battles won, he rested a time, until such questions as slavery, or prison conditions, or the state of the poor, began to command his attention.

But, unlike St George, liberalism couldn’t just be pleased with the mission accomplished, and searched for newer dragons to slay:

He could only live by fighting for causes—the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by.

The morphing of liberalism—that is, the philosophy of limited government—into something different, essentially another justification for ever bigger government, wasn’t unnoticed. Joseph Schumpeter famously observed that “as a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label”. Before him, Herbert Spencer considered that “most of those who now pass as Liberals, are Tories of a new type”, for they contributed to the proliferation of new rules, instead of sticking to the old liberal method of repealing bad ones.

Unlike many St Georgian liberals, Minogue thought a free society was not a destiny, but rather the fragile result of a historical evolution which could have followed other paths. The free society “has emerged from an immensely complex set of social and moral contingencies, and even to ask about its ‘causes’ is hopelessly to simplify the remarkable thing that has emerged” (“The Self-Interested Society”). Freedom developed from clashes between powers, from exchange between countries and peoples, from practices being slowly and inadvertently institutionalised. It wasn’t a simple story, nor the triumphant march of an idea. To get a glimpse of this process, however vague,

we must imagine a vast range of face-to-face encounters between Europeans, over a long period under many varied circumstances, changes of demeanour which sometimes evolved into doctrines or explicit practices—such as chivalry—but which were more often commonly slight variations in manners and moral assumptions, feeding slowly into institutional practices.

Western free societies are places which “found a way of combining ambivalence with social order” (“Individualism and Its Contemporary Fate”). The key feature of the modern European civilisation, as we have seen, is that it allows “the wants and beliefs of individuals” to be recognised “not as disruptive, but as valuable in themselves”. People have different preferences, and these change too. But such changes aren’t considered weakening or wicked: they become an acceptable part of life. Free societies are, for Minogue, associations of individualists: their members can challenge authority, they develop mores of independence and self-reliance, their historical champion is the fictional character Robinson Crusoe, ever-resourceful and eager to fight for his lot against mother nature and fate. And yet these individualists are not atomised individuals; the movement from status to contract changes the nature of social relationships but doesn’t equate with their demise. “Life for a free individual is a sequence not of duties or customs but of commitments: to work, marriage, social arrangements, and so on” (“The Conditions of Freedom and the Condition of Freedom”). Pace its communitarian critics, “the conditional and contractual relations associated with capitalism directly stimulate social association”.

It should be pointed out that what today is vaguely called “social criticism” is an actual part of Minogue’s philosophising. This may shock aficionados of most contemporary philosophers, with their acquired taste for abstractions, as well as other social scientists, for example economists who tend to prefer to deal with the problem of designing good rules of the game, assuming individuals would invariably respond to incentives following cliches of rationality. Minogue didn’t aim to debase the findings of economic science, which he held in great respect. But in his perspective rules and culture are so intertwined that either they’re understood at once, or they’re not. Let me quote again Herbert Spencer, an author Ken didn’t like very much, who noted that “institutions are dependent on character”. According to Spencer, people needed to develop the moral habit of liberty, for a free society to stand. This point, purged of any remaining trace of determinism, is central in Minogue’s thinking. A certain kind of society needs a certain type of character to be sustained, to grow and to flourish. A modern free society, understood as an “association of individualists” where the law is silent more often than not, needs self-reliant individuals to endure. A lavish welfare state typically produces welfare dependence. Such a state of continual reliance on government money may reflect a certain shrewdness in navigating the system, but will also affect habits and mores.

Understanding a certain set of institutions without considering the culture it produces would be meaningless for Minogue: like describing the scene in an opera without referring to the characters.

When it comes to the “conditions of freedom”, Minogue points out that they have “given birth to oppositionality; a new ideal of a rational man as one who exercised an independent judgment on matters which members of his community would previously have foreclosed” (“The Conditions of Freedom and the Condition of Freedom”). This habit of questioning everything, submitting it to close scrutiny, is indeed a feature of Western societies, but it is worth “distinguishing between piecemeal oppositionality which has become an integral part of the modern Western world, and total oppositionality, which construes the modern world as an evil system that must be destroyed”. St George is a glorious dragon slayer, but if he never accepts that the big beasts are gone he may end up slaughtering kids dressed up like dragons for Halloween.

The theme of the fragility of the free society is the real leitmotif of these essays and, perhaps, of all of Minogue’s work. Minogue’s understanding of the history of freedom is in part a cautionary tale for liberals. He dismisses the idea that freedom “is a universal human aspiration”, as “most people have never lived in free societies, nor exhibited any desire or capacity for freedom” (“The Self-Interested Society”). On the other hand, the longing for a status society is a deep-rooted sentiment in human beings. The most interesting feature of the modern, relatively free society, for Minogue, is that it created a new dimension for the moral life: “the individualist as moral agent was concerned not only with the question of whether such-and-such act was right or wrong, but also with what the act might reveal about his own character” (“Individualism and Its Contemporary Fate”). Individualists are people who choose, not people who are chosen by their religion, rank or social order. A free society adds in complexity to the moral life, which is not “any particular moral system, but the daily flow of thoughts and desires we experience as we respond to a sense that there is some right thing we ought to be doing” (“Two Concepts of the Moral Life”).

This perspective informs Minogue’s criticism of democracy, which he developed in The Servile Mind (2010), the last and most powerful of his books. The Australian philosopher came to consider “democratisation” as “the most dramatic of all the corruptions of modernity in which the inherited practice of balance is to be replaced by a single ideal believed to solve all problems”. In a dialectic twist, Minogue pointed out that modern free societies are not only remarkably tolerant, but also (and perhaps for this very reason: for their nourishment of dissent and new perspectives) highly successful, in technological and economic progress. Therefore, they tend to develop an attitude of considering also social prob­lems on par with the sorts of problems that can be solved merely by applying a technique. This is what F.A. Hayek called “constructivism”: the idea that society can be bettered, changed and moulded by all powerful individual minds.

Hayek saw constructivism at work in twentieth-century social engineering: constructivism was the fundamental building block of socialism, both in its authoritarian and its democratic variants. Minogue points out that the “dominant aspiration of our contemporaries” is “perfecting society” (“Two Concepts of the Moral Life”). The sort of attitude Hayek detected with attempted organisation of supplies in the planned economy is now spreading to the concreteness of the lives of individuals.

To engineer moral perfection in society, you need first to identify imperfections which need to be straightened up. This happens through a process by which the achievements of free society are systematically debased. These days “the whole idea of Western civ is assumed to be reactionary and oppressive”, as David Brooks recently observed, and as such it is continuously narrated. Since freedom is understood as “a universal human aspiration”, the fact that it came to be realised in this or in that part of the world appears but a fortuitous event. A fortuitous event it was, Minogue would easily agree, but this precious historical happening would need to be studied and celebrated. Such an attitude is hardly in agreement with the dominant view. The dominant view sees as freedom as a universal right of mankind and, on the contrary, Western history as a collection of abuse and exploitation. Victims of such abuse and exploitation need to be indemnified, for society to be eventually just. Intellectuals (“people who have read a lot of books and take up positions on public affairs”) are taking such a pose, subscribing to dreams of social perfection (“The Intellectual Left’s Treason of the Heart”, originally published in Quadrant).

Thus the “conviction that we suffer from concealed forms of oppression which destroy our freedom unless they are unmasked” (“The Irresponsibility of Rights,” also originally published in Quadrant) becomes widespread. St George ends up confusing liberty with “liberation” of some specific groups from the ties of past oppressions. Attempts at historical understanding are wiped out by what Minogue calls “historical perversity”, a sort of ideological anachronism which compares the past with the standards of utopia.

This is of course incompatible with a parsimonious view of state powers. A traffic-light kind of government should not undertake any specific endeavour—and, most notably, should not dare to believe that perfecting society is at hand.

Morality changes too. “Our basic moral duties today are owed not to those we encounter daily but to those who on a utilitarian calculus are in most need of them” (“Two Concepts of the Moral Life”). The little gestures of our daily life appear mean and petty, if compared with the grandiosity of world problems. If we can attempt to solve the latter, how important could be the first? So morality escapes the realm of individual choice to become political posturing: it has “liberated itself from the merely personal element of being true to oneself and become a program for perfecting the world”. The contemporary world is marked by the emergence of what Minogue labels “politico-moral”: a hybridised condition, in which morality is politicised and politics is moralised at the same time.

You can see, once more, how for Minogue politics and culture are mutually reinforcing, one way or another. He didn’t consider either institutions or habits omnipotent, but saw them as siamese twins—they couldn’t go in opposite directions. Developments in one area are matched by developments in the other.

Sometimes “progress”, is not actual progress. In an echo of Hayek’s discussion of social justice, Minogue argues that “politico-moral society resembles traditional societies in that the rulers are using their authority to implement the one right way of life, a perfect society, into which each person must fit” (The Servile Mind). In primitive, small groups, political leadership was entitled to make substantive choices for its kinship. In the extended order, individuals are supposed to be responsible for their own moral choices. Minogue uses this polarity, underlining the moral nuances of the two poles. Sometimes the reader may get the impression that Ken was himself happy to occasionally épater les bourgeois, as when he claims that “feminists … are well on the way to reinventing the harem, special quarters in which women traditionally lived entirely separate lives untainted by the lusts of men” (“The Goddess that Failed”). Indeed, he loved paradoxes, and a contagious sense of humour was among his many gifts. He found reality often entertaining and smiled at “the occurrence of folly and illusion among the intelligent” (“The Intellectual Left’s Treason of the Heart”). But this does not mean his message doesn’t need to be taken seriously.

Minogue was a splendid writer. His articles are lucid and carefully crafted, full of bon mots, each brilliant enough to make a journalist’s career. His prose is rhapsodic and voluptuous and can be appreciated by the philosophically untrained as well as by the scholar. Sometimes simplicity is the form clarity of thought takes. This was the case with Minogue.

Reading On Liberty and Its Enemies in 2017 makes one think of another adjective for its author: prescient. Minogue was writing well before “identity politics” became the holy grail of American politics. He died the same year Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English and made it to the club of international best-sellers, reviving the discussion on inequality. The essays published in On Liberty and Its Enemies have no specific answer to Piketty’s arguments, but address their cultural background: a preference for equalitarianism, the lack of appreciation for the capitalist system and the culture of “perfectionism” that mark the thought of social planners.

When he died, Ken Minogue was thinking of a new book, the theme being the nature of liberty. Could he have completed it, some of the arguments sketched in these articles would have certainly surfaced there. Some of Minogue’s readers may think that such a systematic book was not his sort of thing. Like Oakeshott, Minogue had little patience with system builders, and was at his best exposing the follies of ideological thinking. And yet, this collection proves that Ken constantly revolved around a certain number of themes, the condition of Western liberty being the central one. He was consistent and rigorous in building upon his previous reflections, improving his own long-standing intuitions. We should be grateful to Timothy Fuller for giving us the best possible surrogate of a great book we shall never read.