A Politics of Imperfection

The Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty: A View from Europe
by Joao Carlos Espada
Routledge, 2016, 212 pages, £95
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Canvassing for Brexit on a bleak North Kensington housing estate in early June, it became quickly evident that my fellow volunteers were mainly self-employed small business people, sacrificing their time on what appeared to be a quixotic attempt to reclaim traditional British freedoms. Pundits from Gareth Evans to Niall Ferguson and Matthew Parris, together with media celebrities like Bob Geldof, deplored both the Brexiteers and the referendum result delivered on June 23. It illustrated, they alleged, a Little England mentality and a xenophobic retreat from the world in general and Europe in particular.

Nothing of course was further from the truth. The surprise result was in fact testament to the English-speaking peoples’ enduring commitment to orderly liberty and an instinctive rejection, when offered the opportunity, of an unaccountable European Rechtsstaat. It is this Anglospheric tradition of freedom as a practice or skill, dramatically illustrated by the Brexit campaign, that Joao Carlos Espada explores in a thoughtful account of the Anglo-American tradition of liberty.

It perhaps requires a European Anglophile to appreciate the English-speaking peoples’ historic commitment to liberty and explain it to a wider world, contrasting its exceptionalism with the prevailing continental approach to democracy and ever closer supranational union. Espada is well suited to the task. A former adviser to Portuguese socialist Presidents Mario Soares (1986 to 1990) and Cavaco Silva (2006 to 2011), Espada began his personal experience of the English tradition of liberty through an encounter with Sir Karl Popper at his Kenley home in 1988. Espada had started a research project on Popper’s thought and asked the Austrian Jewish émigré why his personal library contained so many books on Winston Churchill. Popper replied that European and Western civilisation “is based on liberty” and Churchill saved it from dictatorship and destruction.

Popper further contended that “there was something peculiar to the political culture of the English-speaking peoples: they have a deep love of liberty combined with a sense of duty. It is a mystery.” It is this mystery and the “specificity of the political tradition of the English-speaking peoples” that Espada seeks to disclose. It is, he explains, “a very personal voyage of intellectual exploration”, primarily concerned with the “influential authors” who, in Espada’s view, have shaped and understood “the political tradition of the English-speaking peoples”.

The work consists of five parts. The first addresses the disparate personal influences that shaped Espada’s appreciation of the Anglospheric mind. Popper predominates, as well as Popper’s disciple Ralf Dahrendorf, erstwhile Director of the London School of Economics and Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, who supervised Espada’s DPhil, together with Raymond Plant, the British Labour welfare-reforming peer and a subject of Espada’s dissertation. Plant sits somewhat uneasily alongside the American neo-conservative Irving Kristol, the Anglophile editor of Encounter and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, whom the author befriended on a visit to Washington in 1996.

The second part addresses those thinkers Espada characterises as “Cold Warriors”: Raymond Aron, Friedrich Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. The content here reflects the order in which Espada encountered their thought. They share a common trait, namely, that “the defence of liberal democracy was at the centre of their work and, in many cases, their lives”.

Part three discusses three thinkers “hardly known” in continental Europe who Espada considers central to defining the Anglo-American liberal democratic tradition: Edmund Burke, James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville. Part four Espada devotes to Winston Churchill, a courageous exemplar of the “Anglo American political tradition of liberty under law”, committed to preserving it in dark times. In Part five Espada identifies “the specific characteristics of the Anglo-American tradition and its politics of imperfection”, whilst, in a brief postscript, Espada considers, somewhat irrelevantly in the light of recent events, how the Anglo-American tradition might creatively reform the propensity of Europe’s political elites to perceive democratic politics “as a means to achieve a purpose”. As he observes, the European instrumentalist approach to politics contrasts diametrically with the English-speaking peoples’ political understanding, which “is less a means to an end than an ethos or way of life”.

The appeal of this study resides in Espada’s idio­syncratic interpretation of this Anglospheric tradition through political thinkers that he has either met or carefully examined. While he acknowledges the many differences in the political philosophies of Popper, Aron, Plant, Berlin, Oakeshott and Strauss, he considers their contrasting understandings of liberty a peculiar strength of the Anglo-American tradition. “This tradition,” he contends, “is not a monopoly of one single political tendency or family. It has grown among different political families and it has distinguished those families from their counterparts on the European continent.” The central commitment of these “families” has been to “liberty, orderly and self-restrained liberty”. Its key concern is not to implement a program, but, as Popper averred, to dismiss bad governments without bloodshed, and avoid tyranny.

The limitations to this venture, which revives, in a modified form, the nineteenth-century Whig interpretation of history, stems from Espada’s eclectic blending of political dispositions that exaggerates the importance of some philosophers at the expense of the contribution of equally distinguished figures in this tradition. In particular there is little discussion of those English common lawyers and historians from Henry de Bracton, Sir Edward Coke, Matthew Hale and William Blackstone through David Hume, Thomas Macaulay and G.W. Trevelyan to G.R. Elton and J.C.D. Clark, who defined and traced the exceptionalism of the English constitution and its contingent historical experience.

Curiously, for a work that explores the Anglo-American tradition of liberty the story is largely told through the eyes of diasporic Europeans, many of whom escaped various twentieth-century European despotisms and found sanctuary and employment in the eleemosynary institutions of the Anglosphere. Oakeshott, Plant and Churchill are the only English writers to feature in this account of the Anglo-American experience.

Espada is clearly aware that he is drawing largely on the voices of fellow Europeans to advance his own distinctive view of the Anglo-American core contribution to liberal democracy as a pillar of the free world. It is by no means insignificant that in this enterprise many of the displaced European voices are Jewish. Popper, Berlin, Aron, Strauss, Kristol and Himmelfarb are all part of a diasporic European Jewry that found a congenial home in the Anglosphere. These expatriate European voices attended not only to the character of the Anglo-American commitment to liberty that informs and reflects a way of life, but also to the manner in which the European Enlightenment took a decidedly different approach to democracy and its practice.

Thus Popper, after being turned down for a lectureship at the University of Queensland in 1937, found in New Zealand the tranquillity to write The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957). After he was appointed to the London School of Economics at the instigation of his fellow émigré and former Vienna school colleague, Friedrich Hayek, they both discovered in the political cultures of the English-speaking peoples a disposition to limited government, a spontaneous order based on abstract rules with no defined purpose and a secular pluralism conducive to the tolerance of competing ideas. This they contrasted with “the common intellectual underpinnings of left and right-wing authoritarianisms … in their national-socialist and Marxist expressions”, which they had personally experienced in Europe in the 1930s. They considered the Hegelian and Marxist predisposition to historicist prophecy arising from the dogmatic rationalism of the late-eighteenth-century European Enlightenment project had built the road to serfdom and closed, authoritarian societies.

The twentieth-century totalitarian model, more­over, was inimical to the piecemeal social engineering and the fallibilistic logic essential to the scientific discovery and innovation that characterised the very different English enlightenment from the late seventeenth century onward. It is in this English environment of tolerance, openness and scepticism, requiring “centralized schemes to invent, reconstruct or design moral values” that Espada also locates Isaiah Berlin’s concept of negative liberty. Berlin asserted that liberty is “liberty, not equality, fairness or justice or culture” and that values, particularly those of freedom and equality, clash.

The tradition of value pluralism and limited self-government that these émigré authors encountered, then, stood in marked contrast to a very different European enlightenment political project addicted to purposive ends, informed by an apparently scientific, or what Hayek would term a “scientistic” rational plan. This addiction to bureaucratic micromanagement is what Michael Oakeshott identified as the problem of rationalism in politics. Oakeshott counterposed the experience of a particular, contingent tradition and a local grammar of self-disclosure and self-understanding with the rationalist who “reduces the tangle and variety of experience to a set of principles which he will then attack and defend only upon rational grounds”.

Rationalism cuts itself off “from the traditional knowledge of society”. Instead it combines the politics of perfection with the politics of uniformity. Political activity consequently “consists in bringing the social, political, legal and institutional inheritance of society before the tribunal” of the rationalist’s intellect. “The rest”, as members of the European Union now find, “is rational administration”. The rationalist style is activist and Oakeshott contrasts its “politics of faith”, or what Raymond Aron terms the fanaticism of this “secular religion”, with that of a contingent political tradition informed by what Leo Strauss identified as classical reason, which was particular and prudential.

“Dogmatic rationalism” (Popper’s term) by contrast is utopian and collectivist. For Hayek, Aron and Popper the historical completion of this activist style that first emerged with the Napoleonic and Prussian Rechtsstaats assumed the twentieth-century totalitarian form of national socialism and international Marxism. However, as Espada observes, it persists in the illiberal, progressive tendency of the post-Cold War West to promote central planning, collectivism and the passion for the “organization of the whole” at the expense of the parts, so characteristic of the European Union. Indeed, the rationalist bureaucracies of many contemporary democracies seek to manage all aspects of their citizens’, or more accurately their clients’, lives, replacing traditional constitutional practice with “the sovereignty of technique”.

Espada locates the tyrannical implications of the rationalist style in the European Enlightenment pursuit of abstract equality at the expense of orderly liberty. This baleful preoccupation first appeared in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762). Espada considers Rousseau “the maniac prophet of the equalitarian despotism of the modern age”, responsible for the “frightening cult of equality”. As the French aristocratic liberal Alexis de Tocqueville observed, the cult feeds the modern passion for centralisation and standardisation.

Those who established the pre­suppositions of modern Anglospheric liberal democracy and limited government defined it against Rousseau and the ideological despotism that flourished during the Jacobin reign of terror (1793-94). Espada argues convincingly that Edmund Burke in the United Kingdom, James Madison in the United States and de Tocqueville in France contrasted the Anglo-American tradition of liberty with the French revolutionary, rationalist alternative. Burke, of course, had little time for rationalist abstraction and viewed government instead as an intergenerational compact. “Against the pretended rights of theorists”, the “offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings”, Burke set the rights of Englishmen as an “entailed inheritance” not to be dissipated at will by one generation, but framed by the ancient constitution as it had been codified since the thirteenth century by those “oracles of the common law”, Bracton, Coke, Hale and Blackstone. As Espada interprets it, the limited government and constitutional liberty enjoyed in the United Kingdom grew organically “out of existing, law abiding, and moral abiding ways of life”. More precisely England, as the medieval jurist John Fortescue observed, was a political monarchy (dominium politicum et regale) not an unaccountable tyranny.

An analogous concern for limited government founded in common law also informed the practice of democracy in America. Espada finds in James Madison’s contribution to The Federalist Papers (1788) a further antidote to Rousseau’s “perfectionist” prescriptions. American government was a contrivance of human wisdom to satisfy human wants. It required “auxiliary precautions” or checks and balances. Rather than investing sovereign power in a centralised Rechtsstaat that in Rousseau’s chilling view might strip individuals of their particular attachments and “force them to be free”, Madison preferred an Anglo-style mixed and balanced constitution where the laws chosen by the people in their legislatures constrained the executive power.

This historical pattern of constitutional rule that, from the nineteenth century, was adumbrated by popular accountability required limits. In Democracy in America (1835) Tocqueville argued the Americans had inherited their taste for freedom and orderly liberty from the English aristocracy. Thus, the Anglo-American liberal democratic tradition came to emphasise self-government, political and administrative decentralisation, an independent judiciary, a free press and freedom of religion.

From his discussion of these writers and a brief homage to Winston Churchill’s practical insistence on the “the subordination of the State to the fundamental and moral conceptions of an ever-comprehending community”, Espada abstracts a distinctive Anglo-American politics of imperfection. This he contrasts vividly with the European pursuit of the politics of perfection. Imperfect politics treats freedom as a skill that requires a democratic form of limited government, requiring the dispersion of power, constrained by the rule of law. It stands in opposition to the state or super-state conceived as a corporate enterprise pursuing government-designed socio-economic targets and abstract human rights.

In this Anglo-American understanding, liberty is a practice, an adversarial manner informed by a gentlemanly code of conduct, that requires not only understanding a tradition but also “learning how to participate in a conversation” and protect an existing way of life. This inherited habit of mind constituted the moral capital that for Irving Kristol informed the Anglo American practice of liberal democracy, whilst for Gertrude Himmelfarb the “miracle of modern England” consisted, ironically, in making all the social, economic and political revolutions, “without recourse to revolution”.

These constitutive differences between the Anglo-American tradition of negative freedom and the European rationalist democratic project has spawned two notable political consequences. First:

in Britain and America a political commitment to democracy does not entail a uniformity of views on matters of philosophy, morality or public policy, rival views compete against each other among both the elites and the people … In Europe on the contrary, an elitist monopoly and an elitist uniformity tend to be fostered by both a misleading understanding of democracy and (proportional) electoral systems based on party structures.

This has created a growing gap between political elites and their estranged constituents and poses a serious threat to European democratic practice. It encourages elites to a “despotism of innovation”, manifest in the latest attempts to forge a closer and more protectionist European union, alongside a countervailing “propensity to follow populist and anti-democratic demagogues on the part of significant sectors of the (European) electorate”.

Espada adds, in a poignant postscript, that the euro debacle and the prospect of increased European centralisation, combined with a “lack of mainstream parties defending decentralization … has created a vacuum that extremists have exploited”. Espada argues, following Ralf Dahrendorf, that the issue of advocating fewer powers for Brussels should be a matter of “normal [European] politics” rather than a “constitutional” or existential issue that endangers Europe’s survival.

Such Brussellian tolerance of criticism seems, however, increasingly remote. Brexit, moreover, will amplify the second political consequence of European rationalism—its affinity with relativism. Following Popper, Espada considers dogmatic relativism the inevitable consequence of dogmatic rationalism, which European elites associate with democracy. The interaction of a rationalist understanding of democracy and electoral systems inevitably encourages “wilder rationalist dreams and a wilder relativist atmosphere”. As a result Europe’s non-relativist democrats “struggle hopelessly to find a democratic platform against relativism”. Relativism ultimately “destroys the moral and intellectual resources to understand why liberal democracy is better than its alternatives”.

This might indeed be the case. However, those writers in the Anglo-American tradition of liberty who unlike Popper and Hayek emphasise the cultural specificity of the Anglospheric project are not themselves free from some species of relativism. How can they be when, like Berlin, they accept a plurality of cultures and values, or, like Oakeshott, maintain that political activity requires “using the resources of a (particular) traditional manner of behavior to make a friend of every hostile situation”?

Rather than adopting unquestioningly Popper’s somewhat incoherent view of dogmatic relativism, Espada might have been better advised to follow Leo Strauss, who sees the problem of the modern liberal democratic project stemming from a loss of faith in its universal purpose. As Strauss observed, the West, “which was accustomed to understand itself in terms of a universal purpose, cannot lose faith in that project without becoming bewildered”. The antidote to the failure of universal historicism is to take refuge, as Strauss, Oakeshott, Kristol, Himmelfarb and Berlin do, in some version of “practical particularism”. Strauss preferred to return to the prudential reason of the ancients. opposing classical prudence to the modern preoccupation with universal rights and the attendant “decay of philosophy into ideology”, whilst Oakeshott emphasised the importance of political education in the language of a contingent political tradition.

Moreover, if rationalism and relativism are the disease consuming contemporary European liberal democracy, then the Anglosphere is by no means immune from its ravages. Brexit notwithstanding, the mainstream parties of the Anglospheric democracies have shown a notable penchant for rationalism in politics, while their eleemosynary institutions have become addicted to the more corrosive forms of idealism and relativism. The governments of Blair, Brown and Cameron in the United Kingdom and Rudd in Australia evinced little respect for the Anglo-American tradition of liberty and preferred instead to create a bloated public sector devoted to managing all aspects of their citizens’ lives. In the process our representatives sought to turn us into the instruments of their rationalist projects. More particularly, Blair, Brown, Cameron and Osborne locked Britain into a European “association marked by timid protectionism demographic decline” and economic sclerosis.

This bureaucratic dynamic, and the inexorable descent into servility it foreshadowed, came to a juddering halt in June 2016. The Brexit event offered a striking reaffirmation of what Popper termed “the English mystery” responding to troubled economic and political times. Theresa May, who, unlike her recent rationalist precursors in the office of prime minister, seems to channel the spirit of prudent English exceptionalism and its tradition of liberty, announced “The Great Repeal Bill” at the Conservative conference in October. At a stroke The European Communities Act (1972) and the creeping despotism it intimated will be removed from the statute book. The UK will once more become, in Mrs May’s words, “a sovereign and independent country” and despite the economic doubts and anti-democratic fears of a protected transnational political and academic elite, liberating its business from regulation and practising liberty both at home and abroad.

A hard Brexit will no doubt dismay Espada. He has, nevertheless, written a compelling account of the Anglo-American tradition of liberty. It is possible perhaps, given the personal nature of the work, to take issue with his inclusions in the canon, as well as his omissions from it. Given Espada’s emphasis on the centrality of European émigré thinkers to the Cold War defence of freedom, it is somewhat curious that Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin fail to get a mention. It is also hard to square the inclusion of Raymond Plant’s rationalist advocacy of welfare rights and critique of “neoliberalism” with the Burkeanism of Irving Kristol, who brilliantly exposed the “hidden (rationalist) agenda” informing much contemporary economic, social welfare and human rights discourse. Moreover, if, as Espada contends, the Anglo-American tradition is a house comprised of many families, it is curious that leading American thinkers of the liberal, democrat Left “family” like John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Richard Rorty are excluded from this account.

These cavils notwithstanding, Espada has written a timely and provocative account of the tradition of liberty which deserves a wide audience both in Europe and across the Anglosphere. At its publisher’s prohibitive retail price, however, this seems unlikely.