On Statism

by H. Goldman

In a recent post, E. Soltas asserted that neoliberals (who he calls classical liberals, the names being interchangeable)  "have had their name usurped by statists in sheep's clothing." While this may be partially true, since modern progressives have come to be called liberals while neoliberalism has been absorbed by modern conservatism/libertarianism in popular jargon (although neoliberal is still widely used in academia), a similar and even greater fallacy is made in implying that progressivism (modern liberalism) is somehow interchangeable with statism. For one, progressivism is a highly complex system of thinking, having branches ranging from modern anarchism at one extreme to extreme communism at the other. It encompasses ideas and forms of epistemology (i.e. ways that people come to conclusions and produce ideas) that are irreconcilable. Just like any other ideological framework, progressivism is a fractured whole, but statism is not one of its essential tenets. In fact, statism itself is hard to place in any specific framework.

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In many respects, the statism that is mentioned by E. Soltas
can be derived from a certain reading of Georg Wilhelm Hegel's Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel says: 

The State is absolutely rational inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality. This substantial unity is an absolute unmoved end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. On the other hand this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State.

Read in the context of Hegel's idea of the end of history (that individual freedom has reached its maximum and the prevailing model of the state has reached its point of perfection or become monolithic), the above conclusion (that the individual's supreme duty is to be a member of the State) is perfectly warranted. However, it is the very belief that we have reached the end of history that complicates things. Obviously, many Prussian/German progressives, who took to Hegel's analogous idea that the progression of history promised to expand freedom, found the end of history to contradict the more idealistic aspects of Hegel's thought and tossed it aside as a bad conclusion and nothing more. They believed that the state/community must continually provide for individual freedom, not against it. These progressives ultimately came to be known as left Hegelians (as opposed to the right Hegelians, who were the original statists in my view), and they even came to include Marx and Engels, the fathers of Marxist communism.

This, of course, is one way to show that Marxism, the justification for the formation of the statist Soviet Union, is not itself statist (and that progressivism is not either). Rather, it was the utopian idea of the end of history that resulted in the USSR's statism. Lenin, and even more so Stalin, believed the Soviet Union to be the perfect state, one that would never be equaled. In effect, the idealism and belief in the community as an agent to increase freedom present in Marxist communism were overshadowed by Soviet statism: they were coupled together. This is where the problem with assigning statism to any ideological framework appears. Statism comes from a specific idea, the end of history, that must be believed in order to be coupled with any progressive or conservative framework. It is not a part of an axiomatic structure of progressivism because it is too specific and leaves no room for the idea that the government, state, community, etc. (depending on the form of progressivism in question) should act to maximize individual freedom with no right against it (which is vital to many systems of thought that fall under the progressive umbrella).

In fact, by this logic, a progressive regulatory system is not statist at all. For instance, the government assumed that the regulatory legislation that it had passed long before the Gulf oil spill was sufficient to prevent oil spills. It assumed, in a kind of statist end-of-history hubris, that its regulatory system did not need to extend its reach to deep water drilling because such drilling was far off and seemingly safe. That is statism, whereas reformation of regulatory practices is equivalent to reformation of the state, is a part of a continual attempt by government to expand freedom (or get infinitely close to it, depending on whether one believes in the existence of free will) of the individual in opposition to outside corporate forces, and is, therefore, the antithesis to statism.