Confronting Leviathan

The French Revolution wasn’t just an attempt to turn France into Sparta that failed because France is too big. [Benjamin] Constant was very aware that the problem was not simply the lure of ancient liberty. It was also that modern liberty lacked something. For many moderns it was not appealing enough. That is, they wanted to hang on to it, they had become quite attached to it, but they didn’t really know how to defend it. Many of us, maybe all of us, are very reluctant to give up our private freedoms, but we’re not completely sure why and we are quite easily persuaded that there is something wrong with us for leading such private lives. Ancient freedom has its appeal because modern freedom doesn’t quite have the same resounding endorsements of philosophical principle. That’s the thing about pre-modern politics in the modern world: it often seems to offer the clearer choice. Fraternité will always pull us back – some of us, anyway – because it has such a ring to it.

So one problem with modern freedom is that it is not clear we moderns know how to justify it. We get sucked into political commitments we cannot sustain to try to fill the gap. The other problem, the deeper problem, is that modern liberty can pull us too far away from public life. If you are a modern citizen you can get drawn into the private sphere, the individualistic sphere, almost by default and come to believe that it is possible to lead a life without politics. You assume that you can pull up the drawbridge of your home or your religion or your values or your difference, and you will be free to live that way because you live in a state that doesn’t mind and doesn’t care. There are therefore twin temptations of modern freedom: either to fall for ancient liberty because it is more politically attractive or, alternatively, simply to subsist in the world of modern liberty because it is so comfortable.

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The illusion of the modern world and of modern citizens is that politics will go away if you don’t pay attention to it, that if you as a modern citizen get on with your own business, then other people will get on with theirs and leave you alone. But they won’t. If you don’t do politics, someone else will do your politics for you. That’s how the modern state works. Its power depends on you, but if you’re not interested in it, it won’t simply leave you alone. Its power will become arbitrary and coercive, and one day it will reveal itself to be what you should have known it was all along, before you lost interest in it: an arbitrary Hobbesian state. At that point you will be unable to protect yourself if it turns on you.

The capitalists have lost control of their own magic trick. They don’t understand the power that they have unleashed. Because they don’t understand that power, one of the features of capitalism, one of its inevitable cyclical features, is that it will keep running into crisis. Each successive crisis is caused by the fact that capitalism is more powerful than the people who run it are able to deal with. It is too powerful for them – it produces too much – with the result that this form of exploitation actually outruns itself. What regularly happens in capitalist societies is that too much is produced, more than can be consumed by the workers, who lack the purchasing power because their labour has been exploited – undervalued – in order to produce so much. It is a vicious circle. The workers responsible for the productive power of capitalism do not have the economic power to consume what is produced. This leaves the capitalists exposed because they have too much produce on their hands that they can’t sell. So prices are cut and cut-throat competition begins and capitalist enterprises put each other out of business, which means that they have to get rid of their workers, which makes the workers poorer, which means there’s even less capacity to consume what is being produced. And so it goes on, leading to misery, more misery – misery for everyone.

Digital technology has greatly enhanced people’s voice: our ability to express our selves and our ability to make ourselves heard. It is, among other things, a vast outlet for endless complaint. The same technology has also enhanced our ability to solve certain kinds of practical problems, and thereby to deliver tangible material benefits. It has made a few people – the tech billionaires – vastly, obscenely better off, which is unlikely to be good for democracy. But it has also distributed some basic goods widely, not least because so much of this technology is free to use. It has had many downsides but, broadly speaking, the digital revolution has added to both sides of the democratic equation: more voice and greater benefits.

The difficulty, though, is that it is not at all obvious that those two trends support each other. They appear increasingly at odds. Democracy works best when voice reinforces results and results reinforce voice. The problem-solving capacity of digital technology is often very remote from its capacity to enable us to express our anger and our frustration. In fact, many people increasingly use their voice to express anger and frustration at the problem-solving capacity of the technology, because so much of it seems to be in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and because it so often feels technical and remote, so that these solutions do not connect with the everyday experience of many individuals. Digital technology has the potential to pull apart the liberal democratic package which insists that results go with enhanced respect. Too often, the efficient results leave individuals feeling disrespected. To have your problems solved by a machine is potentially dehumanising in many of the ways that Gandhi warned it would be.