Chapter 8: A Pure Theory of Values

Left liberalism and the rule of law is tempting, but of no avail. It does not prevent authoritarianism, but instead can be plied by it. In certain discrete political situations—for instance, in the power struggle between President Trump and former F.B.I. Director James Comey or Special Counsel Robert Mueller—the rule of law can be a potent weapon in the hands of Left liberals. But it is equally forceful in the hands of law-and-order conservatives, especially in the battles over Supreme Court nominations. In the end, the rule of law is infinitely malleable, and can be reshaped easily by skilled lawyers, particularly in times of crises.

What matters, then, is not the formality of law as hedges or fences to keep everyone from interfering with each other, nor the rule of law as enforcing a neutral set of principles, but instead the values, ideals, and ambitions that underlie the interpretation and enforcement of legal norms. The Third Reich followed a strict rule of law. The problem was the values and ambitions of the political leaders. The formal structure of legal regimes is not at issue. What matters is the direction in which those formal structures are oriented.

This applies as well to political economic structures. Here too, there is no inherent tilt to either free markets or controlled economies—for several reasons. The first, and most important, is that there is no such thing as a free market. The notion of the free market is itself an illusion—one of the strongest. All markets are deeply regulated in different fashions, and those regulatory mechanisms are what distribute resources. As a result, second, there are no necessary correlations between the formal structures of market regulation—e.g. private property regimes versus nationalized industries—and outcomes. There is no necessary correlation, for instance, between a planned economy and equitable distributions or production.

We cannot say, as critical theorists, that any specific type of political economic regime is more likely than not to produce just outcomes. History bears this out. The horrors associated with Stalinism bear this out. The gulag. The corruption of the Soviet Communist Party—and of other communist parties in the former Eastern Bloc. The millions of deaths caused by the Great Famine under Maoist China. The killing fields of the Communist Khmer Rouge leaders. The complete ineffectuality of the Socialist government of French President François Hollande. These are all clear evidence that state-directed political economies, or their derivatives, are no more likely to produce just distributions than regimes built on private property. There is hardly any room for discussion on this.

Here too, then, what matters is not a particular form or regime of political economy, it is the minutia of rules and regulations that determine distributions of resources, wealth, well-being, and life itself. It is the inevitable regulatory web and how it allocates materiality. Every regime is regulated, there is no deregulated space, and all that matters are those specific rules and regulations—not the form, not the category, not the type of political economy. Only the material distributions matter.

This has dramatic consequences for a critical utopian vision. The critical horizon can no longer be a collectivist state, a socialist government, a planned economy, or the withering of the state. All of those forms are essentially empty. What matters, in terms of the vision of a future, is how an already-existing set of political economic regulations shape the production, distribution, and enjoyment of material wealth and well-being in society. What matters is how closely the resulting interactions approximate our political values—specifically, those of the tradition of the critical Left.

In terms of a critical horizon, then, all that we can judge, as critical theorists, is those material effects, and we can only do that by assessing how closely they approximate our values. This explains why a pure theory of illusions must be accompanied by a pure theory of values. It explains why we need to be both idealist and materialist at the same time—entirely so. When we unveil the myths of the free market and of controlled economies, we are only left with an analysis of how the internal gears function and actually distribute. And we can only assess that in relation to our values. We are, in effect, face to face with values—and only values.

I have argued elsewhere, in “The Collapse of the Harm Principle,” that this is paradoxically the fate of the harm principle in John Stuart Mills’ hands. Although the “harm to others” principle was invented to serve as a neutral liberal principle—one that would prevent the state from imposing values on its citizens—Mill’s harm principle nevertheless enshrined an ideal of human self-development and perfection that derived from von Humbolt’s writings. This was inevitable because the notion of “harm” ultimately collapses onto a substantive notion of human flourishing or well-being. It is impossible to define “harm” absent a vision of human well-being.

There are, then, several roads that lead to the same conclusion: everything turns on the values that undergird the mechanisms, and not the abstract category of political economy. As a result, the critical horizon is not an institutional set-up, nor a type of economic structure, nor a political organization. Nor is it a particular constitutional arrangement. The British do not have a constitution, but that may actually allow them to move left.¹⁷¹ Hungary, by contrast, was recently given a constitution, but that may have facilitated a rightward turn. Nor is it a centrally planned economy—we’ve been through that. It can never be, simply, these structures, organizations, or institutions. It is and can only be a set of shared values.

Those values do not come from thin air. They derive from long traditions, often with significant conflicts within those traditions. There are, for instance, within the Christian tradition, Franciscan sets of values that differ from Benedictine. Within the Muslim tradition as well, there are varying ways of interpreting the sacred text, leading to some more conservative, backward looking branches like Salafism, others like Qutbism that are more radical; there is an Islamic Left as well; there is a progressive Left spiritualism, as evidenced in the writings and life of Ali Shariati. Within native American heritage as well, there are different traditions. Elsewhere there are at times national values, party values, family specific values. There are Burkean values. And there are as well leftist values and traditions that have emerged from lengthy discussion and contestation. These are not spur of the moment, or individual, or simply personal preferences. This is not a matter of simple taste, but of lengthy discussions and conversations—and readings, and poetry, of Rousseau, Robespierre, Dewey, Luxembourg, Rorty, and so on.

Richard Rorty is particularly important in this genealogy because he too was anti-foundationalist and ended up in a similar political position, though he disparaged so cuttingly what he called the Foucauldian Left. His polemics were extreme. “Foucauldian theoretical sophistication,” he wrote, “is even more useless to leftist politics than was Engels’ dialectical materialism.”¹⁷² Rorty wrote out of anger and frustration, but nevertheless contributed to this lengthy and ongoing conversation about the values of the Left as the party of hope and moral identity.¹⁷³ Rorty tried to push the critical Left away from stigma and identity, toward greater attention to matters of wealth, economics, and unionization.¹⁷⁴ Despite his polemics and theoretical disagreements, Rorty ended up in a similar practical space: debating core critical Left values.

These questions of values are not simply a matter of faith—not even the more directly religious traditions, like the Christian or Muslim or Jewish values. There are texts to read, hermeneutics, generational discussions, debates, and even, as evidenced with Rorty, deep disagreements, excommunications, heresies, and departures.

For most of its history, critical theory has drawn on a leftist tradition that values equity, compassion, and respect. These are closely tied to ideals of solidarity, although they have been at times more or less communalist. They tend to respect the community. They are shared by critical theorists—who are tied by a particular tradition of thought and debate.

The critical task, then, is to pursue these values of equity, compassion, and respect. That is the critical utopic vision. Not a particular type of state or economy, but a social order that promotes those critical values.

This is a necessarily situated task: we pursue these values, as critical theorists, in confrontation with our really-existing political circumstances. We have to examine how the regulatory mesh we find ourselves in—whether in a capitalist, socialist, or communist state—produces our material and spiritual world, how it distributes material wealth and well-being. We are temporally and spatially located, and can only judge the political economic circumstances within which we find ourselves. Some of us may be in capitalist liberal democracies, others in socialist democracies, others in communist countries, and still others in authoritarian regimes. Each of us, critical theorists, may need to push those regimes in different directions in order to realize our values better. The critical work is inescapably and deeply situated.

This is an inherently violent confrontation because we are, inevitably, and necessarily, in opposition and in competition with other people’s projects and values. Politics is a battlefield, in this sense. It is not a regulated game. We are inevitably in a state of competition against others who have different utopic sets of values. In this struggle, critical theorists need to be strategic in their deployment of tactics—which I will turn to next in Part III. Everything has to be aimed at achieving our shared critical values.

In this sense, then, the pure theory of illusions calls for a pure theory of values: What is to be done—in the sense of what utopic vision critical theory should embrace—involves a situated assessment of really-existing regulatory mechanisms and material distributions, an analysis of how far those are from our desired values, and a determination of the ways to get there.

It is important to emphasize—although this may sound like anathema to many critical theorists—that critique, itself, does not have an inherent or necessary political valence. Critical theory, understood as a pure theory of illusions that endlessly unmasks the mythic structures of our thought and material distributions, does not have an embedded necessary set of values. It has, historically, been tied to a particular tradition of concerns and ambitions, but those values are not internal or inherent to critique. The unmasking of illusions is not just a theoretical intervention for the critical Left. Conservatives can do it as well. In fact, the tradition of nineteenth century critical thought—what has been often referred to as the hermeneutics of suspicion—included Freud and Nietzsche, who had different sets of values than Marx. Being suspicious of specters and illusions is not just a condition or technique of the Left. This explains why, for instance, some alt-right thinkers recently, such as Steve Bannon or Julia Hahn, deploy critical theoretic insights.

There is no inherent leftist valence to critical theory. Precisely for that reason, a pure theory of illusions must be tied to a pure theory of values.

~~~

We live in a world of scarce resources—of scarcity, as Sartre emphasized—and those scarce resources are inequitably distributed. The concentration and accumulation of resources in the hands of a global elite is unjustified and unjustifiable, and defies any possible ethical understanding. It is made possible by illusions: the illusions of political liberalism and free markets, the fantasy of individual responsibility and merit, the myth of upward social mobility. These illusions are what make our unequal world tolerable.

Critical theory can and must unveil these myths and illusions. Whether it does so in the language of ideology critique and legitimation theory, or of power/knowledge and regimes of truth, does not matter as long as it does not then reify an new set of illusions or a political utopia. Truth is, critical theory has now wasted too much energy on internecine struggles between Marxists and Foucaultians, between materialists and interpretivists, when all along critical theorists have been making the same core point: that power undergirds knowledge and that we are surrounded by illusions and myths that construct our world in these unjust ways. Critical theory needs to move forward now, first to recognize its shared set of values and second to praxis.

Nietzsche spoke of the death of God, but the proliferation of his shadow.¹⁷⁵ We seem to be constantly living in new shadows. It is time to get out from under them. You may ask how Nietzsche fits with the critical tradition. But here too, it is a question of interpretation. There is, naturally, the Nietzsche of the noble and strong predator, of the Viking warrior, of the prophet Zarathustra who leads a small band of chosen ones, of “men of knowledge.” There is this Nietzsche of the few who know and can see. Of the select among us who can get beyond man—of the Über-mensch. Recall Nietzsche saying, through the voice of the prophet Zarathustra, “For thus, justice speaks to me: ‘humans are not equal.’ And they shouldn’t become so either! What would my love for the overman be if I spoke otherwise?”¹⁷⁶ But if that may feel at odds with the critical Left tradition, there is also the Nietzsche of §10 of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. Of that nobleness of spirit that comes from a consciousness of power: the way in which we can rise above resentiment and petty rivalries when we are confident of ourselves. That Nietzsche is at the heart of this pure theory of illusions and values. It is, after all, Nietzsche who taught us the value of values.

In the end, the critical theory tradition has thrown its lot on the side of greater equality, equity, compassion, respect, and justice in society. The notion of liberty is empty when citizens do not have equal access to education, health care, and living conditions. We must ensure that everyone has equal educational opportunities—a first-rate public education, available to all, at least through college, with graduate opportunities restricted, if at all, on the basis of interest. Basic health care should be provided to everyone in need. And everyone should have a basic subsistence and shelter. Most importantly, there should not be gross disparities in income or wealth.

This brings us then to the next and final question. Having reconstructed critical theory as a pure theory of illusions and the critical utopia as a pure theory of values, what is the way forward, from a critical perspective, to achieve these shared values and a more just society? What is to be done, to borrow a famous turn of phrase, from a critical viewpoint? And beyond that, what form should critical action take? Does it imply revolutionary action? Or an insurgency? Or an uprising, a revolt, or disobedience? Civil disobedience—or is that too wedded to liberal legalism? Political disobedience? Speaking out or breaking silence? Or self-governance, as a form of Swaraj? Self-mastery or care of self? Social protest, like #BlackLivesMatter or Black Youth Project 100? Liberation movements? Or anarchistic disruption? Hacking? Or occupation? Or the creation of new imagined communities, like Standing Rock? If there is such a thing as a critical praxis that differs from liberal or alt-right practices, how do we instantiate it? In the end, the burning question is: What is to be done?