Stelios Panayano of The Lotus Eaters joins me on the show to talk about his views on classical liberalism and why he thinks it s time to roll back the clock and go back to the old days of classical liberalism.
00:18:30.880Because whenever we talk about the common good, it's an abstract notion.
00:18:34.640We still have to talk about our conception of the common good.
00:18:39.380So, you know, in different circles, there are different conceptions of the common good.
00:18:43.920So I would say that what sets classical liberalism apart is the idea that...
00:18:50.920When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?
00:18:55.520When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.
00:19:00.360When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.
00:19:03.020When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.
00:19:06.300People enjoying a substantial amount of liberties to engage in, to a large extent, forming their
00:19:30.460own lives, but also in, you could say, economic activity, which is one of the major boosts in classical liberalism,
00:19:38.660is that the common good requires voluntary action to a larger extent than it was previously thought.
00:19:49.360Because you could say that one of the other really ancient ideas in the history of human thought
00:19:57.960has to do with morality and the conditions of morality.
00:20:02.260And a lot of people, even back to Aristotle, they say that morality and the ethical character of an action requires choice.
00:20:10.220So what I think led to the adoption of classical liberalism was, to a very large extent, from an ideological standpoint,
00:20:19.260a focus on individual rights as being important for an ethical population, let's say, or for the project of promoting the common good.
00:20:33.880And that was from an ideological standpoint.
00:20:36.840But I think that some of the main, I would say, forces that led to its more widespread adoption are multivariate.
00:20:48.340So, for instance, we have the economic effect of the Black Plague.
00:20:52.300A lot of people in Europe, a lot of people don't mention that the Black Plague in Europe was sort of a death.
00:21:00.640Death was the final nail in the coffin for a long time for economic centralization in Europe.
00:21:07.440Economic activity was far more decentralized afterwards because the lack of stock and grain led to the death of a thing about a third of the population of Europe.
00:21:19.020The other thing was obviously the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars of the Protestant Reformation that led to lots of clashes between Catholics and Protestants in the northern and western Europe.
00:21:31.340And I think that they sort of ended in a kind of stalemate because you could say that in some cases, you know, Protestants won, in others Catholics won, but there was a push towards saying that the state should be neutral, not morally neutral, as a lot of people say, but neutral with respect to enforcing the totality of a comprehensive view of the good life.
00:21:56.360And there are really good debates about where it actually starts.
00:22:02.100You mentioned, for instance, Machiavelli.
00:22:04.200I'm not exactly certain that we can say Machiavelli was a classical liberal because...
00:22:09.980I wouldn't say that either, but I would just say some...
00:22:13.140Yes, but you could say that also he does give a sort of boost to the Republican tradition that was inherited afterwards by many people, especially in the English Civil War, but also afterwards in France and in the US.
00:22:30.980I would say that what is particularly something that makes me say that Machiavelli wasn't, in an important respect, a precursor of the tradition was his skepticism of wealth.
00:22:44.680He seems to me to be a very, you know, old Roman-type Republican where he says, if we have a wealthy population, they're going to be corrupted and they're not going to be willing to fight for the common good.
00:22:57.880And that's where tyranny is going to come.
00:23:00.200And that's where he also says something that has stuck with me that after Rome became a republic, there were lots of strikes against tyrants, but not against tyranny.
00:23:09.900So I think that what classical liberals are trying to do afterwards is that they are trying to fuse sort of republicanism, more constitutional monarchy in a political sphere with a sort of economic expansion.
00:23:26.540And the idea that we need to have a sort of commercial republic, as Montesquieu would say, or a sort of constitutional monarchy that recognizes a significant amount of economic rights.
00:23:42.040But obviously there was the issue of mercantilism.
00:23:45.580There's always the question of how extended are these rights?
00:23:49.360All right, well, I want to dive deeper into the economic aspects.
00:23:54.380I want to ask you also about the possibility of an epistemological shift inside the tradition.
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00:25:12.980All right, so you mentioned several times that economics was tied up significantly.
00:25:18.520The ability to create certain economic systems, maintain a mercantile republic, a commercial republic, to ease the ability of economic transactions was a critical part of this.
00:25:33.500Could you go into a little more detail about what specifically about liberalism facilitated this?
00:25:38.780Well, we need to bear in mind that Adam Smith, who is considered to be, in a sense, the father of economic liberalism, was writing his Wealth of Nations in the 1770s.
00:25:52.140And he didn't think that he was living in an economically liberal society.
00:25:56.860He was criticizing what he thought to be the economics of his age, that was the mercantilistic view that, from my understanding, it gives, you could say that it is sort of a form of state capitalism where a lot of people have preferential treatments.
00:26:19.000You could say the old aristocrats, they had preferential treatments, and they could engage in trade agreements, and they had a sort of boost in economic activity, but also the state was trying to protect them from failing and also was trying to intervene to their favor.
00:26:37.360And Adam Smith didn't think he was living in a society of his own.
00:26:41.980Now, if you want to put forward the epistemological bit that you mentioned, Adam Smith gets a lot from what is called the Scottish Enlightenment.
00:26:53.160And the Scottish Enlightenment is a tradition that was, is a very interesting tradition, and it is precisely the tradition that if someone reads, they'll understand that a lot of the portrayals of classical liberalism today are mainly misconception.
00:27:10.000Because a lot of people say that classical liberalism pays zero attention to customs, to society, to social bonds, or to, or to culture itself.
00:27:21.680The Scottish Enlightenment, particularly with Hume, Smith, and even people that they, that they influence who were necessarily Scottish, is all about customs.
00:27:31.260They have an anthropology that I would say is a bit problematic, maybe we could go there later if we talk about the Enlightenment and some problems with it, at least the way I see it later.
00:27:46.060But it seems to me that what happens is that the idea of having sort of expansion of economic liberties was something that was very slowly adapted.
00:27:58.280What we know as classical liberalism in the 18th century was, started mainly as a political tradition, and it continued later on as an economic one.
00:28:09.220So, again, the one thing I wanted to grasp, though, from that was what specific changes, or if you would like to draw the line between the political and economic there for me, what specific changes moved us into this space of what would be classical liberalism?
00:28:28.320What is enabling this, what is its utility beyond the traditions that previously existed, that made it specific to, you know, this, this time, or, you know, this development?
00:28:41.620Right. So, I would say that there are several answers here.
00:28:45.940One is, I would say, a widespread dissatisfaction with what was perceived as absolutism in politics.
00:28:52.500That was a major boost to having a class of, you could say, aristocracy or the bourgeois class a bit later on, that said, we don't want to live with absolutism, with a king that's going to do anything he wants to us.
00:29:08.840We need to push for a sort of constitution or a sort of checks and balances.
00:29:15.840In the English tradition, I think this was the refocusing on the tradition of the Magna Carta.
00:29:25.100In other traditions, for instance, you could say that it has more classical liberal, classical republican leanings.
00:29:33.140So, I would say that one of the major reasons for dissatisfaction for adoption of classical liberalism was dissatisfaction with political absolutism.
00:29:43.040But also, there was, that was the era where Europe was sort of expanding and engaging in colonialism.
00:29:50.580And there was rivalry between colonial powers that were mostly European.
00:29:59.160And one of the major problems that kings had was financing.
00:30:04.780For instance, if we read the history of the English Civil War, one of the major problems that Charles the, I think it was the first, yeah, Charles the first had was with financing England.
00:30:18.040Also, the French Revolution, Louis XVI had tremendous problems for financing the French state.
00:30:28.140The French Revolution didn't solve that, I think, later.
00:30:31.380So, I think that these are all factors that push towards viewing the expansion, decentralization in politics, but also in economics, as sort of necessary if people wanted to keep a substantial amount of their privileges.
00:30:51.820So, a lot of people that I've read have argued that absolutism kind of directly leads you to this because you have a scenario in which many of the nobles are, you know, very concerned about their loss of rights, as you point out, right?
00:31:11.240And this is why you kind of create the situations in which the state is needing to be more and more centralized, the funding is more and more necessary to compete with the authority of rival monarchs and rival states.
00:31:23.840And so, you create a situation in which you regularly have to draw on the resources and therefore kind of beg for the certain level of, what's the word I'm looking for here?
00:31:37.280Not acquiescence, but you need the approval of these people on a regular basis in a way that was not necessarily there previously.
00:31:45.460And this means that you have to regularly make certain allowances, grant certain permissions, these kind of things.
00:31:51.400And the way that these rights usually worked is they're granted to the aristocracy first, and then they trickle down, right?
00:31:57.660So, you know, you get the original English suing for rights.
00:32:02.280They're not talking for every Englishman, they're talking for nobles, and then once the nobles have these rights, then the idea that these things might be necessary for others kind of trickle down from there.
00:32:12.020And so, this constant need for the king to kind of draw that funding, draw that centralization, the more the Leviathan grows, ironically, the more it has to grant certain rights and protections to the general populace in order to kind of draw the centralization money necessary to kind of create that opposing power.
00:32:31.440Okay, so I think I would largely agree, because it seems to me to be a sort of pattern we see in history.
00:32:46.700But I don't know if there aren't any exceptions, but even if there are, I think that it is a sufficiently repeated pattern, let's say, that makes us, that gives us good reasons to form probabilistic judgments about how society will evolve.
00:33:07.580So, I wouldn't say necessarily that I think that this is a necessary cycle, but I think that there are very strong forces, that the reality of politics leads to very strong forces that lead towards that direction.
00:33:24.380I would say, what you said reminds me of an old classical republican trope, it's the theory of the anasyclosis of forms of governments by Polybius, I think you have heard of it, where he is talking about the cycle where he says that initially, in conditions of anarchy, people gather around a chief, initially that chief governs for the common good.
00:33:54.380Then at some point, then at some point, then at some point, that chief or their sons become a bit tyrannical when they forget the common good, and then we have aristocracy, then the same happens with aristocracy, we go to oligarchy, oligarchy goes to democracy, and democracy goes to anarchy, and then yet again.
00:34:11.300I think that this is a good way to look at it, but I think that Polybius was talking about a cycle of unmixed form of governments, and he was saying that, look at why Rome achieved its greatness, it achieved its greatness because it became a mixed form of government, and hence he was arguing for the republic.
00:34:33.600So, but still, I don't know to what extent we can stretch this to extract statements about necessity with confidence, but I can definitely see that there is value in thinking about it, but I think that there is also value in being open to the empirical method.
00:34:57.820Because I'm reminded of something that Aristotle says in politics in book five, he is giving the example of how some democracies are really stupid.
00:35:06.480He said that there were some people in an ancient Greek city-state where they were democrats, and they exiled so many people that these people formed an army, and they came back, they defeated the democrats, and established an oligarchy there.
00:35:21.840So, that's a different way of going in the cycle, that's taking a step back.
00:35:26.000But I would say that, generally speaking, I wouldn't say it's a necessary thing, but it seems to be a pattern that is repeating itself to a significant degree.
00:35:39.180So I wouldn't say just because there are exceptions, I'm not listening to it.
00:35:43.160Speaking of Aristotle and the politics, one of the things that he says is basically the citizens are those that are armed, right?
00:35:53.720Like, that's a critical part of specifically republican understanding.
00:35:58.040This is also how Machiavelli understood the definition of citizenship and virtue.
00:36:03.220You know, this is one of his main points is that you have to, you need a citizen militia.
00:36:08.140It's bad to have a standing army, it's bad to have mercenaries, you need to have a virtuous population who's willing to take up arms and fight on behalf of the republic, and that's one of the definitions of their citizenship.
00:36:21.400The Founding Fathers of the United States also understood this.
00:36:23.880Most people, you know, to combat the left's attack on the Second Amendment in the United States, a lot of people on the right tend to excise the part about the militia in there.
00:36:35.820But if you read the Federalist Papers, it's very clear that most of the states were worried about standing armies, and to sell the Constitution, you know, Hamilton basically had to promise them, like, oh, no, you should give the U.S. control of your militias so we don't have to have a standing army.
00:36:51.520So it was understood that kind of the citizen soldier was the key to kind of this classically liberal Republican identity.
00:36:59.780But one of the things we look at in the modern state is the idea that every citizen would be an armed member of the state is just mind-blowing to almost everybody, right?
00:37:10.040Like, this is just not something anyone can really conceive of.
00:37:13.640And so since the ultimate question, we're not skipping to the end here, but since the ultimate question of this stream is can we return to classical liberalism, has scale defeated the ability to operate a classically liberal republic?
00:37:27.560Because in the modern world, most people couldn't imagine operating a large competitive state without a standing army with, you know, and not having citizen soldiers, a citizen militia as the basis of your republic.
00:37:42.500And if that's a key to classical liberalism, then it seems like that's something that you would have to radically alter in order to return to it.
00:37:51.440Well, I think that this is something that definitely plays a part.
00:37:59.040So having a standing army doesn't mean that you cannot have an armed citizenry, the way I see it.
00:38:06.560Also, it doesn't mean that an armed populace cannot guard against, you could say, an overreaching government.
00:38:18.080Obviously, the more powerful the army becomes, there seems to be a complete imbalance of power there.
00:38:25.620So, yes, it's definitely, if we're talking about a state that tries to use the army to just kill its population, I think that that's going to be a disaster.
00:38:38.600But we're not talking about any kind of good state in that case.
00:38:43.880So I want to understand exactly what it is that we're talking about here, because it seems to me that going back to classical liberalism could imply, for instance, in my mind, not necessarily going back to the caricature of just somehow, let me grill, bro.
00:39:06.820So I'm going to outsource everything to the government, including my protection to everything, and just let me grill and somehow this is magically going to work.
00:39:29.480But something that seems to me to be possible is to sort of roll back the state progressively.
00:39:37.360So I would say just as I started in the beginning, I said that to me, I don't approach it ideologically, you know, just I don't care about where I'm at without looking at the country I'm talking about.
00:39:50.240I would say it's more an issue of the degree of civil, political and economic liberties and try to say that right now, the woke belt, which you could say is the Trudeau, Biden, Harris, Starmer, Macron, EU belt, is restricting Westerners' liberties to a significant extent.
00:40:12.680I would say that going back to classical liberalism would imply trying to offset that tendency and try to go back to greater extents of liberties without that meaning that what I have in mind is the just let me grill and somehow it's magically going to work.
00:40:33.620I guess the biggest problem that is being addressed in a microcosm in the armed citizenry debate, but is much larger for what you're talking about there, is virtue.
00:40:47.460You can't conduct any of these good societies, but specifically a classically liberal society, without taking on a certain amount of responsibility.
00:40:57.040And for most of these formulations of classical liberalism, the armed citizen was the height of virtue in the sense that they would take responsibility not for their own safety, but for the safety of the state as well.
00:41:09.780And a lot of people from Machiavelli to Bertrand de Juvenal have warned that the standing army also encourages basically military adventurism.
00:41:20.640It creates a situation in which your military is always looking for something else to conquer, something else to do, because this is where it gets its money, where it gets time.
00:41:29.600And the United States is in large part motivated by its military industrial complex.
00:41:34.420Like these are factors that were seen back in the 1500s, but are manifesting themselves today in the way in which we operate these theoretical republics.
00:41:47.020I don't think the United States is a republic in any sense at this point, but these are issues not just in the military realm, but they exist throughout all of our different aspects, from our education of our children to the care for the poor.
00:42:02.220A lot of the libertarian solutions, often things heard from liberals, classical liberals, is we just need to roll back the state.
00:42:10.040But I think this misses a large amount of the point, which is the reason the state was allowed to grow in this manner is so many of these duties were handed over.
00:42:19.320The virtue of the public was hand in hand, right?
00:42:24.860The state crept in to kind of take over these public spheres that would have restricted the actions of the state.
00:42:31.520So by, you know, increasing the dependency on the state, they also increase their power.
00:42:35.920And this also makes it far less likely that the individual would resist against the state because they've handed so much of their, you know, they no longer have the virtue to be self-sufficient.
00:42:44.500A lot of people would like the total state to disappear, but if it did tomorrow, they wouldn't be able to educate the children.
00:42:49.820They wouldn't be able to take care of their parents.
00:42:51.180They wouldn't be able to defend themselves.
00:42:52.740They wouldn't be able to care for the poor in their community.
00:42:54.560And so, you know, the just let's just reduce the government, bro, kind of version of liberalism has or libertarianism more often in this case has significant problems because there's no emphasis on ways in which the populace could retake those responsibilities in any meaningful way.
00:43:13.640I'm in substantial agreement with the overwhelming amount of what you said there.
00:43:21.420And I would say when I say roll back the state and I meant expand civil political and economic liberties.
00:43:32.040When I said expand the sphere of liberties, I didn't mean that there is zero, nothing for the state to do.
00:43:38.680And I completely agree with you when you say about the notion of virtue.
00:43:56.340And also the kind of republics get destroyed when the equality they go after is administrative equality, where every, any notion of hierarchy gets, is seen as tyrannical.
00:44:09.160So what I would say is that we can simultaneously expand the sphere of liberties we have while also trying to use the state in some areas in order to, you could say,
00:44:26.120cultivate patriotism because it seems to me that what you're talking about leads to how we can sort of generate in a population that has been so much used to outsourcing all its responsibilities for maintaining a healthy society and guarding the republic or any kind of social organization.
00:44:49.260How are we going to reinvigorate the moral timber of that population?
00:44:55.060I think that this can be done by, you could say, by trying to see how to instill a healthy dose of patriotism.
00:45:05.420So I wouldn't necessarily, I don't think that I would drastically disagree with something you said there.
00:45:12.040So, yeah, I do think that the rollback of the state to a significant extent is necessary, but I wouldn't say it's sufficient.
00:45:46.700No, it actually leads to the kind of people we talked about, the apolitical people who think that somehow they're just going to engage in economic activity and the state is not going to somehow develop in such a way that is going to tyrannize them.
00:46:06.360And this reminds me of, you know, Lenin and he was saying that, you know, some bourgeois, the bourgeois class are going to sell you the rope with which you're going to hang them.
00:46:15.840I don't think that this applies to the entirety of the bourgeois class, but some of those people tend to think that way.
00:46:27.480I just wanted to remind people of the quote by Pericles that people may think that politics is not going to, that they don't want to deal with politics, but politics will find a way to deal with them.
00:46:42.720So you mentioned a couple of times the Enlightenment.
00:46:45.900And before we run out of time, I certainly want to get to that because that's pretty important.
00:46:50.240I'll just frame an argument for you here and let you kind of respond to it.
00:46:53.880But Alistair MacIntyre in After Virtue makes the argument that the huge problem with the Enlightenment is its epistemological shift.
00:47:04.280It moves away from recognizing telos or tradition or revelation as relevant and tries to isolate rationality as the, if not the only, at least the dominant understanding mode of acquiring knowledge and reason.
00:47:24.980And in doing this, it unmoors the cultures from the traditions that make them particular.
00:47:32.580It makes it very difficult for you to maintain an idea of cultural particularity once you've made rationality the only acceptable form of knowledge.
00:47:44.500And we can see this pretty heavily kind of moved into our current day where we have kind of this devastating effect of you can't believe your eyes and ears.
00:47:55.240You can't believe your lived experience.
00:47:56.820You can't believe the wisdom and knowledge of your ancestors.
00:48:00.120The only thing that matters is our institutions full of scientists with degrees, right?
00:48:05.280Like this is the only thing in ways in which we can really understand truth.
00:48:09.080And that is terrible for all kinds of reasons.
00:48:12.000But most importantly, because it fractures the ability of people to have any kind of shared moral understanding.
00:48:18.680And so what we end up in is this situation where liberalism ultimately creates a overarching state, which is only there to be the final arbiter of competing moral visions, right?
00:48:29.700There's no, there's no agreed upon tradition.
00:48:32.380There's no agreed upon, you know, traditional moral inquiry.
00:48:36.760It's simply, okay, there's a plethora of unresolvable moral clashes.
00:48:43.260And so therefore the Leviathan state has to come in and kind of, you know, the total state has to administer solutions in every one of these scenarios because no one can come to an agreed upon understanding because we've kind of isolated this is the only way to grasp things.
00:49:01.680Right, so this is an excellent topic and thank you for steering the conversation that way.
00:49:06.360So I'll start with the final bit so we can just end with a political bit and stop caring about liberalism for a bit and go to the enlightenment.
00:49:16.140Right, so I would say that the kind of where it all goes wrong is with a particular conception of the notion of autonomy.
00:49:25.320So autonomy is by and large the idea of positive freedom and the idea of being the master of our own life, in a sense, the captain of a ship.
00:49:43.800Now, from a, you could say, a traditional perspective, you would say, and a classical liberal perspective from the 18th century and the early 19th, you would say a lot of people would say that this contains irreducibly individual elements there in the sense that you have to choose.
00:50:05.320You have to govern yourself to be self-governed.
00:51:03.560And I think that the later meal and a lot of the people coming afterwards fall into that tradition.
00:51:09.260And I'd say that this is where it goes completely wrong.
00:51:11.540And this kind of leads towards the total state that you are mentioning.
00:51:17.780And also Isaiah Berlin in 1958 in Two Concepts of Liberty speaks precisely about how the rhetoric of positive freedom can become incredibly totalitarian and justify any kind of totalitarianism, even communism, in the name of positive freedom.
00:51:35.840Going back to the Enlightenment and Alasdair MacIntyre, I think this is a very good criticism.
00:51:42.500And it's important to understand why I think it, why it is a good criticism.
00:51:48.160I believe in the values of the Enlightenment, but I believe that they are much better framed within a traditionalist framework.
00:51:59.540So, do I think the Logos is important?
00:52:04.680But not the Logos as it is understood in the late Enlightenment.
00:52:08.960The major problem, I think, with the Enlightenment is that it leads to what Hume said, the is or distinction.
00:52:20.400I wouldn't say all the Enlightenment leads there because there are several strands.
00:52:25.560Again, there is American, there is Scottish, there is English, there is French, there is German.
00:52:30.780But there are significant tendencies that are ontological, they're materialistic.
00:52:35.440And they lead to creating a worldview that is dominant, unfortunately, since I would say the 17th century or a bit later, where morality just can't be part of it.
00:52:48.160I don't think it makes people into moral monsters, but I think that people who are moral or frequent, who call themselves materialists, are moral despite their materialism.
00:53:01.120So, I would say that the kind of rationality of the materialistic strand of the Enlightenment is just a complex sensory mechanism.
00:53:11.840It's just a complex calculation of the senses.
00:53:14.460It has zero necessary connection with morality, with value, with the transcendent, nothing of a sort.
00:53:24.860And I think that that's actually problematizing people because the knee-jerk reaction of someone who says,
00:53:32.360well, I want to learn about stuff, I want to absorb conventional wisdom, I want to improve my life by thinking, is to go to what is considered conventional wisdom and popular.
00:53:47.400If the popular people of the time are scientists, in other words, advocates of scientists, they're going to tell people, essentially, you're a meat machine, value is an illusion, it's all an illusion conjured up by the brain that, because it has evolutionary advantages for natural selection.
00:54:07.800I think that this is a very destructive way to view the world, and it leads to a conception of rationality that is completely immoral, and that's where, for instance, the value of materialistic rationality, when it comes to just having a materialistic state that calculates outcomes, has zero connection to morality.
00:54:33.180So we have lots of corrupt people who just say, in the name of reason, I'm going to just do what I want, and I'm going to be immoral.
00:54:44.300So could we say in this instance, then, that classical liberalism is a set of political preferences, a way in which to understand the political tradition inside a specific people, inside a specific tradition,
00:54:59.580that doesn't really universally apply outside of maybe a few nations or peoples?
00:55:06.640So, the question of how universalism features in the tradition and the degree to which it does is one of the most important ones.
00:55:15.940I would say that those who approach it from a completely ideological standpoint and ignore culture, the specific character of a nation, are essentially leading us towards the bad forms of it, the undesirable and the ultimately indefensible ones.
00:55:36.400I think that there can be no political theorist worth the result that doesn't focus on particularities and their importance.
00:55:46.960So, we cannot say that this is something that is going to work.
00:55:54.720But let me just give you an example, because I say this to a lot of people who are of the just open borders type and whatever.
00:56:05.300I'm telling you, you can't say, for instance, that you can't read Montesquieu.
00:56:10.960I'm asking them, have you read Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws?
00:56:23.960And why do they don't find it interesting?
00:56:25.980Because it talks about particularities.
00:56:27.300It's 700 pages, for instance, where he's talking about how climate, nationhood, the character of people, all of these situational factors affect legislation.
00:56:43.680And he ends up with saying, essentially, you can't have a one-size-fits-all approach.
00:56:52.840The people who have it, I would say, are basically globalists who are doing it for completely immoral reasons.
00:56:58.800And they say, my side is right now dominant.
00:57:02.040And we are going to say that we're going to expand this philosophy to the entire world.
00:57:06.500I agree with you 100%, but I think that the position you just staked would make you the woke right for most of the people who are themselves calling themselves classical liberal in today's political discourse.
00:57:19.780I know that this is a terrible characterization that they're placing, but practically in our political sphere and our discussion today, if you gave that formulation to most of the people calling themselves classical liberal,
00:57:31.360they would say, oh, that's postmodern, that's fascist, this is the woke right.
00:57:38.760The very core of key classical liberal thinkers that you're talking about would be rejected by those wearing the label in our modern political discourse.
00:57:49.380So I have a false response to this that is, I would say, I consider it a bit tragic because I think that on the one hand,
00:57:56.480people who have done so are unfair, but one of the reasons why they have done so is because they're, for instance, unaware of fascism.
00:58:07.760And it seems to me that the work right controversy right now has essentially span out of control.
00:58:15.720And the initial motivation, or at least the stated motivation is to try to find a way to demarcate between, you could say, acceptable and non-acceptable views.
00:58:27.940I think that personally, I think that there are stuff that Lindsay and Kissin have to say, but I wouldn't be as quick to dismiss people as they are.
00:58:40.920Personally, I have written something about it.
00:58:44.000I think that the term can have sense in some minute cases, but essentially we should just basically read history.
00:58:53.720And it's better if we stop using the term.
00:58:57.940It's much better if we actually, yeah.
00:59:00.820It's much better if we actually use all terms so we can ground our conversation and we can into a historical, into a setting where history is much more prevalent.
00:59:18.740Yeah, I think that this is a bit unfortunate because I see Lindsay has a beef with Carl.
01:00:14.640I, I, I, I, I can't give you an answer because I don't know exactly the specific of the case, of the case.
01:00:25.940Would you, would it, would it clash with a classical liberal, liberal understanding of the state and its spheres of sovereignty if they did not allow for a union of homosexuals?
01:00:40.920Would that be against classical liberalism?
01:00:51.800Well, I would say, I would say that when it comes to, to marriage, I would say that it, it probably wouldn't be consistent, but with a caveat, it would have to be political marriage.
01:01:06.420Because if, for, you, you can't force a priest, according to the way I see it, you can't force a priest who doesn't want to do it, to do it.
01:01:18.680Does it, doesn't that kind of clash with most of your understanding of the founding fathers or many of the people you've drawn on as authorities inside the classical liberal tradition?
01:01:32.120But you're talking to me about something that wasn't so much an issue.
01:01:36.560I don't know to what extent it was an issue back then.
01:01:39.160And I don't know whether the, if we are to talk about the particularities of a case, the world in the 17, say, 80s US and early 1800s is different to the world as it is now in 2024.
01:01:54.200And you would say, for instance, that, which is a bit weird if you see this, but Trump and a lot of the Republicans right now seem to be, in some cases, a bit less conservative than some Democrats of the 90s.
01:02:11.340So, yeah, sticking with the lightning round nature, I don't want to debate any of these things.
01:02:15.000I'm just trying to get the lay of the land on these issues.
01:02:18.080So what about a restriction of sovereignty?
01:02:21.040Would it push against a classical liberal tradition to have any limitation on sovereignty beyond just obviously like being a citizen, being a technically legal citizen because you – like, could you say only people who have served in the military, only men, only heads of households?
01:02:44.520Would any of those restrictions be consistent with classical liberalism or would it drive this out?
01:02:49.820Question, are you talking about national sovereignty or individual sovereignty?
01:03:18.540When it comes to franchise right now, I would say that any kind of person who tries to do politics should focus on the specifics of the case and I would say have a clear-cut plan.
01:03:31.760Something that I think is something that probably could be seen as important would be to examine whether there should be restrictions in the franchise when it comes to people who haven't grown up in a country.
01:03:50.920For instance, let's just – let me just say a lot of people are just now migrating into the UK.
01:04:00.960I don't think that if the state, for instance, Kiyostama tomorrow said, I'm going to give you the vote, I don't think that, A, it would be inconsistent to take that vote, that voting right back if – for the next government.
01:04:18.540So it's not that I would say restricting franchise in itself is inconsistent.
01:04:23.640Personally, I'd be hesitant depending on when it comes to the native population.
01:04:29.820I'd be a bit more steadfast with the case I just mentioned.
01:04:35.160If a community wanted to – because they shared a tradition and cultural understanding and a preference for a particular religious understanding – wanted to pass a blasphemy law, would that be inconsistent with political – with classical liberalism or could it exist inside of it?
01:04:55.260Well, okay, so when it comes to the community and the blasphemy law, I think – I don't know to what extent – this, for instance, reminds me of Islam right now.
01:05:09.560I think that this is – I don't think that this is a good thing because in the present situation, for instance, the push towards saying that we're going to have blasphemy laws for Islam is going to lead to constantly listening to the word Islamophobia.
01:05:31.500Anything, almost everything is going to count as Islamophobia and it's going to be used completely arbitrarily.
01:05:37.420So I would say, in principle, having blasphemy laws would be a bit problematic.
01:05:51.240Would it be inconsistent with classical liberalism or could it exist inside of it to acknowledge a particular religious tradition as dominant and, if not declaring it as the national church or something like that,
01:06:03.140still favorite when it comes to education or the celebration of holidays, these kinds of things in the public square?
01:06:15.080I think that what classical liberal would say no to is to use the state to impose that on – that totalistically on people.
01:06:26.720But I don't think, for instance, that saying that England is an Anglican state would imply that it cannot be somehow classically liberal.
01:06:39.240And I think it's a good way of trying to ensure, you could say, a sort of patriotism.
01:06:47.740But there are also some links there because you have people who say, should we give priority to the nation or should we give priority to the church?
01:06:57.520But generally speaking, if it were a kind of dominant religion while allowing other religions to exist, I'd say it's absolutely consistent.
01:07:18.660I think this is definitely clarifying for people, and I'm glad that we were able to kind of get to better definitions than we normally get from, like, random spats on Twitter.
01:07:30.220So I'm definitely glad we were able to do that.
01:07:32.480Before we move to the questions of the people, do you want to send people anywhere, recommend, you know, Lotus Eaters or your Twitter or anything like that?
01:07:40.380Yeah, they should definitely watch Lotus Eaters, the podcast of the Lotus Eaters.
01:07:45.140You can subscribe on the internet on our Lotus Eaters channel, and you can also check our lotuseaters.com.
01:07:54.640We are a really good team, and I'm sure people are going to like our content.
01:08:02.320We speak about politics across the West and basically across the world, but we focus mostly on the UK, US, and the EU.
01:08:12.120We talk about a lot of the problems of the current day.
01:09:16.120So I'll give flesh and blood to the – or structure to what I think is the common good.
01:09:22.280I think that the common good is essentially tied to the common good of a people in politics.
01:09:29.320Some universalists are talking about the common good of humanity.
01:09:32.360I'll talk about the common good of the people because this is how politics has always been done.
01:09:37.220And I have zero – I have zero evidence that it won't be done like that in the future.
01:09:43.180So when we're talking about a people, I think the common good is to be understood both in terms of outcomes, but secondarily in terms of outcomes.
01:09:56.600But I would say most of it has to do with character and personal flourishing.
01:10:01.180So I would say that the individual common good has to do with the flourishing of the individual character in terms of, you know, Aristotelian terms.
01:10:10.280And when it comes to the common good, I would say that it is that which you could say is the maximum possible, the maximally virtuous organization of these people.
01:10:24.500And I consider – and one of the reasons why I think it is important from an ethical perspective to advocate for a broadly liberal view is because I think that, as Aristotle says, and as most theorists afterwards say, Augustine, for instance, St. Augustine of HIPAA, virtue requires choice.
01:10:48.280So I would say that the common good is to be understood in terms of a maximally virtuous form of a population and how they flourish in a particular setting.
01:11:00.260Now, I know that this is a bit abstract, but this is a very fast question.
01:11:04.900Well, and it has to be because I appreciate your focus on particularity there.
01:11:08.980You cannot understand the common good unless you have lived among the people until you have understood what it is to be a part of that community.
01:11:16.200Once you are – this is why subsidiary is so critical.
01:11:19.360This is why particularity is so critical.
01:11:21.620What is the common good for someone living in Florida in the United States is not even the same as the common good for someone living in Arizona in the United States, much less in the U.K. or in, you know, China or these things.
01:11:37.840And so, you know, the ordered liberty is the what you're looking for there is the liberty, but it is ordered towards the good, like you said, the maximum virtue inside those systems.
01:11:49.200But you can only – you can't give a universal definition because it is very particular to the way of life of those peoples.
01:11:55.620Richard – Johan Richardson says, classical liberalism is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, a civilized nation, a system of English laws, the voice of justice and consanguity – I'm not sure.
01:12:10.860I'm probably reading that wrong – and against bringing on the merciless, savage frontier inhabitants.
01:12:17.620Richard – It requires a high-trust society.
01:12:39.160Richard – George W. Hayduke says, honest definition of woke right equals anything that challenges liberalism's claim to the null hypothesis.
01:12:45.660Richard – Epithet gets pinned on the pre- and post-modern.
01:12:49.520Richard – I do think that is fair in general, but as Stelios has already said, this is mostly a useless term, you know, even if there are corners in which it gets applied properly, ultimately.
01:13:45.020Sorry, I have a soft spot for him because the video with the chainsaw where he's on top of the car and he's using the – it's just my favorite video in politics.
01:13:54.820Yeah, no, no, he's easy to love, though it was funny that he had a showdown with Hoppe out of nowhere.
01:15:24.840Rawls is so abstract that he sort of doesn't give particular directions.
01:15:34.680Anyone could come and say, well, in the original condition, these are the principles that I would pick.
01:15:41.700And this is the kind of formal structure I would pick.
01:15:47.160So I don't – I'm not particularly a fan of Rawls.
01:15:50.700But also there are some shady aspects of Rawls because some people are saying that the two forms of government he thought were proper were sort of like something like property-owning democracy, which he didn't particularly flesh out.
01:16:05.620And every person I hear about it just says something to the effect that business should turn to collectives, which I don't particularly think is a good idea.
01:16:17.280And then he says something like a liberal socialism, but not the welfare state.
01:16:22.580Rawls was criticizing the welfare state for not being welfarist enough.