Crito-liberalism

Establishing a coherent liberal-pragmatic-critical realist and systems-based synthesis

Adam Smith described political economy as “a branch of the science of the legislator.” What happened to that scientific branch?

We are in polycrisis. So what should we do?

Taking as a starting point Robert Heilbroner’s 1985 definition of political economy as “a study of how politics shapes the economy and how the economy shapes politics,” the effort to define a renewed, functional and beneficial political economy must engage with questions surrounding the contribution of economics through the political process to the emergence of the conditions of polycrisis. It will address specifically the question: “If economics is so useful in policy-making, (i) how did we get in to the mess in which we find ourselves (i.e., polycrisis)? and (ii) how can political economy help us to ameliorate and resolve the contributory elements of polycrisis? The first question can be expanded to consider: “What has failed? (a) economics; or (b) political economy; (c) politics; or (d) something else entirely? And how and why has the failure(s) arisen? Who and what have contributed to the failure(s)? How can the knowledge that interrogating these issues may reveal help us to emerge minimally scathed by polycrisis and what steps will be required to facilitate that process?”

While our approach will be closer to classical liberalism that any other contemporary ideology or philosophic position, liberalism, appropriately, must always evolve. We will call our approach crito-liberalism. Mostly, it looks like modernised Millian liberalism (from John Stuart Mill). However, Mill's liberalism, based on his great On Liberty, has been updated in several different directions, which require careful clarification.

The first clarification is Austrian-turned-British economist Friedrich von Hayek's innovations describing the price-discovery role of markets, that is, their role as information aggregators. While Hayek worked within the Austrian framework of Ludwig von Mises' distinction between praxeology (a theory of purposeful human behaviour) and tâtonnement (iterative market determination of price), his extension of the work of his teacher were profound.

The second clarification is a rejection of the anarcho-capitalism of the American libertarians, also heavily influenced by Mises. This approach advocates extreme laisser faire economics with a mininal state. It is neither practicable nor desirable. While the state should only be as large as is required to realise efficiently a comprehensive vision of liberal rights, our modern concept of rights has expanded signficantly (for example, Berlin's distinction between positive and negative liberties). Similarly, the clarification of conditions of market failure & market imperfections has offered a more balance evalution of the relative performance and failure conditions of markets and of government action.

The third clarification is the extension of liberal political philosophy by American John Rawls, whose thought experiment the veil of ignorance is an essential extension to liberal thinking.

The fourth clarification concerns incorporation of the central tenets of American pragmatism, from Peirce, James and Dewey, notably recognition of the importance of consequentialism and of James' adbuctive reasoning to the practical philosophy of science, especially social science.

The fifth clarification is the incorporation of social dynamics and social systems, suggesting cybernetics, which emerged from studying scientifically the basic laws ruling self-regulation, self-organisation, autonomy, communication, adaptation, and complexity. Important exrly contributors to cybernetics include biologist Ludwig van Bertalanffy, Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, Gregory Bateson, Ross Ashby, Jimmie Savage, Kurt Lewin and Warren McCulloch

The sixth clarification is a very broad one. The vital importance of critical reasoning must be included in any realistic, modern liberal philosophy. The major stands of critical reasoning are:

(i) the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse & Fromm and the second generation, particularly Habermas;

(ii) the empirically-based power theorists, primarily, in the US: C. Wright MIlls & Bill Domhoff;

(iv) the cognitivists, linguistic theorists & psycho-linguists, especially Penrose, Vygotsky, Chomsky, Searle, Ryle and, recently, MacGilchrist;

(v) the social constructionists, the later Wittgenstein, Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann,

(vi) the post-structuralists and post-modernists, especially Lyotard, Barthes, Beaudrillard, Bourdieu, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida & Lacan, and more recently, Chantel Mouffe (although most of the decontructionalist content here can safely be avoided as sophistry turned on itself);

(viii) the critical realists, most notably Roy Bhaskar and, in economics, Tony Lawson.

The contributions of these thinkers, and many others, add both realism and vitality to traditional liberalism and provide a stronger base for dealing with the complexities of modern life and the contraditions that have manifested in modern capitalism as it has been implemented in Western social democracies.

It is partly from these critical strands of thought that crito-liberalism draws its name.

The other source of the name is the original Crito, by Plato, portraying Socrates' dialogue with his wealthy friend Crito, who advocated that Socrates escape , in which Crito offers to aid him practically and financially, prior to his execution. Plato presents Socrates' arguments on the nature of justice and duty to the Athenian Republic.

The use of 'crito' in our re-definition of liberalism refers to this concept of both reciprocal and corresponding duties to the rights bestowed by in the modern Lockean conception — of rights to life, liberty and property (or 'pursuit of happiness' in the Jeffersonian interpretation). While it is neatly captured by Mill's harm principle, it bears reinforcement in the modern context of rights-based social dialogue in which attendant duties and obligations are frequently disregarded. These reciprocal and corresponding duties are a vital component of any active debate over the roles of the individual relative to the state and are critically important to establishing a modern, viable and publicly-endorsed liberalism.