The Machine of Personal Responsibility

On the History of Liberal Ideology

By Robert Kurz

[This article originally published in the Brazilian newspaper Folha in 1997 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.krisis.org.]

Liberalism claims “freedom” for itself in its name. The liberal pathos invokes the personal initiative and personal responsibility of the individual. At first this always sounds good. Who would oppose this beautiful term? However as enlightened creatures of the modern age, we also know that words may not be trusted. When George Orwell wrote his negative utopia “1984”, his theme was public language whose terms mean the opposite of what they say officially. As a rhetorical form of whitewashing, this language was known from antiquity as “euphemism” The ancient Greeks described their demonic goddesses of revenge whose hairs were weaving snakes as “well-meaning”. The term liberalism may have arisen in a similar connection.

To discover the truth about a phenomenon of social life, going back to its origins is always recommended. Liberalism arose as opposition to the early modern military states of absolutist monarchies and principalities in the 17th and 18th centuries. However there was another far greater opposition of the masses at the same time who were not involved with liberalism. Comparing these two forms of opposition is very revealing.

At that time absolutism was the first stage of the modern capitalist mode of production by unleashing the modern market- and money economy for the needs of its enormous military apparatus and bureaucracies. This development was felt to be a monstrous and obscene repression by the large majority of the people. The old “simple” feudalism only outwardly tapped the rural and artisan producers of the agrarian natural economy. These producers only had to give a small part of their products to the feudal lords or perform certain works for them. Otherwise they were largely left in peace by feudalism. On their fields and in their workplaces, they could be active at their own discretion and had their own institutions of local self-government.

Absolutism destroyed this limited autonomy and sought to subject people to its centralist bureaucracy to bleed them white and make them into “human material” of a total foreign-determined abstract “work” under the law of money. After this imposition, European farmers and artisans fought back fiercely for more than three hundred years up to the middle of the 19th century. When they followed the banner of “freedom” in their numerous revolts, they always focused on their social autonomy both against the incursions of absolutist bureaucracy and against the pressures of the new anonymous markets. They did not want to be harassed by a foreign principle but to retain control over their immediate living conditions.

In contrast, liberalism was the ideology of the economic “men of action” on the ground of the anonymous market- and money economy released from absolutism. The new financial capitalists flourished under absolutism, the great overseas traders and colonial speculators, the operators of the work penitentiary and prison factories as well as the owners or managers of large estates commissioned by the state for the arising agrarian world market were the first to turn to the liberal ideas. They had no contact with the social concept of freedom of the revolting farmers and tradespersons. Rather they completely agreed with absolutism in the interest of making the mass of producers into “human material” of the world markets, dispossessing them from control over the means of production and degrading them to mere “employees” under the dictates of investment capital.

Therefore the early liberals did not imagine that the “human material” of the market economy could have any kind of right to “freedom”. Among them there were even slaveholders and large property owners who forcibly chased peasants from their land to transform it into cattle pasture. When they spoke of “freedom”, they always meant only their own economic freedom of movement as investors and “entrepreneurs” who felt enclosed by the bureaucratic-state tutelage of the absolutist machinery. Thus their opposition to absolutism had a very different character than the social resistance of the producers. They always made a common front with absolutism against the social revolts “from below”. The conflict of the original liberal ideology and its clientel with the “divine grace” of the absolutist early modern state was only a relative inner-capitalist family dispute around the further development of the common commercial foundations.

In this early criticism of capitalist masters intent on their middle-class “freedom” regarding the social controls by the authoritarian state, a unique logical inversion of standpoints shows the irrational character of both sides. The early modern and monarchic systems as well as that state absolutism (and later socialist and fascist) sought on one hand to subject the economic activity of individuals to vast state control. On the other hand, the claim was also raised that human subjectivity, the human will (in the form of the monarch, the government, the “Fuhrer” or the central committee) should be “sovereign” in relation to the system of the market and money. Conversely liberalism on one side represented the economic “personal initiative” of the capitalist individual in relation to the state and on the other side completely abandoned the claim of a sovereignty of the human will towards the system of the market and money. This system makes itself independent as the blind law of conduct while the person exists at the mercy of “economic structures” and their aimless dynamic.

Adam Smith, the founder of modern economic theory on a liberal foundation, glorified the system of the total market economy as a kind of “divine machine” guided by the blind “self-regulative” mechanism of prices. Analogous to the mechanistic physical worldview of Isaac Newton, Smith understood the economy as an automatic world machine of society to whose gearing people must submit. In physics, the mechanistic worldview was long overcome but humanity is still (and more than ever today) arrested to the mechanistic orientation of the 18th century that is “objectivized” in the forms of social reproduction. In this way, liberalism is marked by an enormous contradiction. The social “freedom” of the individual is always identical with the unconditional common capitulation of all individuals to a blind machine of society that is not negotiable, the secularized Baal of capital.

Through its boundless claims on society, absolutism produces the subject-less monster of an economic automation that makes itself independent which society can no longer control and which soon evaded its “sovereignty”. In reality the liberalism which initially sued for the “freedom” of the individual has only achieved the independence of this “machine”. Liberals are nothing but the priests of an automatic idol dictating an irrational course according to mechanistic “laws”.

The opposition of liberalism and state absolutism is not emancipatory but only reflects the social paradoxes of the modern goods-producing system. Either the human “sovereignty” toward the market machine is masked as authoritarian control of the state over individuals or the “freedom” of individuals masks as the total self-abandonment of the human will to the blind course of the market machine. For the majority of people, the antithesis of absolutism and liberalism is irrelevant. For them, whether they are plagued and humiliated by a state bureaucracy or by the subject-less mechanisms of the market is unimportant. The people in eastern Europe who came from the rain of state socialist dictatorship into the gutter of social degradation by the “free” market made this experience in the last years.

In the 18th and early 19th century, liberalism had the problem of removing the bureaucratic state claim of absolutism and the claims of the masses for social autonomy. Forcing people through repression, police, military, gallows and prisons to make themselves into material of the “labor markets” and subject their own abstract labor power to the laws of supply and demand was impossible. As a result, liberalism began to join repression with popular- and industrial “pedagogy”. If the first liberals only referred the term “personal responsibility” to themselves as “men of action” of an individual capitalism, this term was now extended to “human material”. A tremendous cynicism lies here. The people totally dispossessed of all control over their own material and social living conditions should be “personally responsible” by voluntarily making themselves into “work cattle” of the market and crave “jobs” even under the most miserable conditions.

One of the great pioneers for this liberal “popular pedagogy” was Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the founder of a “utilitarian philosophy”. The “striving for happiness” should be translated into the impulse to integrate all expressions of life in the goal of capital exploitation. Bentham invented a special penitentiary, the so called Panoptikon to bring people to see their own “happiness” in making themselves “useful” in the capitalist treadmills.

What is the Panoptikon? Bentham says that the principle suited for persons is also appropriate for factories, offices, hospitals, schools, barracks and so forth. From an architectural perspective, the Panoptikon consists of a circular building with the box of the “inspector” at its center and the cells of the prisoners or trainees separated from one another at its periphery. Many prisons and “work houses” of the 19th century were built according to this model. The refined goal of the arrangement is that the prisoners feel permanently observed and controlled without knowing whether the lodge of the “inspector” is really occupied. The inmates should gradually act automatically “by themselves” as though they were watched even if that isn’t the case.

The Panoptikon, a model of the “ideal” free enterprise society for Bentham, was nothing but a liberal “personal responsibility machine” to condition individuals for market-conforming conduct. The mechanisms of submission and self-denial should become “inner spurs to human conduct”. This liberal education dictatorship was objectivized in architectonic and organizational structures in signs and psychic mechanisms. The capitalist imperatives as the philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in his book “Surveillance and Punishment” (1976) about the Panoptikon appear “in a concerted arrangement of bodies, surfaces, lights and views… an apparatus whose inner mechanisms produce the condition in which individuals are caught”. Bentham added the finishing touches to the perfection of his social apparatus of training persons. He was the inventor of solitary confinement, identification cards, name-tags and spacious offices. In 1804 he proposed tatooing all English persons with a number.

At the same time Bentham was an ardent democrat. From servants to ministers, everyone should cooperate in “public self-control”, that is in observing oneself and others to wind up together the daily clock of self-repression. Kant, the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment, argued that the person “should emerge out of the tutelage caused by himself and use his intelligence without the guidance of another”. The secret meaning of this liberal imperative is clear in Bentham’s perspective: every one is his own policeman, teacher, prison guard and slave driver! The self-regulating world machine of the market needs self-regulating, “automatically” adaptive individuals.

Bentham anticipated Orwell’s nightmare of “1984” by almost 200 years as a real project. Ironically the liberal-democratic world today understands “1984” as a warning against (state) totalitarianism without recognizing that it itself has long been the product of a totalitarian liberal brainwashing. Today we all act as “self-regulating” robots of the free enterprise personal responsibility machine. That older idea of “freedom” which aimed at social autonomy is regarded as pre-industrial and primitive. Obviously we cannot return to a limited agrarian way of life of farmers and artisans. However must the price of progress be the social degradation of the person to a “Pavlovian dog” of the market machine? Is humanity really unable to regulate modern productive forces through social self-determination and conscious agreement instead of handing itself over to a blind economic machine? The absolutism of the market is not an alternative to the absolutism of the state. We have the task of re-inventing the old idea of “social freedom” for the 21st century against the “Orwellian freedom” of liberalism.