“Liberalism is the political theory justifying this state of affairs, which means that the purpose of liberalism is to ensure that no one ever knows who decides anything.”
From the Archive
“By “liberalism,” of course, I mean the traditional variety, which starts political reflection with the assumption that there is something pre-politically inviolable in the individual, that this inviolability implies a series of rights that the individual bears with him or her in entering political society, and that the main business of politics is cataloguing those rights, setting up hierarchies amongst them, figuring out how best to protect them, to prevent their exercise from leading to one colliding into another, and so on.”
“Liberalism has generated the illusion that what appears below the threshold of direct supervision is what, in fact, determines the form of supervision; even more, that the supervision is a servant of those actors which have merely been provided some leeway.”
“We don’t even need examples: as soon as you guarantee a series of vague, abstract rights you will immediately proceed to generate exceptions. You have whatever rights the government doesn’t find it urgent to violate at the moment.”
“Liberal democracy is constituted by the severing of equality and freedom, which become incommensurable “values” which need to be balanced and one of which must be given priority at any instant.”
“But what has not been sufficiently appreciated is that, like the Romantic utopianism derided by Marx , liberalism cannot perpetuate itself beyond its founding generation without this original intention becoming a source of “perverse incentives.””
“In fact, something like that will need to be enhanced under "absolutism" (or whatever it ends up being called), because liberalism hypes it but actually corrodes it. So, yes, there will be a dialectic with liberalism.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Liberalism names, for GA, not a philosophy of freedom but a mode of concealment. It "starts political reflection with the assumption that there is something pre-politically inviolable in the individual," makes "the main business of politics" the "cataloguing" and balancing of the rights that follow, and so reframes every decision as the protection or collision of prior entitlements (after-liberalism-2). Because the center never stops issuing imperatives, this reframing does not remove authority but hides it: liberalism "has generated the illusion that what appears below the threshold of direct supervision is what, in fact, determines the form of supervision; even more, that the supervision is a servant of those actors which have merely been provided some leeway" (anthropomorphics-center-and-distribution). Its guarantees are thus self-undermining — "as soon as you guarantee a series of vague, abstract rights you will immediately proceed to generate exceptions" — so that in practice "you have whatever rights the government doesn't find it urgent to violate at the moment" (liberal-democracy-is-the-concealment-of-power).
This places liberalism firmly in the register of critique rather than of scenic origin. It is distinct from sovereignty, which it does not deny but disperses and cloaks, and from the victimary affect that drives its late crises: liberalism is the specific ideological machinery that ensures "no one ever knows who decides anything." Katz reads its internal contradiction as the "severing of equality and freedom" into incommensurable values a state must forever balance (the-mistake-of-liberal-democracy), while Gans notes that its founding intention corrodes over time, since "liberalism cannot perpetuate itself beyond its founding generation without this original intention becoming a source of 'perverse incentives'" (clr-136). Yet the concept it hypes — individuality — persists and must be reconstituted rather than discarded, "because liberalism hypes it but actually corrodes it" (online-version-of-erics-gans-a-new-way-of-thinking). The task GA poses is to bring the concealed decider back into view: to inquire openly into the meaning of imperatives issued by the center.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“Liberalism, furthermore, could only advance the same way—by locating new or hitherto unnoted obstacles to freedom. Different forms of liberalism will offer different answers to the question, obstacles to what, exactly? That is, where is the presently unrealized freedom/equality located? What is the unconvertible imperative forbidding? For metaphysical…”
“But maybe liberalism is wrong. Or was right, for a limited time, in certain places, among certain sectors of the population. And maybe is no longer. The abstract freedoms advanced by liberalism suited the rising middle classes in their struggle against feudalism (and slavery and absolutism) perfectly, and then gained new life in the struggle against…”
“But there must be something that prevents the complete, unlimited power of the ruler from being exercised unchecked upon each and every member of society! If liberalism is part of your common sense, or even a little piece of it, it will be very difficult to get past this kind of reaction. Of course the reaction itself, along with the pitiful devices put in…”
“If liberal modernity, as it has often been accused of doing, in fact destroys meaning, it is on this level of linguistic meaning that we should be able to identify its effects. If we just look at the most basic liberal concepts we find a junkyard of meaningless phrases: “individual,” “equality,” “autonomy,” “rights,” “freedoms,” and so on. These are all…”
“There is only one political principle or axiom worth anything, and that’s because it is converted into an anti-political axiom when adhered to: if you give someone the responsibility to carry out some task or function, you must give them the power they need to do it. It’s difficult, but possible to imagine forms of democracy that accord with this…”
“Those entrusted, to be more precise, must be those willing to draw some of the violent centering toward themselves, if necessary. Furthermore, we can say that the government has an interest in every individual having opportunities to reduce the “meaning gap” I identified between “speaker’s meaning” and “sentence’s meaning,” between the way one sees oneself…”
“[Q:SamgyeopsalChonsa] Some people I've been talking to have been describing GA as the NAP or Hobbes 'on autism': I'm interested in hearing how GA, and its fundamental premise of language deferring violence, is not just a re-packaging of the NAP or Hobbes or many other Liberal thinkers and ideas? I don't know what "NAP" refers to, but regarding liberalism…”
“All of liberalisms most cherished principles presuppose unbridgeable asymmetries in power. Equal rights, human rights, free speech, voting rights, freedom of association—all of these “God-given” rights depend upon the Leviathan, because none of them could possibly exist if power receded below the level of the state’s “monopoly on legitimate force.” If…”
“If all thought has indeed become political, the solution to its dreariness is not to return to a bygone era when it wasn’t, but to forge ahead through the political to a higher, metapolitical , level. This has been my overall view of neoconservatism . It has been my claim that its opposition to liberalism is not horizontal but dialectical, creating the…”
“If the Church or the judiciary is to be the ultimate arbiter, then if one wants to counter the king or president one seeks control of the Church or judiciary, or Church doctrine or legal theory, which, in turn, requires control over the universities, seminaries and law schools. Liberalism is the political theory justifying this state of affairs, which means…”
Key Texts
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