[The Liberal Mind by Kenneth R. Minogue. (Liberty Fund, 2008[1963]; 207 pp.)]
I found it hard to get a grip on The Liberal Mind, because, as it seems to me, there is an underlying tension in the book’s argument. Kenneth Minogue (1913-2014) was a New Zealand political philosopher who taught at the London School of Economics, and he was quite sympathetic, on the whole, to the free market, though he deplored what he took to be its excesses; and “libertarian” was not for him to term of praise—far from it. He views libertarians as people who want to maximize the satisfaction of their desires, and if you responded to him that libertarianism is based, not on an unlimited desire for acquisition, especially of material goods, but rather on natural rights, he would not be impressed.
He views Lockean natural rights as grounded in the desires of individuals rather than, as Murray Rothbard did, as the continuation and improvement of the traditional natural law of the Middle Ages, as expounded for example by St. Thomas Aquinas. (Indeed, in one place he reproaches Aquinas for suggesting views that led to classical liberalism and libertarianism.) Minogue is, to a large extent, a follower of Michael Oakeshott, for whom traditions, not articulated by conscious reasoning, were of prime importance, which does not exclude efforts to change them, so long as reforms were moderate.
The underlying tension in the book is that, despite the stress on tradition and opposition to arguments based on desire, by far the largest part of the book consists of psychological analyses of various political programs. The analyses are often acute but sometimes difficult to follow, as one position is shown to transform itself into its opposite.
We can gain much for his insights, especially about “wokist” programs, of which he was one of the earliest to criticize; and in the remainder of this review, I shall discuss a few of these.
One of the most important of these insights concerns collective guilt. He says:
…just as the self involved in self-pity may be a collective self, so also may the self in self-reproach. Thus one may reproach oneself not only for acts which one chose oneself to commit, but also for acts which were done in one’s name by more or less representative political bodies; or for acts done by people long dead.
An example of the latter case would be the European anti-colonialist who reproaches himself for the entire colonial policy of his country, a man fruitlessly concerned to reproach himself with what “we” once did to “them.” The result of this kind of feeling is the creation of a curious intellectual entity which we may call category guilt. Thus, as a political pamphlet put it, the concern of British policy (towards Jamaica, in this instance) should be “to repay the debt we owe them for long years of exploitation by now helping to develop the economies of their countries, and make possible a decent life for them there.”
Minogue notes that the libertarian “humanitarians” profess to be helping others but they show little concern from finding out what the beneficiaries of their help wanted, but instead paternalistically sought what they deemed good for them:
The liberal mind turned the actual sufferings of the human race into the materials of cliché and stereotype, but that was the least of it. The “suffering situations” invoked by the literature played down the active character of the objects of their indignation and saw in them little but pain. Terms such as “aid” or “help” logically entail the idea that the helper is seconding some independent endeavor of the person being helped. Aid to the Third World was thus often a misnomer, since it commonly took no account of what its supposed beneficiaries were actually doing or wanting, and merely provided materials which might help in making these people more like us.
Another of Minogue’s insights is that the programs of the left are often dominated by a search for moral purity, which is inimical to the recognition that politics is a struggle for power. He calls the mentality behind these programs “moral nationalism”; this is not a misprint for “moral rationalism,” his more frequent target, as one would expect of an Oakeshottian:
The development of this particular complex moral sensibility appears now to have coalesced into a distinguishable political movement in Great Britain, a movement which we may describe as moral nationalism. This movement gains most mass support from the program that Britain should abandon her independent nuclear strength in order to give a moral lead to other nations;. . .[it] has been summed up in the conviction that our country’s role is to be exemplary rather than powerful. Like many moral movements, this one involves a withdrawal into inner moral certainties, with a consequent refusal to take external events seriously. As a political policy, for example, moral nationalism assumes that politicians in other countries will be moved to imitate the example which has been given; if this factual assumption were to be proved wrong, however, moral nationalists would not hesitate. They would still be concerned to do the right thing anyway. Moral nationalism is thus one more maneuver in the long tradition of devices which are thought to do away with politics, seen as the selfish exercise of power.
In a way that is reminiscent of Objectivism, though on a quite different basis; Minogue deprecates an emphasis on the need for self-sacrifice by the rich, while the “the oppressed” are encouraged to have unlimited demands:
The formulation of such questions in terms of “basic human needs” is thus a device which serves to obscure the conflicts and social changes which will result from following a welfarist policy. Every social policy requires sacrifices—which is why all political movements include one clause on the beauties of sacrifice. And sacrifice is good because it is self-sacrifice, the conquest of self-indulgence. Even the classics teacher resisting the encroachments of science can be presented as self-interested. So can the painter who thinks of painting but not of how much white bread for Red China his Chinese white would buy. Not to accept a welfarist policy can come to seem a moral defect, a lack of compassion, pity, sympathy for one’s fellow creatures.
Minogue’s keen insights often led him to foresee what would not be evident to most people for many decades, and readers of The Liberal Mind might enjoy grappling with an unusual moral sensibility, although Rothbardians will often have occasion to disagree with it.
