The great liberal insight was that social order need not depend on submission to hierarchy but on reciprocity, instead — a reciprocity of peace and liberality and tolerance.
When the Other refuses to reciprocate on those grounds, however, then we have a state of war, where we must reciprocate belligerence for belligerence.
This is clear in the writings of Herbert Spencer — what with his distinction between the militant and industrial forms of coöperation and social cohesion — but it is even clearer among today’s evolutionary psychologists (EP) and sociologists (sociobiologists).
Liberal theory — and, after it, libertarian theory — sidetracked the reciprocity issue by reifying rights into a metaphysical realm, and positing their inalienability. This had some political advantages in its heyday, but nowadays prevents people from dealing with the actual advantages of liberal solutions. It rigidifies thought, of course, turning libertarians into philosophical dogmatists. But, worse yet, it throws the problem of conflict resolution to the authoritarians.
Hence the modern impasse. Libertarians are still trapped by inalienability theories, and progressives are locked out of access to the basic notions of conflict avoidance, which makes them crazed. And conservatives and “liberals” waffle between reciprocal and authoritarian solutions depending on the issue, or the politics of the moment. This makes their policies incoherent at best.
And the people, in general, have become utterly disenchanted with all sides.
twv
Wirkman Comment 