“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”1
And so the argument goes, round and round, where it stops, nobody knows, the centuries old battle between public and private, between socialism and capitalism, seems without end, as if the disputants, intoxicated by rarefaction of the abstract heights, have ignored the process of history itself which has largely made irrelevant these very musings. Yet, humanity has never felt it beneath itself to starve, struggle, maim and kill another on behalf of an idea, and so the battle must be settled in the ideal sphere itself, in the realm of ideas.
Michel Foucault once called the cold war face-off between capitalism and socialism a mere “tempest in a teapot,” snubbing in four words a conflict that had immersed millions and brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Can such an outrageous remark be attributed to that run-of-the-mill academic pretension that so haughtily places itself above everything concrete and meaningful? Or, rather, was Foucault on to something profound that not only permits but encourages an aristocratic flick of the hand that dismisses the whole scene as something utterly sub-standard and not worthy of an enlightened process of digestion.
While there are many points of entry to begin our critical discussion, our purposes are best served to begin with Ayn Rand, whose ideas are still clung to, by some, with a religious ferocity, and who set herself up as a major critic of socialism and uber-proponent of capitalist individualism. According to Rand, government is to play a small set of rudimentary roles. “These basic functions are: the police, the law courts, the military. (These represent the only moral justification for the existence of a government: the protection of individual rights, i.e., the protection of individual citizens from the initiators of physical force.)”2
What is interesting about Rand, in this case, is not that she enumerates a number of exceptions to the ideal of a pure laissez-faire model of capitalism, as the “proper” sphere of government but that she does so without being arbitrary, never pretending as if their number and existence were guaranteed by virtue of their presence on the page or as if they had tumbled from the very mouth of God. Rand is far too smart for such dogmatic utterances and thus she describes the test that produced that list, the test of “the protection of individual rights” -- not, it is to be noted, a test of efficiency which is a measure that plays solely to capitalism's strengths and goals. Rand's “test,” however, far from marks her as a thinker on the fringe of mainstream discourse. Instead, it places her snugly within the bosom of liberal thought dating back hundreds of years. It is this test, in fact, that has linked together serious and thoughtful individuals that today are claimed by a variety of ideologies but that overall fall within the expansive European tradition of liberalism that links Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and J.S. Mill with Adam Smith, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Hobbes, whose famous four words will be remember long after Foucault's memory has completely dissipated, describes an existence of pure individualism as “nasty, brutish and short.” Starting from lofty and idyllic beginnings of humans living solely for their own needs, he quickly stumbles across the contradiction of death via an all out war. In the place of pure individualism then, he argues, there must exist a social contract binding one with another that serves not the bogeyman of “collectivism” but that very individualism he previously demonstrated to be contradictory in its very being. Hobbes realized that an ideology of pure individualism led to a “war of all against all” where each sought to dominate the other for fear of being likewise dominated. Yet, rather than simply reject individualism, Hobbes aimed to guarantee it through its opposite – the collective. Thus Hobbes's most valuable contribution to political and philosophical thought is twofold: the individual alone (and the ideology of pure individualism) is contradictory; and, that this contradiction is resolved through its opposite, the social realm.
Hobbes leads us by the hand from abstract individualism (“I exist for myself”) to concrete individualism (“I exist because and through the existence of others whose existence I, too, work to guarantee”). The difference or the “middle term” between these two modes of individualism is the social realm, sometimes identified with the government. This simple journey lies at the core of the liberal thought that embraces the scholars above and many more. Rand, herself, finds a home within this skeletal system when she makes government a necessary element to provide for the existence of the individual – for she knows, as does Hobbes, that the individual left to itself is a contradiction. The individual exists only within the social.
As I alluded to above, Rand's list of three functions of government is the product of a test and not the results of a divine exception that arbitrarily secludes those aspects of a social order from the rest. While chronologically they appear before the test in Rand's phrase, they are the logical results of that test. It is the test of the “the protection of individual rights” that spawns, in her eyes, three products: the police, the law courts, the military. However, because it is the test that counts and not the products, these three items are always susceptible to a re-test to determine if they continue to meet the standard. Moreover, because these three are not arbitrarily chosen a priori, as if plucked from the mind of God, but are products, they are not bound by any logical determination to be the only three. The test, in all its formulaic glory, is not limited by any earthly consideration, neither number nor ideology. Its goal is simply to test each potential candidate against the aforementioned measure and decree a result. As such, the difference between the chosen three and any number of items, say health care, postal services, road maintenance, coffee production, dentistry, etc., is eliminated. All items, like individuals, are equal before the law, and the law decides in each case according to the merits of each. Some items, it decrees, assist the task of translating individuals from abstract to concrete reality, others hinder it.
What becomes apparent at this point, is that Ayn Rand's test is no different from that of Hobbes, Smith or Marx's. The test for all is the same, what is different, is the outcome tallied by each individual thinker. Hobbes tallies the least, listing only government, Smith tallies more, including a role for social welfare within his model, and Marx tallies the most, enumerating a lengthy number of roles that must be brought within the realm of social supervision in order to protect the rights of individuals (such as the length of the working day, public education, etc.). Each of these thoughtful individuals are thus in communication with each other, disputing not between dissimilar systems but nuances within the very same system. Moreover, this argument across time has none of the bipolar features of Internet discussions that bounce between abstract individualism and abstract socialism. Each thinker above accepts and makes the individual and his or her concrete existence the goal of their system, and thereby weighs the institutions of society accordingly. Each thinker implicitly or explicitly accepts that the individual and the social exist together, reinforcing each other, in dialogue. For them, there is no world of pure individualism or pure collectivism.
Thus, from what appeared to be a world war without possibility of mediation, we find instead an internal war, a civil struggle – which as history teaches us can be of the most uncivil variety – between foes with a similar purpose and a common heritage. In this understanding, the divine exception that seemed to miraculously cleave Rand's three roles from charges of “socialization” is eliminated. The functioning of a liberal, individualist, society is seen anew as one that exists on a continuum of socialization. Thereafter, the charges of “socialism” lose their heretical potency to be replaced instead with thoughtful contemplation and practical experimentation, based in the empirical realities of everyday existence, that seek to determine to what degree more or less socialization preserves the rights of individuals. The divine exception removed, citizens are free to wonder why, if the police exist necessarily to protect individual rights should there not also exist a social health care system to protect the property (the body included, according to Locke) of citizenry? With the divine exception removed everything becomes fair game for the test whose results are never predictable beforehand and must always be interpreted using empirical data by the democratic multitude for which it exists. For again, there is no simple abstract pre-existing law enumerating a set number of social services.
Henceforth, abstraction, deemed a calumniator for its earnest attempts to foment eternal contradiction, is considered persona non grata and banned from the social realm for good. Hurray!
1 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Dutton, 1992): 199.
2 Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Reader, ed. Gary Hull and Leonard Peikoff (New York: Plume, 1999): 105.
