Interesting points.

As I understand it, the source of the American concept of liberty comes from the simple observation that each man is at liberty to do as he pleases until another man stops him or forces him to do something he would not do if left alone.

Maybe I'm missing something but this sounds like a universal observation to me. It is true across all cultures and countries. It is not more or less true for an atheist society than a religious society.

Rather the only difference between the two societies is the nature of their justifications for restricting liberty.
An atheist society would restrict liberty on the basis of perceived societal needs and a religious one would restrict it on the basis of their perception of God's will.

It is these differences in the basis for restricting liberty and arguments over how to determine who can decide whose liberty shall be restricted that divides the world and always has, not the concept of liberty.

The concept of equality is similarly derived -- from the observation that there exists no objective basis for saying that one human life is more valuable than another or indeed that one person's opinion is more valuable than anothers. Such notions of valuing one group of people over another are always, wherever they exist, enforced.

"I do think, as Stephen Walt does, that more united the liberal internationalists of the Princeton Project with their neo-conservative opposite numbers than either side would wish to concede"

I know you state this and move on, but I think herein lies a lot of what we on the left distrust about the interventionist policies of the neoconservatives and their little helpers among the "liberal" democracy-promoters. We are told endlessly of the academic differences between the neocons and the liberal interventionists, but when push came to shove and Bush shamelessly and transparently lied his way into Iraq (against all international norms of reasonable behavior), the most we got from these liberal-interventionists in the way of opposition was hair-splitting (and worse if one counts Beinart and Daalder on the liberal-interventionist side...Beinart in particular combined the worst aspects of parroting and pandering to the neocons and unleashing his McCarthyite attacks on the left)

I was holding forth at the dinner table about respect for sovereignty trumping all other values when my son-in=law said
"so what would you do about Rwanda?" And left, fortunately because I didn't have an answer.

Well put, brooksfoe.

I think international law can provide another interesting take on this. Yeah, I know, some people consider "international law" to be an oxymoron. But the fact is that international law, even when it is not literally enforceable, wields a powerful shaping influence over inter-state relations.

These relations are mostly governed as a matter of mutual consent, i.e., through treaties in which states agree to behave in certain ways. But international law also recognizes the concept of "jus cogens" -- sometimes also called "peremptory norms" ; these are legal principles that are deemed so "universal" and important that they must be followed whether a state has agreed to them or not. While there's debate over just what populates this list, you'll get broad consensus that prohibitions on genocide, slavery, piracy, aggressive war, torture -- perhaps others -- are jus cogens.

But you will not find many takers for the proposition that American/European notions of "equality" -- substantive or procedural -- or "individual liberty" are jus cogens. Maybe one day they will be, but not yet.

She points out that she and John Ikenberry have argued that the US must, both out of moral commitment and self-interest...

What exactly is this "self-interest" that we have in other countries affairs? Some how we only invoke the moral argument when the place under consideration has raw materials or markets we covet. Everyone knows this and our actions since the end of WWII have generally illustrated this. Why did we intervene in Iraq and not Sudan? Why the Philippines and not East Timor? Why Panama and not Congo?

These neo-liberals with a new version of the white man's burden are either blind or hypocrites. Let's stop the charade. We want their raw materials and finished goods under conditions favorable to us. Cloaking this in terms of moral commitment is just putting lipstick on a (greedy) pig.

If we want to see a world with less strife we need to work towards developing sustainable economies which put fewer demands on declining natural resources. We need to adopted a social structure in the US which doesn't consume 40% of the resources while having 4% of the population.

As a final sign of hypocrisy we can't even solve the problems of racism, poverty and social inequality here at home, but we feel justified in telling others how to go about it.

It's all about oil, face up to it and skip the moralistic sugar coating.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

WhatDoIKnow is exactly right about the myth of the lone individual. That definition of liberty isn't wrong because of its being a narrow, American conception of liberty. It's wrong because it's not the framer's idea of liberty at all. it's libertarianism.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

I think you are the one who misunderstands. You're talking past me and you're extrapolating conclusions from my statements that I don't intend.

You are talking about what people choose to value. I'm talking about the reality of our existence and how the universalness of that reality is used as the basis for the concept of universal rights.

The fact is that no matter the culture or the country, we experience existence as individuals not as a society. The very concept of a society -- Confucian or otherwise -- is an amorphous abstraction with no reality of its own other than the reality we give it in our heads.

That's not to say that the concept of society isn't important. Like many constructed realities, it is very important. But starting your thought process from such abstractions will lead you off into more abstractions even further divorced from reality.

What keeps an individual in a Confucian society from ignoring his obligations and doing as he pleases? Isn't it social pressure or even legal penalties? Couldn't he do whatever he pleased except that other people demand otherwise on the basis of Confucian ideas? Therefore, isn't Confucianism really a set of ideas justifying restrictions on his liberty, which was the point I was making in my original post?

My larger point is that creating liberty in the world isn't really the issue. Liberty exists on its own and will flourish as soon as we stop spending energy to quash it.

The real issue is how much should liberty be restricted? To what extent are restrictions needed and why are they needed -- to achieve what goals?

As Jefferson so wisely quoted, "Ultimately, people get the government they deserve." So the German people got the Nazis, we got the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, and Iran got Ahmadinejad.

You will argue that no one deserves to be ruled by extremists and despots. But the reason Germany ended up with the Nazis is because the majority believed that German nationalism would lift Germany up from its economic and political malaise. We got the neocons because the populace was more concerned about conveniently manufactured 'moral' issues than political and economic ones. Iran ended up with an Islamic fundamentalist in charge because, frankly, the majority of the people are Islamic fundamentalists.

Before we can even think of exporting liberty, we need to get it back ourselves. And if the people of other countries want it, then they can obtain it via ballots or bullets, the same way we did. We can't impose liberty on someone else. A people can't obtain liberty until they prize it above safety, security, and all other things. And we can't realistically hope to help others prize liberty until we do so ourselves.

=== The fact is that no matter the culture or the country, we experience existence as individuals not as a society. The very concept of a society -- Confucian or otherwise -- is an amorphous abstraction with no reality of its own other than the reality we give it in our heads. ===

Without the reality, not the construct, of some type of organized society we would be pairs of apes roaming the plains trying to keep our children from being eaten by hyeanas. Individual human beings (or individual male-female pairs) are not the easiest pray on the African plains, but they are nowhere near the hardest prey either.

To put it another way, go bear hunting with a rifle. Then with a bow-and-arrow. The with a bow you made yourself. Then with a knife (you DO know the recipe for making steel yourself, right? If not, I am sure you can develop it from personal observation). Then with a pointy stick. Let me know how you do.

sPh

Oh, a loyalty test. How nice.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

The question that must be asked is what gives certain norms and values the status of universality. Many philosophers (Rawls and Habermas) take it that a norm is universal if it is the object of an un-enforced consensus, or the inter-subjective result of no-coercive dialogue. Based upon this premise, these philosophers construct universality based upon what such a dialogue between rational agents would produce. If this construction is to be done fairly and not ethnocentrically, it must establish its universals only after discussion, i.e., after a strong and sustained attempt to understand the position of the other. This discussion requires imagining oneself into the role of the other and de-centering ones own moral horizon, even a liberal one. Of course, Rawls and Habermas, after all of this work, end up ratifying as universal a basic package of norms and values that are familiar to us as liberal. However, their method of constructing universality still gives us the means to demonstrate why the Princeton project is ‘imperial’: instead of attempting to arrive at an un-enforced consensus concerning basic norms and values, it assume one. This is where the tacit belief that inside everyone is waiting a little American to get out becomes important. One does not need to search for a consensus through dialogue with the other if it is the case that the other is just like me. We already agree, and based upon that agreement we can stipulate that the advancement of our norms and values is the advancement of the other’s norms and values. To argue against this view one does not need to fall into a crippling moral and cultural relativism, one simply needs to point out that universality is achieved and not given.

I, for one, do not agree that "the US should "promote the universal value of equality." To me, this is exactly the kind of blind projection of (self)righteousness (on the individual level) and American exceptionalism (on the aggregate level) that has gotten us into trouble time and time again.

Iraq is but a clear example of this tendency, as is practically every plank of the neocon agenda, the idea that American values are divinely inspired, or by some agency (is it "might makes right"?) perfect and ready for export to the unenlightened but oh so ready to be enlightened masses. The mass of evidence in Iraq is that promoting equality and democracy, American style, has led to diminishment of both in Iraq (not to mention America).

If, by "promotion of equality" we mean to say aggressively push our own values, using rhetorical, economic, even military (or worse, secret CIA-style interventions) upon peoples, cultures, governments that are as yet unenlightened unto our superior American values, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of Iraq.

One of the worst problems in this whole idea of promotion of values is that while we love the lofty arena of values, who doesn't?, the fact is that international dynamics have little to do with values and everything to do with money and resources. I mean really, how many people out there think they could go to Iraq, India, Sudan, name any trouble spot where equality, democracy, women's rights, where any of our vaunted values are underappreciated, and with the power of argument convince them or their reigning powers to adopt our values? In fact, there is no instance where our foreign efforts to instill our values in another culture did not depend essentially on paying people to mouth our platitudes or killing those who do not agree to mouth them.

Iraq again provides a beautiful example. The Bush invasion was driven in large part by a values agenda. To wit: the neocons saw Iraq as an opportunity to prove to the world the validity of their values-based (rather than empirically derived) economic model. Iraq was a petri dish where the neocons could plant all their ideals in a cash-rich environment (hingeing on the truly idiotic notion that the war would be over in 6 days and that oil revenues would be flowing quickly) and by virtue of the essential righteousness of their ideals, Iraq would quickly bloom into exemplar they all envisioned. Anyone, like General Jay Garner, who threw the cold water of doubt on their optimistic forecasts, was fired, and Paul Bremer and a horde of neocon values-thinking (but Middle East culture ignoramuses) rolled into Iraq to pull off this stunning demonstration that would promote the neocon value system into the next century, while bringing peace and economic growth to the Middle East, and not coincidentally, riches to the USA.

In my view promoting values is like proselytizing your religion - a little naive, a little disrespectful of others' values, and not a very powerful way to convince people, especially if you don't have the threat of an angry Mormon God, or Shiva, to seal the deal.

A far more enlightend way of promoting values would be to actually promote and practice them here at home, and let those who are inspired by them elsewhere bring it to their fellows independent of our meddling and naive wishes that they could have the blessing that we have.

And as a final note, it seems there could be nothing more defeating to our hopes of promoting values elsewhere than our own failures to practice them here at home. What could be more laughable to a prospective Iraqi convert to the values of democracy and equality than the notion that in the USA, voters are being denied their fundamental right to vote, and the preponderance of those being denied are those who are the least "equal" in society. That, and all the other values hypocrisy, torture, habeus corpus denial, mistreatment of immigrants, muslims in particular, on and on.

There is nothing less convincing than a righteous hypocrite, and this whole values promotion deal stinks to me of righteous hypocricy. Values are nice, and we all need them, but our actions tell far more about our values than our wishes do.

Ted Bucklin

I wish this particular claim would disappear. It violates elementary logic. It is a fact that bad things have been done behind the rhetoric of "Democracy." So what? That in no way invalidates the "rhetoric of Democracy."

No, looting and murder are in fact the most extreme expressions of liberty because the most extreme version of liberty is anarchy.

And you are correct that when you have people murdering and looting, it obviously limits the liberty of those being murdered and looted but it does not change, in fact it reinforces, the original observation that one is at liberty until some other person restricts your liberty.

In this case, it is the murders and the looters that restrict the liberty of those they murder and loot as well as those who now limit their actions due to fear.

And that is the traditional justification for government among Americans -- that we need to give up some of our liberty to government in order that government may restrict the liberty of those individuals or groups that would attempt to restrict our own liberty.

In other words, liberty must be restricted to protect liberty. But again this doesn't change the universal nature of liberty.

And it should be noted that it is NOT liberty itself that produces anarchy, looting or murder.

In fact, it is inequality that leads to these things. In a theoretical situation where there is perfect liberty and perfect equality, each individual has equal power, equal wealth and equal ability. Therefore, an attack by one individual against another would be met by equal force. Anything stolen from a person could also be stolen back.

Look at the situation in Iraq. The problem is that you have certain groups of people who have accumulated centers of power around themselves along with money and arms and therefore have the power to restrict the liberty of others. And they seek to make their power to restrict the liberty of others permanent. If the society were one with no guns, no bombs and every individual equal, how would they possibly effectively restrict the liberty of others?

But this is of course, the rub. The problem is that in practice, perfect equality doesn't exist and perfect liberty combined with inequality does lead to all kinds of ills. In fact, if the inequality becomes great enough, it leads to tyranny and the end of liberty all together.

You are also right in saying that this is a very American understanding of things. It comes from this country's experience as a frotier nation where there were large ares with little government or law for long periods of time.

And I must say that it is extremely chauvanistic of you to call the basis of much American political thinking and culture childish. Your view of it as childish is in fact a product of your own social and intellectual preconceptions rather than any universal truth about the nature of childish thought vs adult thought.

Such insults are not particular constructive.

Excellent post. It's bad enough that our Administration is so allergic to dialogue that it seems incapable of having a genuine conversation with Democrats or journalists, let alone Muslims or North Koreans. But if liberals allow themselves to lapse into the same provincial and solipsistic assumptions about the universality of American values, then we're really screwed.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Again, I am making observations about the nature of reality and you are jumping to conclusions about where those observations lead.

But my observation about liberty is merely one step in a long stairway. It need not lead to a justification of humiliating parents, or denounciation of country or public disorder. You assume it leads there because of your own intellectual and social preconceptions.

And again, these are justifications for restricting liberty not some different understanding of the concept of liberty. I never said that there were no valid reasons for restricting liberty. I merely said that liberty is something inherent to individuals unless society or another person takes it away.

There is nothing you ever do or want which is not in some way reacting to "other peoples' demands", and the vast majority of the time, you are conforming to those demands, not rebelling against them. Literally every thing you do during the course of the day is a construction of "society".

Yes, liberty means I am at liberty to react to the demands of others and others are at liberty to make demands of me and, in fact, a society can form -- in fact it has been constructed -- out of liberty in just this way. This is how communities often formed on the American frontier.

When those demands are enforced by government or through some other kind of force then the individual has had his liberty curtailed. This is what Americans traditionally mean by liberty -- liberty from forced action. In modern times, it has also come to mean liberty from social and even economic pressure (Communism) as well.

Being at liberty means being at liberty to do good as well as evil. In fact, one of Madison's primary arguments against suppressing liberty as a means to combating evil is that supressing liberty to stop evil also suppresses the good people might do with liberty in the process.

The social understanding precedes the physical one.

How does the order in which understanding arrives have any bearing on the reality of any given understanding? Centuries ago human beings looked up in the sky and saw that the sun moved from one horizon to the next and understood the sun to moved around the earth. Later they understood that the Earth in fact moved around the sun. Surely you do not claim that the first understanding was more valid simply because it preceded the second?

How do you know I'm an individual?

I love this argument. I absolutely don't know for certain. You are right. It is something I infer based on assumptions that may or may not be true, but which seem to me likely to be true given that TPM Cafe, to my knowledge, only gives posting accounts to individuals not groups.

You are absolutely correct in saying that I as an individual am constructing society -- and indeed at least some of my entire reality -- every day based on all kinds of assumptions that I have no way of verifying independently.

But so, I believe, is everyone else, whether they know it or not.

And the reason for that is that we each experience the world as individuals not as a group and we have no way of changing that at present. All understanding is to some degree subjective.

And that's why it's problematic for any individual to be talking about the beliefs of a whole society -- although we obviously must do so for purposes of discussion -- because you essentially speaking for thousands of individuals whom you cannot possibly know or understand because you are not them.

However, I can say, with some reasonable certainty, that each individual can do whatever they want to do so long as no one stops them because that is a physical reality that I have observed to be shared by all human beings and which I can observe to be true of all human beings anywhere in the world.

Or at least, it has been true of ever single individual in every country I've ever heard of.

Why would you make such an argument?

Just dumb.

Really???!!

So what is the American conception of liberty?

Enlighten me.

I agree here with rdf. Slaughter and Ikenberry talk about promoting democracy as if we all understand the same thing about these concepts and in fact the concepts are usually used by the national security thinktanks to disguise imperial ambitions. Have Slaughter and Ikenberry objected to the administration's characterization of Venezuela and Iran and Palestine as undemocratic states (or groupings) led by dictators?... when in fact they have freer elections there, than in Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Kazakhstan, or Jordan. So whose democracy are Ikenberry and Slaughter going to use our military to defend and enforce?... our story-book view of our democratic tradition or the real-life Enron/Halliburton/Exxon "democracy". Clearly Bush uses the story-book democracy deeply seated in the American story to enforce Halliburton democracy internationally. Before I give an ounce of trust to Ikenberry or Slaughter I would like to hear them talk about the actual view of the democratic values they say they want to promote. Before we fight can we at least address whose freedom is on the march?

Apropos of faux grassroots organizations, I am reminded of the comparison of the making of law and elephant reproduction:

1. Everything important happens at a very high level


2. There is a great deal of commotion, but nothing is produced for two years


3. The grassroots get trampled

--
Howard

who is among the few, I suppose, to have watched an elephant losing his virginity, with the assistance of a National Zoo civil servant.

No man may be an island, but I have known quite a few isthmuses and a significant number of peninsulas, the latter particularly in the current White House and Congress.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

...a norm is universal if it is the object of an un-enforced consensus, or the inter-subjective result of no-coercive dialogue

An un-enforced consensus among whom?

A no-coercive dialog among whom?

Presumably the members of the Princeton Project conducted a dialog among themselves and eventually reached a consensus. No doubt they consider themselves rational actors.

So by the reasoniing you attribute to Rawls and Habermas (and I'd really like to see the text where they said this), this should in fact be universal because un-enforced consensus was reached after no-coercive dialog.

Perhaps you mean something different by universal than the idea that something is universally true, which is the way I understood the term to be generally intended in these discussions.

I would also note that for your universalness to be "achieved" requires liberty -- at least in thought and speech. So do you agree then that liberty is universal and that it can universally be defined -- as I have defined it in another post -- as the absence of coercion?

"universal only within the community that discussed the issue"

How can something be universal but only apply to a few people?

This contradicts the commonly understood meaning of the term universal, which is something that applies everywhere and in the case of people to everyone.

"Liberty as a concept cannot pre-exist those capable of imagining it."

Why not? A dog is unable to conceive of liberty, but if you take it and put it in a cage, has its liberty been less curtailed because it doesn't understand the idea?