After the Future

Learning from Our Grandparents

Or great-granparents, as the case may be.

I want to spend some time with Polanyi in part because he has a fundamentally conservative temperament and POV. I'd argue that he's more of a Burkean conservative than most to the conservative intellectuals who are obsessed with the tyrannic threats posed by big government. I like reading The American Conservative, as contrasted with other conservative  partisan rags like The National Review or The Weekly Standard, because TAC for the most part gets that while the Big State creates significant problems, the market as a disruptive force is far more destructive of human liberties and well-being than the state is. TAC is opposed to Liberalism as a mindset, and in that I largely agree with them, but I also believe that the Liberal State is a necessity for living in a country with 310 million people and on a planet with over 7 billion.

Large scale governmental bodies are with us in the long run; it's silly to think otherwise. The challenge is to organize them in such a way that they allow for as much freedom as possible where people live on the ground while at the same time making sure that power and wealth don't aggregate into the hands of too few. That is job #1, and that requires creating a mindset in which the basics tenets of social democracy are broadly accepted in such a way as to push every other ideology to the fringes. This was the hard-fought accomplishment our  grandparents, the folks in Polanyi's generation in the thirties and forties, after having learned the hard way that nothing else works.

It's a lesson we've forgotten, and so we are having arguments on the ethos level when we should be having arguments on the logos level. We need consensus about basic political  values, so that we can argue about the most practical way to solve pressing practical problems. The current domination of Neoliberal ideology among our elites has been a regression to the mindset of  late 19th-century Liberalism. Our grandparents learned that that mindset leads to disaster, and now it looks as if we'll have to learn it again. But it is a lesson we will learn for good sooner or later because nothing else but social democracy in a subsidiarist key will work. And social democracy cannot work unless there is broad acceptance that it is the best way to organize things in the political sphere. It will be hard enough to make it work when there is consensus about it, but it's impossible for it to function in any practical sense without it. 

What Is More Natural Than Markets?

Reflections on The Great Transformation, Chapter Three: "Habitation versus Improvement"

Central to Polanyi's argument is that markets are not natural, that contrary to the assumptions of classical economists, to "truck and barter"  is not something that has been a central element in human social activity for thousands of years. He argues that the market economy is something that only became possible after the machine made a certain kind of wealth accumulation possible. Economic activity had always before that been subordinate to other social values, and that the key to 'the great transformation' is that for the first time in history, society's values have become subordinated to economic ones, that economic growth was the only thing that mattered.

This is a "revolution" that is taken for granted by us now, and most of us assume that its benefits are self evident, but it's worth a few moments to reflect on its significance. 

Nowhere has liberal philosophy failed so conspicuously as in its understanding of the problem of change. Fired by an emotional faith in spontaneity, the common-sense attitude toward change was discarded in favor of a mystical readiness to accept the social consequences of economic improvement, whatever they might be. . . . It should need no elaboration that a process of undirected change, the pace of which is deemed too fast, should be slowed down, if possible, so as to safeguard the welfare of the community. Such household truths of traditional statesmanship, often merely reflecting the teachings of a social philosophy inherited form the ancients, were in the nineteenth century erased from the thoughts of the educated by the corrosive of a crude utilitarianism combined with an uncritical reliance on the alleged self-healing virtues of unconscious growth. 

The catastrophes of social dislocation experienced first in England and then elsewhere were justified by a purely materialistic/utilitarian calculus: Happiness = economic growth. The entire 19th century is shot through with an optimism and that the disruptions caused by the unprecedented economic growth were temporary that the wealth generated would somehow be redistributed, and that a rising tide lifts all boats. Utopian schemes proliferated. That optimism evaporated during the trente inglorieuse between 1914 -1945, and a more sober, social democratic compromise in the Atlantic world replaced the ideological fervor of the decades preceding whether the fervor was for free markets, for socialist revolution, or for fascist will to power. The boring, sober, process-oriented bureaucratic nature of social democracies is precisely what destabilized it in the 70s, and a space was created for the re-emergence of market idolatry.

When Polanyi wrote this book in the forties, he assumed we learned this lesson. That the catastrophes of the preceding thirty years were directly associated with our not having understood the destructive impact of the 'market system' when it first appeared. 

. . . an entirely new institutional mechanism was starting to act on Western society; that its dangers, which cut to the quick when they first appear, were never rally overcome; and that the history of the nineteenth-century civilization consisted largely in attempts to protect society against the ravages of such a mechanism. The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities . . . .

But how has this revolution itself been defined? What was its basic characteristic? Was it the rise of the factory towns, the emergence of slums, the long working hours of children, the low wages of certain categories of workers, the rise in the rate of population increase, or the concentration of industries? We submit that all these were merely incidental to one basic change, the establishment of a market economy, and the commercial nature of this institution cannot be fully grasped unless the impact of the machine on commercial society is realized. We do not intend to assert that the machine caused that which happened, but we insist that once elaborate machines and plant were used for production in a commercial society, the idea of a self-regulating market system was bound to take shape. . . .

Perhaps no other outcome was possible during the nineteenth century because technology, although it is a human invention, works back on humans and reprograms them as they adapt to its effects. That this process is largely unconscious is what makes it so hard to resist. There are so many little choices made that in their aggregate lead to transformations that even twenty or thirty years before would have been unimaginable. 

Since elaborate machines are expensive, they do not pay unless large amounts of goods are produced. They can be worked without a loss only if the vent of the goods is reasonably assured and if production need not be interrupted for want of the primary good necessary to feed the machines. For the merchant this means that all factors involved must be on sale, that is, they must be available in the needed quantities to anybody who is prepared to pay for them. Unless this condition is fulfilled, production with the help of specialized machines is too risky to be undertaken both from the point of view of the merchant who stakes his money and of the community as a whole which comes to depend upon continuous production for incomes, employment, and provisions. 

Now in an agricultural society such conditions would not naturally be given; they would have to be created. That they would be created gradually in no way affects the startling nature of the changes involved. The transformation implies a change in the motive of actions on the part of the member of society; for the motive of subsistence that of gain must be substituted. All transactions are turned into money transactions, and these in turn require that a medium of exchange be introduced into every articulation of industrial life. All incomes must derive from the sale of something or other, and whatever the  actual source of a person's income, it must be regarded resulting from sale. No less is implied in the simple term "market system," by which we designate the institutional pattern described. But the most startling peculiarity of the system lies in the fact that, once it is established, it must be allowed to function without outside interference. Profits are not any more guaranteed, and the merchant must make his profits on the market. Prices must be allowed to regulate themselves. Such a self-regulating system of markets is what we mean by a market economy. 

The transformation to this system form the earlier economy is so complete that it resembles more the metamorphosis of the caterpillar than any alteration that can be expressed in terms of continuous growth and development.

For the first time everything is fungible--even people and their labor. The traditional face-to-face relationships that shaped economic activities are destroyed, and social value becomes subordinated to economic value as determined by the market. This works hand in hand with the larger liberal project of rejecting tradition as unnecessary baggage and a heap of superstitious mumbo jumbo. The nineteenth century bourgeoisie thought they could create society anew according to a rationalistically determined template. 

My goal here is not to decry that horrors of the market system, but only to point out with Polanyi's assistance, that a market society isn't natural.  It is a recent development. The machine enabled market economy produced was a historical inevitability precisely because it was so radically new and so poorly understood, and gaveexcitements rise to remarkably naive utopian ideas, not the least of which was revolutionary Marxism.

So we've been there, and we've done all that. The challenge now is to learn from our mistakes and move sanely forward. I'm all for a politics and an economic system that is boring and sober. Let people find their excitements elsewhere. 

The Great Transformation

Several months ago I announced that I was going to post a piece entitled "1848". It's probably not going to happen, but my reason for it was that I saw it as the year that the music died, so to say, the year that materialism and disenchantment became the dominant motif in the West.

When I was younger I mostly thought this was a bad thing, but now I see it as an inevitable or even as a necessary thing. I think it's important as a stage in anyone's spiritual development that they see reality and all the ways it's shot through with evil and brutishness and yet to remain hopeful. I've written before here about how the early modern St. John of the Cross was a harbinger in writing about his own spiritual development about what we would go through collectively as dark nights of spirit, soul, and senses. After 1848 the Dark Night began in the West.

Delusional, optimistic, naive, utopian thinking lingered until World War I among certain factions within the West's cultural elite, but already by 1848 the new cultural OS had been installed, and it had purged romantic notions of spiritual dimensions shaping history. My essay "Metaxis" discusses this theme in greater detail. Hegel dialectics of spirit became Marx's dialects of matter, and about ten years later Darwin's publication of the Origin of the Species provided a basis for Huxley, Spencer, and the development of ontological naturalism as the culture's new dominating (if not quite yet dominant) metanarrative that sealed the deal.

Thereafter any arguments that history was anything more than a random, purposeless struggle for survival seemed silly and medieval. But surely once a civilization loses all sense of spiritual aspiration, it ceases to be a civilization. It's been the argument of this blog that our current social reality is not civilization, but a wintertime of the spirit, a wandering in the dead land, the wilderness, a decadent interlude, which we must endure in hope while we wait for spring. 

And so for the last year or so I've been trying to understand the how this winter came upon us, and if understanding its nature might lead to some understanding about how to look for and cultivate the early signs of spring. I've been spending time reading about 19th Century as much as I had time for it--mostly Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of" books. And I feel that while I don't have a specialist's grasp of what happened, I do have a very good understanding of the main economic, cultural, and political developments from the American and French Revolutions through to World War II.

But knowing what happened is not the same as understanding it, and I need some help in understanding that, and since in a wintertime of the spirit, there is no such thing as a philosophy of history, one is force to embrace people of a philosophical cast of mind who think about history, and such a person is Karl Polanyi.  I've just started 1944 book, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, which has been on my reading list for some time. I wanted to read Wm. James and maybe Peirce this summer, but that will have to wait, because Polanyi is more in the flow of what I've been thinking about the last year. 

So this is my summer project. I've just finished reading the first two chapters, and I invite readers here who have read Polanyi or may have had him on their list too to work with me as I read through it. My family health issues are a little more stable, but not completely resolved, so my posting here still might be a little spotty. 

***

Polanyi understands that something really big happened in the 19th century, which wasn't all that long ago, and that we still don't understand it very well. He's writing from the perspective of the middle of WWII, but I don't know that we've learned much about what happened since he wrote about it, especially considering the developments of the last thirty years:

To trace the institutional mechanism of the downfall of a civilization may well appear as a hopeless endeavor. Yet it is this we are undertaking. In doing so, we are consciously adjusting our aim to the extreme singularity of the subject matter. For the civilization of the nineteenth century was unique precisely in that it centered on a definite institutional mechanism. 

No explanation can satisfy which does not account for the suddenness of the cataclysm. As if the forces of change had been pent up for a century, a torrent of events is pouring down on mankind. A social transformation of planetary range is being topped by wars of an entirely new type in which a score of states have crashed, and the contours of new empires are emerging out of a sea of blood. But this fact of demoniac violence is merely superimposed on a swift, silent current of change which swallows up the past often without so much as a ripple on the surface! A reasoned analysis of the catastrophe must account both for the tempestuous action and the quiet dissolution. (p. 4)

What is this institutional mechanism? It's the self-adjusting market of 19th Century Liberalism and the complex of institutions that became subservient to it from the Concert of Europe, to the gold standard, to the great international banking houses: 

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it. (p. 3-4)

I find it interesting that he thinks that the changes that came in the 1930s and 40s as a response to the cataclysm were a permanent:

But if the breakdown of our civilization was timed by the failure of world economy, it was certainly not caused by it. Its origins lay more than a hundred years back in that social and technological upheaval from which the idea of a self-regulating market system sprang in Western Europe. The end of this venture has come in our time; it closes a distinct stage in the history of industrial civilization. (p.5)

Has this stage in industrial civilization dominated by the unregulated market come to an end? Until the mid 90s I would have agreed with this statement, but the resurgence of 19th Century Liberalism in the Libertarian and Neoliberal ideologies that dominate American and world political elites since the 80s shows that the lessons that Polanyi thinks we learned apparently have not been learned. 

That we have traded material prosperity for spiritual poverty is basically a conservative argument, at least an argument made by thoughtful conservatives. I agree with conservatives in this regard. I disagree, however, that this was a mistake. I embrace it, as suggested above, as a necessary stage in the spiritual evolution of humankind. I also disagree with conservatives who think that the State is necessarily the enemy--it can be, for sure. But the depredations of powerful actors in the private sector have been and will continue to be more destructive of the quality of our lives if left unchecked, and the only checking mechanism we little people have is our collective political will to push back against the predators through our political institutions. The cataclysms dating from 1914 through to 1945 taught our grandparents and parents a lesson that Polanyi thought we had learned, but apparently not. I hope we won't have to go through similar cataclysms in order to understand what he and they did. 

More as I continue with my reading. 

Gyges' Ring

This American Life did a show some time ago about superpowers, and in Act One John Hodgeman asks which superpower, if only one were possible, would we choose--Invisibility or Flight. The answers given by people he interviewed were, I thought, rather depressing.

One person talked about how she would choose Invisibility so that she could steal sweaters from Brooks Brothers, and another about how he would choose it so he could watch different beautiful women taking showers--but then changed his mind because he knew that was unacceptable. In the end he would choose Flight to prevent himself from using Invisibility as a Peeping Tom. He would not be able to control himself if he had Invisibility. Another person speculated that most people would choose Flight, but that they would be lying because they don't want to admit to all the sneaky ways they would use Invisibility. It's interesting how sneaky people assume everyone else is. I suppose Hodgeman's choice of these people reflects his own bias that they are admirable because they are honest. Or maybe it's just that there's little entertainment value in the non-transgressive. 

Although Hodgeman tried to frame his own thoughts on the matter ambiguously, the thrust of the piece was shaped by what I think of as the Tarantino aesthetic, a sophisticated nihilism that assumes that the only thing that is truly, deeply, unambiguously real in human beings is their base instincts. Or as a character on "Mad Men" said a couple of weeks ago, people are unhappy because they're living to meet other people's expectations instead of doing what they really want, and for folks like Don Draper, for want of any other ideas about it, what they want is defined by lust, greed, and the will to power.

In Freudian terms we restrain our indulgence of these instinctual drives because they are proscribed by the superego, the rules of the tribe, not because there is something inherently good that it is possible to choose. We do "good" to avoid the shame of being caught and punished, not because there is actually something Good to choose.

So there's what we do to get along in society--being nice, following the rules, etc., which is alienating, and there's doing what we want to do, which is to live instinctually, which is fulfilling. We'd all be HBO Rome's Mark Antony, if we could be--the model of the uninhibited pursuit and fulfillment of lust, greed, and the will to power. "Oh, how we lived," he says to Cleopatra shortly before killing himself. He went for it, and so would the rest of us if we had his balls, according to the Tarantino aesthetic.

Antony's character is contrasted with Octavian's, who is no less single-minded in his instinctual pursuits, particularly the will to power, but he wants the appearances of virtue and decorum. Antony could care less about appearances, and he is the more appealing character. Antony is honest and straightforward, guileless in his own way; the priggish Octavian is not.

These  assumptions--that the only reason we behave well is in order to get along in society, but we wouldn't if there were no price to pay--frame the Hodgeman piece.  We've heard it a thousand times since we were in college: "I may be a selfish, manipulative bitch, but at least I'm honest." Virtue, decency, kindness are always a lie, a kind of sucking up, a refusal to be "real". It's interesting how there's always a tone of sanctimony in people who think like this, as if their position is the only morally acceptable one.

I accept that each of us in a fallen world has a dark side, each of us has transgressive urges and desires, but the Tarantino aesthetic assumes that those urges and desires are more real, more truthful, more authentic than those impulses that would restrain us from doing something that is intrinsically morally ugly. For the Tarantino aesthetic, those restraints or any impulse that would lead us to do the Good are mere acculturation, a trip that's laid on us by "society" so that we "share" and "play nice" and "use our words" instead of "hitting with our hands". They are fictions that keep us from tearing one another to pieces, and the Tarantino aesthetic assumes that there is nothing in humans that intrinsically wills to do the Good because there is no Good to will. 

***

In the summer of 2007, I put up a series of posts entitled Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism I, II, III, and IV. If you've some time and the subject interests you, take a look. It lays out an alternative set of assumptions to those of the Tarantino aesthetic. The discussion that went on in comments was pretty interesting as well. And I remember the one thing that discussion brought into clearer focus for me was  the argument that moral behavior, doing the Good, does not depend on a set of religious beliefs. I said somewhere a la Dostoyevski, If there is no God, then nothing is impermissible. And some commenters objected.

The most robust objection was the social-contract argument--people behave well because it's in their self-interest to do so because a society of law-abiding citizens is a society in which everyone prospers, not just the powerful who do what they please with impunity. You don't need God to be the enforcer; the law and customary norms are sufficient. But isn't being a law-abiding boy scout in this way precisely what the Tarantino aesthetic rejects as the alienation of living up to other people's expectations?  Isn't that precisely why the transgressive man is celebrated in popular culture?  He's the one who does what he wants, not what is expected of him. He is powerful and charismatic, and the rest are grayed-out, bourgeois Last Men whose lives are a mere going through the prescribed, socially acceptable motions.

The social-contract argument refutes the nothing is impermissible argument, but not Glaucon's argument in Plato's Republic, which is Hodgeman's argument, that if we were invisible all of us would transgress because we could do what we really wanted with impunity. And it doesn't solve the deeper problem of alienation and fulfillment. There is a deep sense in each of us that fulfillment lies in the transgressive, that the law and our acculturation are a kind of prison from which we must be liberated. That problem is solved either by embracing the human being as instinct-driven talking animal, which is at the heart of the Tarantino aesthetic and the Hodgeman piece, or by embracing the idea that the human being is in addition to being an animal, also a spiritual being with a  conscience, the faculty that enables us to cognize the Good, and a will capable of freely choosing it.

The great spiritual traditions offer a path to fulfillment, but it is not a fulfillment immediately realized or easily achieved. In the Christian tradition that fulfillment has more to do with following the dictates of conscience and not superego. And it requires behaviors that are transgressive and at times subversive of the social contract when the laws and customs are abusive of human dignity, as they were, for instance, in the South in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.

Paul's epistle to the Romans talks about liberation from the law; Kierkegaard's teleological suspension of the ethical explores how conscience can lead one to commit criminal acts when conscience requires them; Dostoyevski celebrates the transgressive, freedom-embracing character of the Christian message in his depiction of the encounter between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor. Gandhi, King, the Berrigans, Mandela were all transgressors in the service of the Good.

So it's not just a choice between living out others' expectations or doing what you want.  There are also the transgressions in the service of the Good. And I think that while it is easier to do the Good if you believe there is such a thing, it's not essentially a head thing. It's a will thing, and a belief in God as enforcer is not necessary for people to will it. I think that believers don't have a significantly bigger advantage than non-believers. Grace is ubiquitous. I think that coming under the spell of the Tarantino aesthetic, however, makes it harder insofar as it smugly celebrates what is worst in us while sneering at what is best. It's harder to embrace possibilities that you assume are impossible.

There is something in each of us, regardless of our beliefs, that wills the Good, and this is the second, I think deeper, objection to the assertion that without God any atrocity is permissible. Call it natural law, call it the Tao, call it what you want, but it's intrinsic to human nature to long for and to do the Good, even if it is also intrinsic to our natures to revert to behaviors motivated by the baser instincts. Both are intrinsic to our human nature; they live side by side in our souls.  But in the long run what matters is which one plays the dominant role in shaping the lives we live. Because we often want and do what is not Good does not mean that there is no Good and that it is impossible to want to do it. The Tarantino aesthetic finds such an idea embarrassing.

This American Life does not, on the whole, embrace the Tarantino aesthetic, even if occasionally stories like the Hodgeman piece do. The great thing about Glass's show is that in so many of the stories on it are the stories of people who are sniffing out and doing the Good whether they think about it in spiritual/religious terms or not. Because in the long run it doesn't matter what you think or say about it, it only matters what you choose to do. It's just that there are more possibilities for authentic choices than Hodgeman seems to understand.

[This is a slightly reivised re-post of "Superpowers: Invsibility vs. Flight" from August 2010.]

The Left-Right Spectrum: Time for a Realignment?

Reader Mike McG sent me Crispin Sartwell's Atlantic article "The Left-Right Political Spectrum is Bogus"  I agree with much of what Sartwell says, and I like his point that we should stop thinking from the Left or the Right, and start thinking about the Left and the Right.

If we understand Left-Right in its most basic sense, the Left is identified with the modern Liberal project in Europe to disrupt and displace the old customary society defined by crown and altar. By the end of WWI it was clear to anybody that the Left had won that fight. The Right after that became identified with fascist or 'authoritarian' political systems, and the far Left with Revolutionary Socialist regimes like those of Russia and Mexico and later in China and Cuba.

Since 1989, this distinction has become irrelevant because there is no extreme Left anywhere that matters, and the extreme Right has become associated primarily with jingoism and fundamentalist religious extremists. So if the essence of the Left is open-ended disruption that embraces the destruction of traditional beliefs and ways of life, then free-market capitalism is the only robust force left standing that performs this disruptive Left function.

The Left-Right distinction since 1989 is more confusing than clarifying because Left and Right since then have mainly to do with cultural values rather than with economic policy. Insofar as there is a Left left in the 19th-Century sense, its influence is mainly in the cultural sphere where it pushes for its anti-traditional-values politics--abortion, gay marriage, gun control, marijuana legalization. This program has been embraced by most people who think of themselves as free-market capitalists. And since this anti-traditional values program has been so successful since the 1960s, it has caused a backlash among American traditionalists whose sense of right and wrong is deeply embedded in the vestigial customary culture that the cultural Left sees as so oppressively constraining. Those on the Right who embrace both free-market capitalism and the preservation of traditional values are incoherent.

The cultural Left has been so effective precisely because most of those who compose the power and economic elite endorse that "liberal", anti-traditional program. The cultural elite and the economic elite are heirs of the classic 19th-century liberals in that they could not care less about the way capitalism destroys the old traditional ways of life. That's the price of progress. They think of modernization as a necessary, positive step in every country's development, and that free-market capitalism is the engine for everyone's becoming wealthier and healthier, and that traditional values and ways of life are the primary obstacle preventing a better, more prosperous life for the immiserated poor in the undeveloped countries. These neoliberal elites sincerely believe they are the real Progressives, and as such the real Left.

For this elite, it's all about disruption, change, transformation. And so if there is a Left and Right that defines our political economic discourse now, it could be argued that the Left comprises those who embrace unconstrained capitalism and technological advancement as the creative-destructive engine of history, and the Right those who resist it. Some like fundamentalist Muslims and Christians are at the far-Right extreme, but couldn't it be argued that anybody who wants to restrain capitalist disruption is on the Right? What about Occupy?  What about anti-growth environmentalists? What about anti-transhuman humanists?

Couldn't it be argued that you are on the conservative Right now if you resist or want to restrain progress if by progress we mean whatever capitalism and open-ended technological development bring us? Some kind of realignment is called for here, and I'm with Sartwell in questioning whether Left and Right are helpful categories in any effort to promote that. So that's why I'm proposing as an alternative--Red and Blue, the Red party of Radical Irresponsibie Unconstraint, and and the Blue Party of Responsible Evolutionary Restraint.  

***

Near the end of his article, Sartwell says

Milton Friedman and Vlad Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Augusto Pinochet: They may well have disagreed about this and that. But they have agreed, or said they did, that the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and vice versa. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position.

I would say in a new alignment that Blues are not about pitting government against capital, but about finding the balance between them within a framework defined by the principle of subsidiarity. This is a conservative idea; it's a very Blue idea. Subsidiarity correlates with social democracy. The development of the social democracies in the West is the great success story that came out of the chaos of disruptive change that wracked the 19th Century and the first half of the twentieth. I believe that sooner or later the countries, like the U.S and U.K. that that lost social democracy to the Neoliberal ideologues since the late 70s will once again find their way back to it, not for ideological reasons, but for very Blue pragmatic reasons: It makes the best kind of political and economic sense. 

Sartwell also makes this point near the end of his article:

This spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power and wealth. There are alternatives, and the one I would suggest is this: We should arrange political positions according to whether they propose to increase hierarchy or to dismantle it. Instead of left and right, we should be thinking about vertical versus horizontal arrangements of power and wealth.

Sartwell is right to point out that the iron law of oligarchy operates along the whole spectrum, from the extreme Left to the extreme Right, and everywhere in between, from local street gangs to PTAs. Ruling cliques always emerge in every social configuration regardless of their political commitments or lack of them. But it's wrong to think we can get along without hierarchy. This is where I think movements like Occupy are a silly.

The key is to find balance, and the principle of subsidiarity should be our guide in organizing relations vertically in a way that finds the correct balance between top and bottom. I'd argue that It's the key to the Red-Blue realignment we need so badly now because subsidiarity doesn't fit neatly into conventional ideas of Conservative or Liberal. Small-government conservatives like it because of its bias toward local sovereignty, and Liberals like it because it allows for interventions by higher levels of the hierarchy when the lower levels lack the resources or competency to deal with extraordinary or intractable problems.

For those unfamiliar with the term, subsidiarity acknowledges the necessity of hierarchy, but insists that higher levels in a hierarchy exist to serve and support the lower levels. In this sense if flips the idea of hierarchy on its head. We see this principle in action all the time, whether we call it subsidiarity or not--for instance, when a disaster overwhelms the resources of city, the state government comes in to support it, and if it overwhelms the resources of the state, the  federal government steps in. It wants as few constraints as possible at the bottom, but to allow for judicious constraints from the top when the situation calls for it. 

The principle of subsidiarity provides the framework for resisting government overreach, and I've used it to make my case against top-down education reforms like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and now the Common Core State Standards. The vast majority of schools in the U.S. are doing just fine. There are some school districts or schools within those districts that don't have the resources to adequately provide for the educational development of the children in their care. They require extra resources and interventions from outside, but this can be done in targeted ways without disrupting the whole system the way these federal top-down programs do.

Insisting on some national standard is silly and non-productive. It serves the needs of bureaucrats, not the needs children and their families. It's a prime example of top-down over-reach. And it's interesting that both progressives and conservatives are opposing this overreach because it points to where there is common ground for realignment. For more on this see "Governing Principles for the Development of Local Humanistic Learning Communities."

The point is that subsidiarity provides a political framework that seeks a balance--it's not either/or, either anarchic libertarianism or oppressive top-down centralization. In the last 200 years we have learned that neither of those work well, and it's just a matter of time until once again we find the balance that my grandfather's generation found in the 30s when they were forced to abandon ideology focused on what worked and what didn't. 

See also "Finding the Balance between Centralization and Localism I" or click on the 'Subsidiarity" tag below.