The Liberal, or Illiberal, Family
- Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
- Apr 1
- 22 min read
April 1, 2025
By Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Families and groups of friends matter. They matter because language matters and upbringing matters and direct, personal cooperation matters. No person is an island, entire of itself. Even the lonely individual, believing that “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul,” has a family or friends or fellow employees or at least some casual encounters in the neighborhood, or else he goes mad, an unconquerable soul on a mountain in Montana plotting to send letter-bombs to save Nature.
If personal relationships matter then ethics matters, as the basis for trade and a republic. It is formed by families and other small groups from childhood to old age, during direct or indirect cooperation or conflict. Our unusually cooperative yet unusually conflictual species, Homo sapiens, with its unusually long childhoods, and now its long old ages, too, is based on the family, for better or for worse.
We know this. Lest we forget, Erasmus of Rotterdam, a liberal by the standards of his time, always started his Adages (1508 and later editions) with Amicorum communia omnia, “Among friends, all things in common.” He was not recommending a socialism of big societies. Drawing on the classical tradition of adages shared among friends, he was observing that a small society—your little group of friends, your family, your playmates, your fellow employees—runs on equality of permission, which is an equality of respect, and even of pizza. His adage had something like the same force as Aristotle’s “Humans are political animals,” that is, the free men debating the expedition to Syracuse in a little polis.
As speaking animals, further, we live in metaphors, sometimes apt and sometimes not. The old joke among students of literature and language is, “Do we speak the language, or does the language speak us?” As the German-American poet Rose Ausländer sang in 1981, “In the beginning / was the word /and the word was with God. / And God gave us the word / and we lived in the word. / And the word is our dream / and the dream is our life.” We dream of categories, in our metaphors and our stories, or in our imagined theories and our perceived facts, constrained by what is out in God’s world and what is inside our private dreams. With them we make our models and our histories and our lives, for example our scientific lives, saying the world. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr wrote in 1927 that “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out what the world is. Physics concerns what we can say about it.” We. Humans. Say. With words.
The silent, de-humanized, vending-machine “individual” without a family or friends or polis is one such metaphor, dominant in western philosophy since Descartes and in orthodox economics since Bentham. Yet Adam Smith emphasized at the outset of economics that the metaphor can lead to a tyranny of the “the man of system,” one man coercing all. Smith observed that The Man imagines “that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board. He does not consider that . . . in the great chess–board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.” Thus in 1762 Rousseau’s imagined “the general will.” In 1917, Lenin promised to make the Russian economy into one big factory. For centuries the metaphor of the family-less and authoritarian individual has slid into a theory and practice of tyranny.
But the “family” itself has been another such metaphor, dominant since the caves, and especially dominant since the hierarchies attending on agriculture. The landlord becomes the captain of my soul. Captaincy is not a great problem when the family is a literal, and lovingly liberal, family, or a group of friends equal in permission. We choose a quarterback for the time being, and we love our literal father, sometimes taking his wise suggestions. But the metaphor of the “family” is commonly extended to large groups or entire nations, with the king as father of“his” people. It makes the underlings of the patter familias into children or into subjects or into slaves.
Both the “individual” and the “family” bear watching, for their liberal fruit when used well, and their illiberal, rotten fruit when not.
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Orthodox economists and their followers favor “methodological individualism” in a specialized, limited form, what they call “rational” maximization of one, given, unified, individual utility function subject to constraints. All analysis must start with it, they declare, not with the family or the little group discussing and thinking together. It “must” start with an isolated, un-socialized, and silent fellow, who nonetheless somehow acquired a utility function and somehow knows without discussion what are his constraints.
He—I choose the gender carefully—may be called “Mr. Max U.” The procedure of starting always with Max was laid down by the great Paul Samuelson (Nobel 1970) in his modestly re-entitled PhD thesis when it emerged as a book, The Foundations of Economic Analysis (thesis 1940; revised and published 1947). The procedure, I’ve noted, is what orthodox economists mean by “a model.“ The economists do not say why. Perhaps they think that such a model of choice is acceptably liberal, giving apparent agency to the lone man, like their favorite man, Robinson Crusoe on the island until Friday.
But wait. Before the rise of liberalism in the 18th century, an agriculture which became worldwide after the last ice age had long entailed top-down rules such as “Kings and landlords always win” and “Women and slaves always lose.” The contrary liberal democracy proposed by the pioneers of the Liberty Movement denied the ancient rules. Consumer sovereignty, too, sounds—and is—democratic and liberal.
Yet it’s a strange sort of “agency” or “sovereignty,” or indeed a strange sort of “self-rule” in Locke or “autonomy” in Kant and the rest of the pioneers, that has none of the doubts of actual people, or of the internal and external dialogue of actual, serious decisions among families and friends. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics begins with reflections on how humans in fact choose. If a Samuelsonian reads it, the passage startles her. After all, she says to herself, choice is a snap. Move to the point of tangency in such-and-such a diagram. Done and dusted. Her Max-U analysis pulls a curtain over the human doubts with which Aristotle began. The Samuelsonian Mr. Max U never doubts, never regrets, never changes his mind, never faces a crisis, never was a child, never had a mother, never listened to other people in a human world of language. The Samuelsonian reduces an analysis even of the family itself and even of the individual identity itself to a Max-U problem.
The Samuelsonian economists strictly follow Bentham, who in the late 18th century defined humans as utility machines of pleasure and pain. Later attempts by psychologists and economists to measure utility failed. And so during the 1930s the young Paul Samuelson, and his contemporary in Britain, the young Lionel Robbins, initiated a diversion of the argument into a strict behaviorism. Behaviorism still haunts economists, long after the psychologists gave it up. The behaviorist economists of the 1930s—and nowadays the new behavioral economists so admired by people ignorant of economics—declare that all an economic science needs is to observe the preferences revealed by what we can observe from the outside of a human mind, as we observe ants or fish. Humans buy apples or waste money on Christmas clubs, whatever. Utility is redefined as behavior, giving up our human self-knowledge. A few economists, following a thin line since Smith, are initiating a similar turn, called “humanomics.” Most economists aren’t yet buying. They’re sticking to behavior in the absence of mind, cognition, reflection—what we know from life and literature.
The utilitarian declarations of the economists have long allowed their Romantic and communitarian opponents to complain somewhat plausibly that economic theory recommends an inhuman selfishness. The economist’s Max U, and a coldly deterministic behaviorism, justifies the accusations of selfishness, alienation, lack of community, bowling alone. Therefore the English socialist and amateur historian, Arnold J. Toynbee the Elder, could in 1880 joke plausibly about “the bitter argument between economists and human beings.” The American communitarian and political philosopher Michael Sandel could in 2012 plausibly complain about “market fundamentalism.“ The economists who ignore the family—and the elaborated and transferred love in the polis and the agora so characteristic of speaking mammals—open themselves to critique by the very numerous “plausible illiberals,” as Alberto Mingardi and I call them, who are intent on substituting the State for the family and on fettering the individual to it.
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Paradoxically, the Max-U dogma, contrary to its superficially democratic and liberal politics, can lead to top-down governance. Even all the way to fascism. Mussolini’s politics, articulated in 1925, was “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” What is this Stato? It is a big national family run as a single utility function by Il Duce. Every sort of European statism, from the mild social democracy of Samuelson to the vicious fascism of Mussolini, has been justified by Rousseau’s notion of the Volonté Générale arising from a Contrat Social, and therefore—non sequitur alert—bridging the gap between individual and collective will. There’s no gap, qua Jean-Jacques, if the individual Mr. Max U merely, if mysteriously, accedes to the “social” Max U. The “new welfare economics “of the 1930s, articulated by Samuelson’s fellow PhD student at Harvard, Abram Bergson, and exposited in canonical form in the Foundations, emerged, as Samuelson recalled in 1981, because Bergson kept asking him, “Paul, what can Pareto mean by this 1898 use of the French singular when he speaks of 'the social optimum’?” Good question. The modern Samuelsonian economist replies that Lo Stato is an individual Mr. Max U, absorbing individuals and families. He says this even though Samuelson’s brother in law Kenneth Arrow soon showed that the social Max U cannot by derived from summing individual Manx Us, if constrained by liberal principles—something the so-called “Austrian” branch of economics had been saying for decades before Samuelson, Bergson, and Arrow.
That is to say, a faux-rigorous Max U slouches towards a faux-rigorous collectivism. The nature of man under socialism, said all manner of socialists, would adjust the lone man’s U to the social U. The zeal of the Stakhanovite would make vulgarities such as price and profit unnecessary—as they are in truth unnecessary in a loving family, or a group of dear friends, or in a disciplined army.
The reign of worldly philosopher-kings over the nation is thus reinstated, against the irritating unpredictability of actual markets, marriages, agreements, conversations among the individuals—the fraught and fatiguing choices of actual humans interacting with each other to yield spontaneous orders in language, economies, friendship, fashion, jazz. The metaphors of the General Will and the Social Contractàla Rousseau, and then Welfare Economics à la Samuelson, remake by a sleight of hand a collective action into an action by a lone king or husband or economist, servicing with affecting sincerity a social utility function, or serving the nature of man under socialism, or serving the Thousand Year Reich. But as the old farmer put it, though, “When I hear the word ‘service’ I wonder who’s getting screwed.”
The metaphor of “we “as an imagined collectivist Max U has increasingly dominated economic thinking, from A. C. Pigou in the 1920s down to Joseph Stiglitz in the 2020s. The “we” is not truly plural, but highly singular, a single-minded, top-down maximizer. “I’m from the government, and I’m here to maximize you.” It’s what Samuelson advocated, in Foundations, chapter VIII, and which Stiglitz, his prize student, took up with such enthusiasm. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock and their school of public choice, without much effect on the top-down enthusiasm for policy that most economists have evinced since Keynes, noted that the state or its master is not an apt metaphor for a single, Max-U individual. The masterful individual put in charge is not likely to turn out to be a sweetly philosophical king. And even if he were, the Austrians had pointed out, he could not possibly have the knowledge of place and circumstance necessary for even a rough approximation to the maximum.
§
Little liberal groups, for example the family, contrary to the Max-U dogma, should be taken seriously as potential staring points in social science, even in economics. The analysis should often start with a little society of loving and negotiating friends, not always with the individualist jerks who populate Woody Allen movies and the Gary-Beckerian faux-family run by a pater familias, whose lonely and unreflective will is the only utility function in sight.
The American sociologist the late Howard S. Becker (1928-2023; no relation to Gary) spoke of a “world.” He was implicitly contrasting his “world” with the “rational man” engaged in a non-cooperative game, as imagined by Gary. And he was explicitly contrasting his “world” with the “fields” of the snobbish, proudly Enlightened, hierarchical ploys by under-socialized individualist jerks, as imagined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Becker wrote:
The metaphor of “world”—which does not seem to be at all true of the metaphor of “field”—contains people, all sorts of people[in families, say], who are in the middle of doing something which requires them to pay attention to each other [in families, say], to take account consciously of the existence of others and to shape what they do in the light of what others do. In such a world, people … develop their lines of activity gradually, seeing how others respond to what they do and adjusting what they do next in a way that meshes with what others have done and will probably do next…. The resulting collective activity is something that perhaps no one wanted, but is the best everyone could get out of this situation and therefore what they all, in effect, agreed to.
It’s the liberal society. As Adam Ferguson of the Scottish Enlightenment— not of the constructivist and centralizing French—said in 1767, a world is commonly “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” Improvisation is like that, said the jazz and classical trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. It’s not surprising to learn that Howie Becker himself was from age 14 in Chicago a part-time but paid jazz pianist, and that his first book was about jazz musicians. And it’s no surprise at all that the USSR hated bottom-up jazz and loved top-down ballet.
There is, in short, something standing between collectivist and the Max-U theories. On the one hand, the state-loving economist Mariana Mazzucato advocated in the 2010s and 2020s an illiberal, top-down, unloving planner with a heedless, theory-indulging will. On the other hand the selfishness-praising novelist Ayn Rand advocated in the 1940s and 1950s an illiberal, unloving, isolated Max-U man with a heedless, desire-indulging will. Between them, the self-consciously liberal novelist of the 1930s, Laura Ingalls Wilder, advocated in her series of books, The Litle House on the Prairie, a loving family living amiably among others. And her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who collaborated on the Little House novels, shortly thereafter wrote The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority. Their American version of classical liberalism, renamed ill-advisedly during the 1950s “libertarianism,” yielded unplanned spontaneous orders, the ecological outcome, the evolutionary result, the language game, the creative conversation, the jazz improvisation, the market equilibrium—a sociological world of liberated human action.
The point keeps being rediscovered, because it keeps being forgotten, in favor of a French-Enlightenment notion that one clever (male) mind can lay down the future, “scientifically,“ as in Lenin’s boast for scientific socialism or Samuelson’s life-long affection for Soviet central planning. The Soviet literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who flourished during the transient liberties of the 1920s before the Stalinist night, put the contrary, liberal case in 1929: ”It is quite possible to imagine . . . a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that in principle cannot be fitted within the bounds of a single consciousness, that is, so to speak by its very nature full of event potential and is born at the point of contact of various consciousnesses.” Adam Smith, that self-conscious theorist of rhetoric, would have warmly agreed. Early in the second chapter of The Wealth of Nations he wrote that “this division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary. . . consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in view no such extensive utility”—adding in Bakhtinian style that it arises from the “faculty of speech.”
Such an invisible hand is neither macro nor micro, neither Mazzucato nor Rand, but meso. It guides most of what we do as humans—the linguistic riches of Greek or German or English, the navigating of a crowded pavement or a highway, the making of apps, the pragmatics of game playing, the proliferation U.S. Protestant sects, the compiling of Wikipedia, the making of friends, the locating of lovers, the invention of tradition, the history of painting, of fashion, of rock music, and of hundreds of other personal, economic, and technological practices. Consider the 30,000 new consumer packaged products, such as new breakfast cereal or new gadgets or new electronics, introduced every year into this or that U.S. store, to be tested by this or that local market, which is to say tested by the choices, rational or not, of people and their families. Only about 5 percent succeed, in the way that only Mozart is Mozart. Emergent order in all living things, and in much of human society, comes from such trial and error, often face-to-face in a family or among friends, but more and more at arm’s length in the Howard-Beckerian “world” of the families and friends globalized—not from putatively rational planning by a mastermind, whether by a masterful Mazzucato-style team of economists fulfilling a plan for the Anglo-American Concorde airplane or by a masterful Rand-style hero indulging his whim, to blow up the building he had just sold, his women swooning over his oh-so-masculine mastery.
The liberal family, then, is an appropriate unit of social and political as of economic and sociological analysis. A family is complicated, rhetorical, linguistic, and often therefore unpredictable. We do in fact internally debate, within our own free wills, or with our partners. Max U making a non-decision” decision” to achieve tangency in a diagram does not. And in a fully liberal family, the adults debate. If they are actually grown-up adults in a liberal society, they do so sensibly, with love and wisdom. The outcome affects social equilibria. Language matters. Families matter.
§
The Max U individual, a monad mysteriously arriving fully grown, has been assumed in Western ethical and political thinking since Machiavelli’s Il Principe. The family, and later in life the small groups of friends or colleagues, being quasi-families, make ethics at all three levels of a good life—self-fashioning, other-regarding, and transcendent-attending. A scholar such as Martha Nussbaum shapes herself to serious thinking, the discipline of ancient Greek and modern philosophy. She listens to other scholars, and to students and friends. And she serves the transcendent of Love and Learning. What is crucial, wrote Amélie Oksenberg Rorty in 1983 is “our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden presuppositions, changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and not because they have listened, really listened, to their friends’ [or spouse’s or siblings]’ questions and objections.”
Such an ethics of rhetoric grounds all the human “conjective” (Latin “thrown together”), the meso-outcome of our faculty of speech standing between the unknowable of God’s impersonal, objective truth, and the unknowable of your personal, subjective soul. All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know, is conjective. The conjective yields moral sentiments, and depends on them, too. Th legal philosopher John Hasnas makes this (obvious but true) point by observing that “The stability of the law derives not from any feature of the law itself, but from the overwhelming uniformity of ideological background among those empowered to make legal decisions . . . This agreement is due to the common set of normative presuppositions the judges share, not some immanent, objective meaning that exists within the rules of law.” And the same is true of science however defined, as we have known since Thomas Kuhn. Ethics grounds what we know and say and take to court or to the scientific journal together, the conjective. We better get our moral sentiments lined up, and in such a way that hideous outcomes are rare. We better have good mothers.
Think of how impossible it would be, for example, to come to the conclusions of Kantian or utilitarian or Sen-Nussbaum or Buchanan-Tullock political ethics, or even the phony objectivity of the New Welfare-Economics, if The Ethicist or The Theorist or The Policy Man did not already have the ethical character of concern, impartiality, carefulness, learning, humility, courage, and so forth, formed conjectively in a family and then exercised in the Howard-Beckerian world entered as a liberated adult. It all hangs on “overwhelming uniformity of ideological background.” If not, none of it goes through. Frankly, my dear, he wouldn’t give a damn.
What is required for any ethics, in other words, is a conscientious moral agent, a virtuous person, even if a scientist or scholar, raised up by family and society—Hilary Clinton’s “It takes a village.” Kant himself, rather against his own philosophy, said so. In his Reflections on Anthropology, he praised “the man who goes to the root of things,” and who looks at them “not just from his own point of view but from that of the community,” which is to say (wrote Kant) der Unpartheyische Zuschauer. The phrase was the contemporary German translation of Adam Smith’s ideal character from whom virtues are said to flow, the Impartial Spectator.[1] Yet Smith, unlike Kant, did give in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) a deep account of how such a person could appear on the scene, once a child in a family. Smith’s system, which Kant had read in German, was the last major statement of virtue ethics and therefore a developmental philosophy, John Dewey excepted, before its revival in departments of philosophy from the 1950s on, especially among female, anglophone, analytic philosophers.
§
If we are to have a well-functioning society, then, a Howard-Beckerian world, we need good families, with the good parenting that produces good adults—though the production function for such a result is not perfectly known. Though the conservatives and the progressives disagree, the modern liberal family in a liberal society, polity, and economy seems a good bet to arrive at the good result.
The impulse by both the conservatives and the progressives is to intervene to assure virtue, with a policy, as though we knew. Yet many top-down policies by the state to improve the human outcomes of families have not worked out very well, or at all, or entirely disastrously. Consider the one-child policy of the Chinese state, or the policy of banning unsupervised play by the U.S. state. The policies substitute massively for the human action of the families. Public education substitutes for the attention of parents. The somewhat mysterious sources of good parenting, especially by mothers, matters greatly to producing out of a child a grown-up Impartial Spectator. The Nobel economist Theodore Schultz observed it in poor countries during the 1960s. If mothers are literate, he saw, they make sure their children become so. If fathers are, not so much. Frank McCourt’s wrenching memoir of his childhood in Limerick, Ireland, Angela’s Ashes, tells of his father going directly from the pay window to the pub, with no intermediate stop to pay the family’s bills. When African men convert to evangelical Christianity they stop drinking and whoring, with better results for their children. If not directed by wise parents to wise purposes, money does not suffice, whether provided by work or by the state. Michelle Obama, raised on the South Side of Chicago by thoughtful and ethical, though non-rich, parents, succeeded much better in life, by any standard other than the ability to corrupt everything he touched, than Donald Trump, raised in Queens in New York by thoughtless and unethical, though very rich, parents.
We do not know enough to fulfill the grand conservative or progressive schemes for the family. A modestly liberal laissez faire seems the truer wisdom.
§
If the dogma of Max U leads unexpectedly through the metaphor of a social utility function into top-down tyranny, are we required to accede to the collectivism of the plausible illiberals?
No. Rushing straight to policy, social U, collectivism, communitarianism, theocracy, or fascism are varieties of the problem. None is the solution.
Collectivism, I have noted, can and often does come out of the metaphor of the nation as a family. A metaphor for the nation is explosive material, like nitroglycerin, and needs careful handling. The way the Robinson-Crusoe metaphor of individualism suggests a top-down solution to social problems, so does the illiberal versions of the metaphor of the family. The metaphor elevates the micro of a person’s life-world to recommendations for the macro of the whole. Humans find it difficult to think any other way than micro. Either “we” behave as Crusoe does in choosing which scarce tools to bring from the wreck or “we” behave as children comfortable in the bosom of the family. Those are daily experiences. The Howard-Beckerian world disappears into habits and conventions and institutions, the ethical bases of which are hidden from daily awareness. Like fish in the water, we don’t feel the conjective, ethical pressure. The meso-thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment, justifying a bottom-up Liberty, has repeatedly been simplified into the macro rule of top-down Reason by certain errant if Enlightened Frenchmen, justifying the tyranny of a king or of a father or an economist or a majority.
A famous speech in 1927 to the Swedish parliament introduced the term folkhemmet, “the people’s home.” Swedish politics was run as folkhemmet until its economic disasters during the 1990s. It was inspired by an alliance characteristic of the era, of conservative corporatists and progressive socialists—thus the New Deal in the United States—consecrated by the holy water in an older Christian socialism, or in the Protestant social gospel, or in Catholic social teaching.
The faith in Gunnar and Alva Myrdal as good parents taking charge of your life from their offices in Stockholm echoes a similar myth in a slave society, of the Good Master, the hoped-for sweetness of paternalism. One sees it in the letters of Seneca to Lucilius. Seneca writes, ”Live mercifully with your slave, amicably even. . . . Don’t you know what our ancestors did to eliminate resentment towards masters and abuse towards slaves? They used the name ‘father of the household’ for the master and ‘members of the household’ for the slaves.” Yet when exercised over adults, such a paternalism diminishes in soul and often enough in goods both the “father” and the “son.” To call a Black man “boy” has the same valence.
The insistent modern demand, under the misapplied metaphor of the family, that the state take on the role of loving parent arises of course from democracy. H. L. Mencken, that sharp-eyed wit, declared that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Democracy was entailed by liberalism, by an equality of permission gradually extending to the crucial dignity of the universal franchise. The unhappy paradox is that when equality of permission was universalized it led to proliferating statisms. As Mencken also said, our masters, whether democratic or not, Harris or Trump, know that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” “’Fear not us,”‘ the masters say. / “Fear the goblin down the way.’”
The coercive regulations of statism led to a reduction of the original equality of permission, that had been half-achieved in Britain during the early 19th century—before the “New” Liberalism of the 1880s recruited the state to solve the social problem of poverty, and of misbehavior by the poor damaging to the family, such as drinking up the pay packet at the pub. In the ruck of special interests and under the popular belief that free lunches abound, and according to the conviction by lawyers that all that is required is statute, and by ignoring the lessons of liberal economists that unintended and very bad consequences of policy happen often, and that our masters do not have either the knowledge or the ethics to serve our good, the common people got what they wanted, good and hard. Consider the history of Argentina after Perón.
The 19th-century coinage “social problem” would have seemed absurd before liberalism. In the pre-liberal olden times, it was supposed that everyone should have a coercive master, or else the gates of Hell open. Take up your cross, and shut up, because if obedient you anyway have infinite bliss to come. With liberalism, whose first great triumph was solving the newly perceived social problem of slavery, the phrase “social problem” and its correlate term “policy” exploded, as the N-grams show. The New Liberals, and the Protestant social gospelers, and the Catholic social teachers, and the revolutionary socialists all agreed on the matter. Romantic hostility to a spooky “capitalism,” and enthusiasm for an imagined social justice or general will, implemented by a utilitarian state, became in the early 20th century commonplace among the clerks. Let’s regulate those unpredictable markets. Let’s redistribute that unequal “capitalism.” “By the late 19th century,” the historian of the bourgeoisie, Jürgen Kocka, observed in my correspondence with him, “capitalism was no longer thought to be a carrier of progress.” From the 1920s on, even the formerly true-liberal economists increasingly asserted—down to the present with not a scintilla of quantitative or other scientific evidence for the assertion—that a market economy of equality of permission is chock full of terrible, nationally significant imperfections. Class warfare. Unemployment. Monopoly. Externalities. Inequality. Informational asymmetries. Ignorant consumers.
By now we turn to the state when it rains.
§
The modern idea of state policy is in fact the main source actual social problems, whether applied to the family or the industry or the business cycle or the growth of the economy. The motto of Auguste Comte’s positivism two centuries ago was “Understand in order to predict. Predict in order to control.” Why we would believe we can or should control other innocent adults is obscure, and tends strongly illiberal. Bentham’s panopticon was his proudest achievement, a scheme for designing prisons. Modern economists suppose that they are assigned to devise polices on policies on policies, entailing a chaos of second- and ninth-best monopoly such as U.S. health care. They issue orders as guards to their citizen-prisoners from the shaded observation tower of a university panopticon. The standard form of a paper in international economics is an N x N x N model on the blackboard without attention to magnitudes or second-best, followed by “policy implications.” Positivist policy treats our fellow citizens as ants or atoms without language or liberated wills, and proposes to control them as children or slaves. In highway engineering it makes some sense, and is no great loss of human liberty. In family policy it often makes little sense, and often is disastrous for human liberty.
The social engineering that a succession of French thinkers, and Jeremy Bentham, devised after 1762 in the line of Rousseau, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Comte, Blanqui, Sartre, Duclos is mostly impossible. Yet, we think society is now Scientific and Superior, so unlike our naïve and unscientific ancestors thinking un-Scientifically about families, such as he Mahabharata or Sophocles or Lady Murasaki or Shakespeare or Austen or Tolstoy or Woody Allen. We are ensnared by the paired rhetoric of social problem and social policy. Herbert Spencer in 1853 took note of a major template for stories in the newspapers supporting mor and more state action, still in wide use today. First the scolding of the state: “Take up a daily paper and you will probably find a leader exposing the corruption, negligence, or mismanagement of some State-department.” But then find the suggestion to bring on still more of it: “Cast your eye down the next column, and it is not unlikely that you will read proposals for an extension of State-supervision.” In 1891 he wrote that “As fast as voluntary co-operation at the micro level is abandoned compulsory [macro] co-operation must be substituted.”
Let’s stop doing it.
The family is of course essential for human life—as are other micro groups, such as intimate friends, or the band of brothers in war, or circles of courtesy and respect on the job, or for that matter the ordinary care we take not to bump into each other passing on the sidewalk. For a well-functioning world the ethical adults formed in the family are necessary, and even sufficient. Humans are not Max-U vending machines, but above all speaking mammals, raised by mothers. They talk and talk and talk, among families and friends and colleagues, cooperating directly. We get this, of course, from life and literature, though the helpful and quantitative science of how exactly the family works, or fails to work, is by no means finished and done with.
But the family, I say further, is an exceptionally poor model for the great society, the massive meso- and the resulting macro-organism of indirect, arms-length cooperation. A market, city, or nation is not a family. Taking them to be families—subordinating their spontaneous orders to a dangerous myth of the personal relation—leads to authoritarianism. So does the correlate myth of managerialism, that a masterful economist, say, can quite easily root out the alleged imperfections in spontaneous orders (though imperfections, it has turned out, I repeat, mostly undocumented up to serious scientific standards). Even the sweetest form of the family-manager, a myth of folkhemmet, well short of throughgoing fascism or communism, crowds out the virtues of the family, even while intending earnestly to correct its vices. The motherly state takes over raising children, and the fatherly state takes over managing adults. The state-as-parent, or as worldly philosopher king, reduces citizens to children—to bad or sad children depending on political outlook.
Let us have the liberal family, that happy innovation of the modern world, with liberated women and half-liberated children. We do not need to go back to the authoritarian, hierarchical family, or to go forward to the authoritarian, collective “family. “ Our conservative and progressive friends are quite mistaken on these points.
Let us have instead liberal families populating liberal republics. If we can keep them.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is a distinguished scholar and Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute.
[1] The passage is noted and the identification with Smith asserted by a German translator in 1926 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Walther Eckstein, quoted in Raphael and Macfie, eds., “Introduction,” to Theory (ed. of 1976), p. 31.
