Economic polity

Paul Kahn ( Putting Liberalism in Its Place ) traces the dominance of economic/market logic in modern politics to questions about the “faculties of the soul.” On the economic model of these faculties, he argues, interest is “modeled on bodily desire.” This does not mean that all interests crudely express a bodily desire, but that the interests that count share certain characteristics with bodily desire – “a primacy of the individual”; the notion that interest, like desire, is an internal state that makes external claims on things outside the self; and, like desire, interest cannot be judged from some neutral position.

Interest-as-desire becomes institutionalized as the market, which Kahn describes as a method of “objectifying interests in the form of property, which then allows a process of valuation and exchange” in place of “brutish competition of each against all.” (I wonder here if Kahn proves himself to be still in the grip of social contract theory, which posits a pre-social, pre-exchange state.)

When desire/interest and the market come to dominate society, as they have in the modern world, reason and will tend to take a particular shape, a particular political shape.

Reason becomes the effort to “identify barriers to free entry [to the market] and to correct for market failures. Government’s role is to establish and secure the conditions under which markets can flourish.” Economics is the queen of the sciences so long as “we take up political psychology from the perspective of individual interests.” Kahn has the historical sense to know that this is not the way all societies function: “If were were . . . to approach political psychology from the perspective of a religious quest for salvation, theology would displace economics as the form of reason to which politics must be responsive.” He also recognizes that in specialized areas, other disciplines (medicine, eg) form policy. Still, the overall framework for political life is derived from economics.

Will in this context is, as it is classically, “a subjective capacity to locate the source of meaning outside the self,” but in the market/interest setting will is understood “on the model of contract.” Contracts express “a commitment to regulate one’s own interest-seeking behavior in conjunction with others. Without others with which to engage, will is indistinguishable from desire.” Thus contract “changes what would otherwise be the unpredictable character of interests into a stable order of intersubjective satisfaction.”

All this contrasts, Kahn argues, with a polity in which will rather than interest takes priority. Will-politics looks to the popular sovereign as the creator of politics community: “Will privileges the [revolutionary] narrative of self-creation of a particular community.” In this setting, reason is “hermeneutical,” the effort to “interpret the manifestations of the sacred,” the sacred popular will. Reason subordinated to will shapes a political rhetoric that calls “the individual citizen to realize his or her deepest meaning in the giving over of the embodied self wholly to the maintenance of the sacred meaning of the state.” Desire on this model is an obstacle that needs to be overcome in order to conform the individual with the sovereign popular will.

Liberal society is caught between a politics of the will and a politics of interests. He sees this tension reflected in America’s oscillation between “a pride in American exceptionalism and a demand for lower taxes. The former makes prominent the collective memory of a unique history; the latter aims to put more discretionary power in the individual consumer who is seen as the ultimate source of his or her meaning.”