Transcript

Liberty and Government: Hindess and the History of Liberalism

Author(s): Duncan Ivison
Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 36, No. 1, Theory, Politics, Power: Essays
in Honour of Barry Hindess (February 2011), pp. 10-16
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Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
36(1) 10-16

Liberty and Government: © The Author(s) 2011
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Hindess and the History DOI: 10.1177/0304375411401832

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of Liberalism ÜSAGE

Duncan Ivison1

Abstract

This article investigates Barry Hindess's distinctive interpretation of liberal political thought, and
especially his analysis of liberalism's emphasis on the normative priority of liberty. For Hindess,
drawing on Foucault's lectures on the history of early modern political thought and liberalism,
liberty is an important aspect of liberal thought but so too is "government," understood in the
broadest sense. Any genealogy of the liberal conception of freedom must, therefore, also deal
with the nature of liberal government, understood as a distinctive "rationality" of government.
Hindess' "realist" approach to political thought, his focus on the relationship between freedom
and government and the extent to which liberalism governs not only through freedom but also in
determining which agents and/or groups could not be governed in this way, offers a rich and
unusual perspective on the nature of liberal freedom. The article concludes with an attempt to
provide an account of liberty as a distinctly political value that incorporates aspects of Hindess'
analysis and yet challenges it in other ways, especially with regard to the importance liberty plays
in the way we conceive of the legitimate exercise of political power.

Keywords
liberty, liberalism, power, government, Foucault

Liberalism has no essence but it does have a history. This means the term can be extended in a
multiplicity of ways, albeit always within a certain range. Thus, one finds claims that Hobbes, Spi
noza, Rousseau, Kant, Von Humbolt, Mill, Sidgwick, Rawls, and Hayek are all liberals of one kind
or another, despite espousing often radically different philosophical and political views. In this arti
cle, I want to explore the distinctive interpretation of liberalism offered by Barry Hindess in range of
articles and books over the past decade.1 Although he draws extensively on the work of historians of
political thought in order to put various strands of liberal political thought into historical context, his
general approach is "realist," where this term refers not to metaphysical realism, or to the realism
one finds in theories of international relations, but rather to political realism. I want to begin by say
ing something more about the nature of political realism.

1 University of Sydney, 2006 Australia

Corresponding Author:
Duncan Ivison, University of Sydney, Department of Philosophy, Sydney, NSW, 2006 Australia
E-mail: [email protected]

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Ivison 11

Nietzsche claimed only that which has no history can be defined (a favorite quotation of Barry's),
and so perhaps attempts to define liberalism are doomed to fail, or at least be uninteresting. But does
that mean there is nothing we can say, in general, about liberalism? To claim something has an
essence is distinct from making certain generalizations based on our understanding and evaluation
of the particular history (or histories) of a concept or conception. The history of the uses of a concept
will inevitably shape and constrain what we can do with it, but the very fact that we are historically
aware of its different trajectories and contexts means we can at least attempt to understand that past
and reshape its future. The boundaries of concepts are fuzzy and subject to variation and change. Lib
eralism, for example, can probably never be transformed into something approaching a claim about
the virtue of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but that is not to say it cannot be bent to more radical
or conservative ends, depending on context and historical circumstances.
If singular definitions of liberalism are of limited value, then what can we say about it? There are
at least four broad tendencies or predilections we might associate with modern liberalism, each of
which is shaped by other beliefs and values and together form different constellations that become
more or less central to liberalism in different contexts and at different times. These include (a) a
broad commitment to individual and social freedom; (b) to toleration; (c) to individualism and
autonomy; and (d) to a suspicion of unlimited or discretionary power. In each case, of course, there
are multiple variations and traditions, many aspects of which are often at odds or cross-purposes with
each other. If the prehistory of liberalism includes Hobbes and Rousseau, for example, then the spec
trum of views about the nature of freedom and authority will be very broad indeed. Similarly, if
modern liberalism embraces T. H. Green and Von Hayek, then approaches to the proper role for the
state will vary enormously.
What I want to focus on in this brief essay is the centrality of liberty within the liberal tradition,
and in particular, Barry's distinctive interpretation of this aspect of the history of liberalism. For Hin
dess, there is another layer to consider in any genealogy of liberalism focused on the concept of lib
erty: namely, the many contexts in which the challenge is not only to promote freedom, but also to
govern it. The central question animating my essay is this: What would a suitably "realist" form of
liberalism look like, and more specifically, a particularly clear-eyed account of freedom? I shall
begin by saying a bit more about what I mean by "political realism."
It has been a singular feature of Barry's writing on liberalism that he has resisted the common
tendency of seeing it always in terms of the normative. Barry's approach has been relentlessly his
torical. This means he has also avoided another common tendency in the literature; namely, the
excessive moralism that can sometimes infect so much contemporary liberal political theory. Hin
dess is a political realist, it strikes me, in the sense we find in Hobbes and Weber, but also more
recently in the work of Bernard Williams, Judith Shklar, Stuart Hampshire, and Raymond Geuss.
Political realism, very generally, puts the acquisition, distribution, and use of power—understood
in the broadest sense of the term—at the heart of political analysis. Why? Because it is an empirical
fact about the societies we know most about. It is our present danger.2 But realism, in this sense, also
offers a distinctive account of the role of political theory.
Bernard Williams has distinguished between what he called the "enactment" and "structural"
models of political theory.3 According to the first, the point of political theory is to formulate prin
ciples, concepts, ideals, and values which are then expressed in political action through the use of
(legitimate) power, persuasion, and so on. According to the second (the structural model), on the
other hand, theory lays down the moral conditions of co-existence under power, conditions in which
power can be exercised. Utilitarianism is an exemplar of the first, Rawls of the second. Both repre
sent the priority of the moral over the political: politics is either the instrument of the moral or the
moral is meant to constrain politics. Against this Williams suggests we should give greater auton
omy to distinctly political thought. This means political philosophy ought to grasp itself in such a
way that it is oriented toward the concrete, toward action, and be acutely aware of the "partisan"

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12 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 36( I )

nature of all political discourse (including the philosophical). The idea of the political is importantly
connected to political disagreement, which in turn is not reducible to moral disagreement. Political
disagreement is identified by a field of application—it involves disagreements about what should be
done under political authority, among other things. It also involves disagreements over the interpre
tation of political values that tap into complex "historical deposits": we are not all simply arguing
about how to read one text.4 Thus, action and the contexts of action matter as much (if not more) than
mere beliefs or propositions (although, of course, as Quentin Skinner and others have pointed out,
propounding a belief or theory can itself be an action). As to what this might mean in terms of how
we approach the subject matter of politics itself, Guess suggests that we should not start with how
people ought ideally or rationally to act, desire, or value but with the way "social, economic, polit
ical, etc. institutions actually operate in society at some given time, and what really does move
human beings to act in given circumstances" (whether that be on the basis of moral principles, cul
tural norms, or indeed illusions).5
What this approach also means is that we should reject the thought that there is only one choice to
be made between "morality," understood in broadly liberal terms, and unmediated coercion (or as
one of my PhD supervisors used to put it to me, that the choice is between reason and "welcome
back Hitler, all is forgiven"). The practice of reason itself cannot be equated with liberal reason.
Williams suggests that "might is not, in itself, right" is perhaps the first necessary truth about the
nature of right, which may exclude many bad things but is radically indeterminate about what is
required. All it really says is that coercion requires legitimation and that the will of the stronger
is not itself a particularly persuasive legitimation story, however much it may actually describe what
happens on the ground. If liberalism offers a better set of tools with which to think about legitima
tion—because it has higher standards of what counts as individuals being disadvantaged and a cor
respondingly higher expectation of what states can do, for example—then this stems mainly from its
current historical situation, as opposed to an abstract vindication of its reasonableness.
The definition of a liberal for many is someone who believes in the preeminent value of liberty.
One standard way of making sense of this idea is to argue that liberals can be identified as those who
accord liberty primacy as a political value. Thus, the prehistory of liberalism includes theorists such
as Locke or Hobbes, for whom man was considered to be naturally free, and more contemporary
variations wherein liberty is taken to be normatively basic. In both cases, the moral and political
onus is therefore placed on those would limit freedom, especially through coercion. This puts the
justification of political authority at the heart of liberal political theory, along with that of the state.
Even where the actual substance of a particular account had distinctly illiberal consequences—as in
the case of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, or Kant—the fact that they all start from the premise of
"man" being free and equal locates them, very generally, within this camp. By the nineteenth cen
tury, so one version of this story goes, this apparent presumption in favor of liberty is linked increas
ingly and more explicitly to limits on state power and an antipathy to the presence of discretionary
power (at least in "civilized states"; a point we shall turn to in a moment). This conjunction can be
found, arguably, in Humboldt's critique of the cameralist politics of state welfare and his vision of a
night watchman state unshackling the self-activity of individuals; in Constant's critique of the exces
sively moralistic conception of ancient liberty; and, of course, in Mill's articulation of his "one sim
ple principle" in On Liberty (it is also clearly prefigured in Adam Smith's analysis of the "natural
system of liberty").
Hindess has consistently and incisively criticized this particular genealogy of liberal self
understanding. He claims this story is not so much false as radically incomplete. I want to look a
bit more closely at this argument.
On the one hand, Hindess has sought to point out the implicit (and often explicit) supra-national
dimension to liberal political thought, against what for a long time tended to be an almost exclusive
focus on state/subject relations within normative liberal political theory (the pendulum has now

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Ivison 13

swung dramatically the other way, with the rise of the literature on global justice). Thus, Hindess has
been concerned to point out that even when liberals thought they were dealing with exclusively
intrastate issues—consent, legitimacy, political authority, and so on—they were, in fact, presuppos
ing and reinforcing various crucial international and transnational processes and structures. The con
tractarian story at the heart of Lockean and Rawlsian political theory, for example, far from
explaining and justifying a purely internal process of development, was itself an artifact of a
supra-state governmental regime: namely, that which emerged out of the various treaties of West
phalia in 1648 that finally brought the destructive religious conflicts of northern Europe under some
kind of control. This is not just an oversight on the part of liberals, Hindess suggests, but reflects a
fundamental blindness about the actual history of states and state formation that has serious conse
quences for a proper (realistic) account of the nature of liberalism.
Another crucial line of argument Hindess has developed has been with regards to the apparent
primacy assigned to liberty and to the promotion and protection of private property. First of all,
he has been critical of the overwhelmingly normative focus liberal theorists have taken on these
questions, giving little serious consideration to the actual techniques and mechanisms of regulation
and control that are or could be used in the governing of populations and states. Even when Rawlsians,
for example, distinguish between "ideal" and "nonideal" theory, they remain focused on normative
issues. Nonideal theory just means: how do we make our moral principles work in the "real world?",
as opposed to whether or not there are different kinds of considerations one needs to bring to bear on
gaining a sufficiently robust and realistic understanding of the world in the first place.
Hindess's main approach, however, has been to develop and extend aspects of the analysis of
liberalism offered by Foucault. Foucault's analysis of liberalism involves seeing it as a distinctive
rationality of government—understood in the broadest sense—as much as it is one of liberty. So,
Foucault accepts that liberals generally do believe in the primacy of liberty as a political value (and
thus are predisposed to be skeptical of state power, at least in some domains), but he locates this
belief within a much wider and denser set of concrete practices and institutions. Thus, rather than
opposing liberty to government, Foucault sees them as intimately connected, and Hindess has devel
oped a particularly lucid account of the consequences of this move. I want to explore two aspects of
his analysis here.
First of all, in various articles and in Discourses of Power, Hindess has developed Foucault's
insight of a conception of the liberal rationality of government in which the long-term objectives
of government— whether it is to reduce crime, improve healthcare outcomes, or minimize
fraud—is best pursued through the "free decisions" of individuals. Thus, attempts by the state to
overregulate or aggressively manage behavior often end up defeating the very ends for which coer
cion was originally thought necessary. Limited government should be grasped then not only under
the guise of a normative disposition opposed to the arbitrary exercise of state power but also as a tool
or mechanism for effective government. Here, he joined with a range of other scholars—including
Nikolas Rose, Mitchell Dean, Jeffrey Minson, and others—who offered a range of analyses that
tracked these kinds of changes occurring under the guise of "advanced liberalism" in a multitude
of contexts.
However, a second aspect of this analysis was aimed at what Hindess thought the governmental
ity school often missed. The assumption made by many under the influence of Foucault was that
liberalism as a rationality of government was concerned mainly with governing through liberty.
In fact, liberalism also had to concern itself with determining which individuals (and "peoples")
along with areas of conduct within (and beyond) the state could not be governed in this way. He
makes this point very clearly in his article "Liberalism—What's in a Name?"7:

To the extent that [liberalism] is concerned with the government of actual states and populations—to the
extent, we might say, that it is serious about politics in the modem world—then liberalism can hardly

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14 Alternatíves: Global, Local, Political 36(1)

avoid the question of what to do about individuals and areas of conduct which seem not to be amenable to
government through the promotion of suitable forms of individual liberty.

It turns out, of course, that when we turn to the work of figures such as John Locke, Adam
Smith, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and J. S. Mill, they all draw a line between those peoples
and domains that can best be governed through the promotion of liberty and those that can't
(whether the poor, indigenous peoples, minority language groups, South Asians, etc.)· In other
words, that as well as there being certain capacities required for freedom, there are certain
capacities required to be governed as a free agent (capacities delivered either through "civili
zation," "improvement" the workings of nature, or through institutional design). Both support
ers and opponents of imperialism, for example, appealed to the historicist view about the
development of capacities for freedom. Nor was the developmental argument the only response
to the problem of governing populations both within and beyond state borders. The crucial
upshot of this analysis, for Hindess, is that by adopting a more realist account of liberalism,
we are less likely to fall prey to a blindness about the relationship between liberalism and var
ious actual political developments, and we are less likely to fall back on convenient but obscur
ing distinctions between principle and policy, theory, and application. The challenge of
governing populations has always been part of liberalism's complex relationship with liberty,
and thus, we should expect to see new ways in which liberal government manifests itself today,
even in an era that has supposedly adopted nonimperialist norms of international human rights
and the promotion of democracy as the sine qua non of international law.
Is there a "realist" conception of political liberty that can be excavated in light of Hindess's
analysis of liberalism? Or to put it slightly differently: how should we conceive of liberty as a dis
tinctly political value? In the last section of Discourses of Power, Hindess turns to—what for him
must be disappointingly familiar—traces of various enduring fictions about liberty in Foucault's
later work. On the one hand, Foucault seems to make various noises about the need to keep domina
tion to a minimum and to "ground yourself in liberty." On the other hand, given Foucault's general
claim that power is unavoidable and there is no point positing an imaginary state of emancipation
from its effects as a viable normative ideal (including any conception of moral autonomy or
personhood), the suggestion must be that "liberty" can only ever be akin to an empirical fact about
particular reactions to power. Power will be resisted but there doesn't seem to be any further grounds
to say that it should be kept to a minimum in the name of liberty.
However, if we take seriously the thought explored above, that our political concepts are, as
Geuss puts it, "historically accumulated constellations of heterogeneous elements"8 then we should
expect to find a complex assemblage of quasi-normative and empirical material underlying our
concepts and conceptual schemes. In fact, this is as true for Foucault as it is for Rawls, and indeed
possibly for Hindess.
As we know, for Foucault our capacities for action are partly a function of not only our physical
constitution but also the social and institutional context in which we live, including, crucially, those
normative considerations (moral, political, ethical, and cultural) one brings to bear on understanding
and justifying one's actions to others.9 Capacities can change but also perspectives; sometimes
the same capacities can acquire radical new meaning in light of a changed or newly acquired
perspective.10 The human sciences, for example, provide regulative models or ideals of "normal"
human flourishing that shape our practical reasoning in different ways. They also shape how the
state and its agencies treat their citizens (as well as noncitizens). These discourses exercise a kind
of epistemic authority in the public culture and in our own practical reasoning, but insofar as they
come to shape implicit conceptions of the person and thus normatively available ideals of human
flourishing, they come to shape moral and other attitudes. The same is true of various discourses and
rationalities of government. The various detailed studies of German and American neoliberalism in

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Ivison 15

his recently published College de France lectures, as well as of the natural rights and utilitarian
traditions of liberal thought, provide an historical perspective on the content and development of the
normative structure to which liberal theorists often appeal.
For Foucault, understanding the conditions of possibility for experience, including what it means
to be free, can only be grasped for him in terms of what he called the "historical a priori." According
to this account, there is no contradiction between the idea of a self-engaged in reflection and criti
cism on the one hand, and a genealogical account of the development of those very capacities in the
context of "power-knowledge" on the other. Freedom is a kind of ontological precondition for
ethics and politics but where this is an historical as opposed to metaphysical ontology.11 I am free
to the extent that I possess the actual capacities and self-understanding to (re)act in a particular way
to a particular set of relations of power, which presupposes agents who are capable of so acting.
Hence what we might call a practice conception of liberty.
There are two possibly interesting results to note here. First, as in the republican conception,
interference per se does not constitute unfreedom, but in an even more radical sense; free agents are
made, not given. Our capacity to practice freedom is contingent on a wide range of other practices,
including practices of the self. Second, according to the republican conception I am unfree if I find
myself in a situation in which someone or some agency could arbitrarily interfere with my liberty,
even if they never actually intend to. The mere knowledge of my being in their debt renders me
unfree. On Foucault's account, however, the fact that others could arbitrarily interfere with my
freedom is a given feature of the social and political domain.
Thus, perhaps surprisingly, Foucault ends up endorsing something like a corporeal conception of
liberty: I am free to the extent that I can actually exercise my capacities in such a way so as to modify
the actions of others on my actions. Freedom is tied very closely to action. But that corporeal free
dom is itself conditioned by various social, political, and historical forces, as well as the interpretive
frameworks within which the agent understands herself. Resistance to existing forms of government
or power, for example, will have to find means of support in the available rationalities of government
already in the public culture. Thus, Foucault's conception of corporeal freedom is far richer than
Hobbes', given his genealogical account of the nature of human bodies and their capacities. It's not
merely a natural body seeking to maintain itself in motion and satisfy whatever desires it happens to
possess. Instead, it includes a dynamic account of the capacities and perspectives that enable a
particular kind of natural body—a human agent—to respond to and reflect on those actions acting
on it, however much it is always acting within a dense field of relations of power.
In the end, the kind of agency Foucault is interested in, both in his work on modem political thought
and ancient ethics, is not causal—that is, the power to initiate action by an act of will in some way
independent of antecedent causal conditions—but essentially historical. Is not there a temptation on
the Foucault/Hindess analysis then to say we should simply dispense with the illusion of political lib
erty altogether as anything other than a kind of empirical claim? Three thoughts militate against this
claim. First, it is difficult to avoid evaluative language when interpreting political concepts, just because
it is woven so deeply into our discursive and political practices. The desire for a more complete or rea
listic picture of politics is itself motivated by various normative concerns. Second, if we think we can do
without the illusion or fiction of a certain kind of liberal liberty then I think we'll still be left with the
general question of making sense of what it would mean to never resent or resist the attempts of others
to frustrate our desires, projects, and values. What view would one have to take of others who attempted
to do this—and of political authority in general—for that kind of question to never arise?12 Central to
just about any form of politics is the notion that legitimate power is not simply effective coercive
power; there is always a need for some kind of legitimation story. However great the range of
disagreement and variation across time and place, modem politics involves presumptions against
certain kinds of legitimation stories, and this has to do with the importance (for us, now) of liberty as
a political value.

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16 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 36(1)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of
this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes

1. Hindess, Barry, "Imaginary Presuppositions of Democracy," Economy and Society 20 (1991): 173-95;
"Notât Home in the Empire," Social Identity 7 (2001): 363-77; "The Liberal Government of Unfree
dom," Alternatives 26 (2001): 107; "Democracy and the Neo-Liberal Promotion of Arbitrary Power,"
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3 (2000): 68-84. See also below.
2. Geuss, Raymond, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 97.
3. Williams, Bernard, "In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument," edited
by Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
4. Williams, Bernard, "In the Beginning was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument," edited
by Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 77-8.
5. Geuss, note 2, 9.
6. Hindess, Barry, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (London: Blackwell, 1996).
7. "Liberalism: What's in a Name?" in Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, edited by
Wendy Lamer and William Walter, 23-39 (London: Routledge, 2004).
8. Geuss, note 2, 8.
9. Cf. Charles Taylor's notion of "strong evaluation"; see "What is Human Agency?" in Human Agency and
Language: Philosophical Papers 1, 15-44 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and for a
Nietzschean twist, see Patton, Paul, "Foucault's Subject of Power," in The Later Foucault, edited by Jer
emy Moss, 74 (London: Sage, 1999); and "Nietzsche and Hobbes," International Studies in Philosophy 33
(2001): 99-116.
10. Nietzsche provides the clearest example of such a case in the first essay of his Genealogy of Morality, see
the discussion in Patton, Paul, "Foucault's Subject of Power," in The Later Foucault, edited by Jeremy
Moss, 74 (London: Sage, 1999).
11. See, for example, Hacking, Ian, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
12. See the discussion in Williams, note 3 passim.

Duncan Ivison is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney. His most recent
books include Rights (Acumen, 2008) and as editor, The Ashgate Research Companion to Multi
culturalism (2010).

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