A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell
Nevertheless, despite the scope and consistency of both constrained and unconstrained visions, there are some other very important social visions- Marxism and utilitarianism, for example- which do not fit into either category completely. In addition, one of the hybrid visions which has had a spectacular rise and fall in the twentieth century is fascism. Here some of the key elements of the constrained vision- obedience to authority, loyalty to one's people, willingness to fightwere strongly invoked, but always under the overriding imperative to follow an unconstrained leader, under no obligation to respect laws, traditions, institutions, or even common decency. The systemic processes at the core of the constrained vision were negated by a totalitarianism directed against every independent social process, from religion to political or economic freedom. Fascism appropriated some of the symbolic aspects of the constrained vision, without the systemic processes which gave them meaning. It was an unconstrained vision of governance which attributed to its leaders a scope of knowledge and dedication to the common good wholly incompatible with the constrained vision whose symbols it invoked.
Adherents of both the constrained and the unconstrained visions each see fascism as the logical extension of the adversary's vision. To those on the political left, fascism is "the far right." Conversely, to Hayek, Hitler's "national socialism" (Nazism) was indeed socialist in concept and execution.
Inconsistent and hybrid visions make it impossible to equate constrained and unconstrained visions simply with the political left and right. Marxism epitomizes the political left, but not the unconstrained vision which is dominant among the non-Marxist left. Groups such as the libertarians also defy easy categorization, either on a left-right continuum or in terms of the constrained and unconstrained visions. While contemporary libertarians are identified with the tradition exemplified by F. A. Hayek and going back to Adam Smith, they are in another sense closer to William Godwin's atomistic vision of society and of decision-making dominated by rationalistic individual conscience than to the more organic conceptions of society found in Smith and Hayek. Godwin's views on war (see Chapter 7) also put him much closer to the pacifist tendency in libertarianism than to Smith or Hayek. These conflicting elements in libertarianism are very revealing as to the difference made by small shifts of assumptions.
Godwin's profound sense of a moral obligation to take care of one's fellow man39 never led him to conclude that the government was the instrumentality for discharging this obligation. He therefore had no desire to destroy private property40 or to have the government manage the economy or redistribute income. In supporting private property and a free market, Godwin was at one with Smith, with Hayek, and with modern libertarianism. But in his sense of a pervasive moral responsibility to one's fellow man, he was clearly at the opposite pole from those libertarians who follow Ayn Rand, for example. It was the power of reason which made it unnecessary for government to take on the task of redistribution, in Godwin's vision, for individuals were capable, eventually, of voluntarily sharing on their own. But were reason considered just a little less potent, or selfishness just a little more recalcitrant, the arguments and vision of Godwin could be used to support socialism or other radically redistributionist political philosophies. Historically, the general kind of vision found in Godwin has been common on the political left, among those skeptical of the free market and advocating more government intervention.
Logically, one can be a thorough libertarian, in the sense of rejecting government control, and yet believe that private decision-making should, as a matter of morality, be directed toward altruistic purposes. It is equally consistent to see this atomistic freedom as the means to pursue purely personal well-being. In these senses, both William Godwin and Ayn Rand could be included among the contributors to libertarianism.
The unconstrained vision is clearly at home on the political left, as among G. B. Shaw and the other Fabians, for example, or in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward or in the contemporary writings of John Kenneth Galbraith in economics or of Ronald Dworkin and Laurence Tribe on the law. But the constrained vision, while opposed to such philosophies, is also incompatible with the atomism of thoroughgoing libertarians. In the constrained vision, the individual is allowed great freedom precisely in order to serve social ends- which may be no part of the individual's purposes. Property rights, for example, are justified within the constrained vision not by any morally superior claims of the individual over society, but precisely by claims for the efficiency or expediency of making social decisions through the systemic incentives of market processes rather than by central planning. Smith had no difficulty with the right of society to regulate individual behavior for the common good, as in fire regulations 41 for example, and Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that "the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives."42
Neither the left-right dichotomy nor the dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions turns on the relative importance of the individual's benefit and the common good. All make the common good paramount, though they differ completely as to how it is to be achieved. In short, it is not a moral "value premise" which divides them but their different empirical assumptions as to human nature and social cause and effect.
Another complication in making these dichotomies of social philosophy is that many twentieth-century institutions or legal precedents represent thinking that is "liberal" (in American terms) or social-democratic (in European terms), so that conservatives who oppose these institutions or precedents are often confronted with the argument that such things are "here to stay" essentially a conservative principle. Those on the political right may thus end up arguing, on the ground of the political left, that certain policies are "irrational," while the left defends them as part of the accepted social fabric, the traditional position of the right.
While these might be simply tactical debating positions in some cases, there is a very real philosophic difficulty as well. At the extreme, the long-standing institutions of the Soviet Union were part of the social fabric of that society, and communists who opposed reforming them were sometimes considered to be "conservative." Among fervent American supporters of the free-market principle, libertarians are often at odds with conservatives on welfare state institutions, including labor unions, which are now part of the American social fabric-an argument which carries little or no weight in libertarian thinking, though some conservatives find it important.
While it is useful to realize that such complications exist, it is also necessary to understand that a very fundamental conflict between two visions has persisted as a dominant ideological phenomenon for centuries, and shows no signs of disappearing. The inevitable compromises of practical day-to-day politics are more in the nature of truces than of peace treaties. Like other truces, they break down from time to time in various parts of the world amid bitter recriminations or even bloodshed.
The general patterns of social visions sketched in these chapters in Part I provide a framework for looking more deeply into the application of constrained and unconstrained visions to highly controversial issues involving equality, power, and justice in the chapters that follow in Part II. Finally, the role of visions will be assessed against related but very different concepts, such as "value premises" and paradigms.
PART II:
APPLICATIONS
Chapter 6
Visions of Equality
---I quality, like freedom and justice, is conceived in entirely different terms by those with the constrained vision and those with the unconstrained vision. Like freedom and justice, equality is a process characteristic in the constrained vision and a result characteristic in the unconstrained vision.
From Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century to Friedrich Hayek in the twentieth century, the constrained vision has seen equality in terms of processes. In Burke's words, "all men have equal rights; but not to equal things."1 Alexander Hamilton likewise considered "all men" to be "entitled to a parity of privileges,"2 though he expected that eco
The constrained vision of man leads to a constrained concept of equality as a process within man's capabilities, in contrast to a results definition of equality, which would require vastly more intellectual and moral capacity than that assumed. The argument is not that it is literally impossible to reduce or eliminate specific instances of inequality, but that the very processes created to do so generate other inequalities, including dangerous inequalities of power caused by expanding the role of government. Milton Friedman exemplified this aspect of the constrained vision when he said:
A society that puts equality-in the sense of equality of outcome-ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.?
But to those with the unconstrained vision, such dangers are avoidable, if not illusory, and therefore to stop at purely formal process-equality is both needless and inexcusable. "What could be more desirable and just," Godwin asked, than that the output of society, to which all contribute, should "with some degree of equality, be shared among them?"8 Both visions recognize degrees of equality, so the disagreement between them is not over absolute mathematical equality versus some degree of equalization, but rather over just what it is that is to be equalized. In the unconstrained vision, the results are to be equalized- to one degree or another- whereas the equality of a constrained vision is the equalization of processes. Godwin was prepared to concede some advantages to talents and wealth," though other believers in the unconstrained vision varied in how far they would go in this direction. What they shared was a concept of equality- of whatever degree- as being equality of result. When Godwin lamented seeing "the wealth of a province spread upon the great man's table" while "his neighbors have not bread to satiate the cravings of hunger,"10 he voiced a lament echoed many times throughout the history of the unconstrained vision.
Even when equality is phrased as "equality of opportunity" or "equality before the law," it still has different meanings in the two visions. Although these concepts are expressed in prospective rather than retrospective terms, they can be either (1) prospects of achieving a given result, or (2) prospects of being treated a given way by the rules of the process.
So long as the process itself treats everyone the same- judges them by the same criteria, whether in employment or in a courtroom- then there is equality of opportunity or equality before the law, as far as the constrained vision is concerned. But to those with the unconstrained vision, to apply the same criteria to those with radically different wealth, education, or past opportunities and cultural orientations is to negate the meaning of equality- as they conceive it. To them, equality of opportunity means equalized probabilities of achieving given results, whether in education, employment or the courtroom.
This may require the social process to provide compensatory advantages to some, whether in the form of special educational programs, employment preference policies, or publicly paid attorneys. Though the specific issues of "affirmative action" or "comparable worth" are quite recent in history, the thinking and the vision behind them go back at least as far as the eighteenth century. According to Condorcet, "a real equality" requires that "even the natural differences between men will be mitigated" by social policy.11 Without equalized probabilities of achieving given results, formal equality was inadequate- if not hypocritical- according to the unconstrained vision. George Bernard Shaw, for example, ridiculed formal equality of opportunity:
Give your son a fountain pen and a ream of paper, and tell him that he now has an equal opportunity with me of writing plays and see what he says to you!12
Those with the unconstrained vision see no need to neglect at least trying efforts toward equalizing chances for particular results. But to those with the constrained vision, attempting to single out special individual or group beneficiaries is opening the floodgates to a dangerous principle whose ramifications go beyond the intentions or control of those initiating such a process. Again, it was not argued that it is literally impossible to reduce specified inequalities seriatim, but rather that the generation of new inequalities by this process defeats the overall purpose and creates additional difficulties and dangers. A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on preferential treatment rejected the idea that ethnic groups could be ranked by the levels of historic injustice suffered and the compensatory preferences to which they were correspondingly entitled:
As these preferences began to have their desired effect, and the consequences of past discrimination were undone, new judicial rankings would be necessary. The kind of variable sociological and political analysis necessary to produce such rankings simply does not lie within the judicial competence .... 13
The unconstrained vision was expressed by an opposing Justice in the same case, without regard to this argument. Instead, a lengthy elaboration of historic injustices and handicaps suffered was cited as arguments for compensatory preferences to achieve equalization of prospects.14 The two visions argued past each other.
CAUSATION
For equality to become an issue between the two visions, there must first be inequality. The existence and persistence of inequality is causally explained very differently by those with the constrained vision and those with the unconstrained vision. Many leading exponents of a constrained vision do not explain inequality of result at all, while many leading exponents of an unconstrained vision find such inequality both intellectually and morally central.
It is not only the existence and persistence of unequal results which have long held the attention of those with the unconstrained vision, but the magnitude of these differences as well. For Godwin, the inequality of property ownership was at "an alarming height."15 To Shaw, for one person to receive three thousand times the rate of pay of another "has no moral sense in it."16 Moreover, it is not only the magnitude of unequal results but the source: According to Shaw, "landlords have become fabulously rich, some of them taking every day, for doing nothing, more than many a woman of sixty years drudgery"17 Capitalists likewise were conceived to prosper in much the same way, profit being considered simply "overcharge."18
It was not merely that some have little and others have much. Cause and effect are involved: Some have little because others have much, according to this reasoning, which has been part of the unconstrained vision for centuries. In one way or another, the rich have taken from the poor. According to Godwin, the great wealth of some derives from "taking from others the means of a happy and respectable existence."19 Such reasoning has been applied internationally as well as domestically. Imperial Britain was thus "a parasite on foreign labor," according to Shaw.20 The correction of such exploitation has been a central concern in the unconstrained vision.
The theme of unjustified taking is not limited to direct employer-employee relationships, to businessconsumer relationships, or to imperialist-and-colony relationships. When those incapacitated for work "those less endowed with bodily strength or mental power"- do not share fully in the fruits of society, they are not merely denied compassion but robbed of rights, according to Edward Bellamy, for most of what makes modern prosperity possible comes from the efforts of past generations:
How did you come to be possessors of this knowledge and this machinery, which represent nine parts to one contributed by yourself in the value of your product? You inherited it, did you not? And were not these others, these unfortunate and cripple
The thesis that material deprivation has been aggravated by the infliction of psychic pain has long been a recurring theme in the unconstrained vision. In the eighteenth century, Godwin declared:
Human beings are capable of enduring with chearfulness considerable hardships, when those hardships are impartially shared with the rest of the society, and they are not insulted with the spectacle of indolence and ease in others, no way deserving of better advantages than themselves. But it is a bitter aggravation of their own calamity, to have the privileges of others forced on their observation, and, while they are perpetually and vainly endeavouring to secure for themselves and their families the poorest conveniences, to find others revelling in the fruits of their labors.22