The Discipline of Freedom. High Modernism and the Crisis of Liberalism

This essay investigates three answers to the crisis caused by the end of laissez faire, the First World War and the October Revolution that have been formulated during the ‘20s and the ‘30s of the 20th century. The first answer is the reconstruction of liberalism proposed by Walter Lippmann, who proposed a political science of the market. Freedom in the market must be constantly asserted both against individual behaviours and against the structures arising in the market and then sanctioned by the law. There is a paradox here that operates inadvertently and that recurs constantly throughout the neoliberal program. The market is the place of freedom, because it presupposes free individuals; individuals, however, are not always willing to recognize their freedom: they must therefore be obliged to be free. The second answer is that of Fordism, an ideology that exceeds Taylorism establishing not only a different compulsion to work but a new social discipline with a renewed spirit of obedience. The position assigned to the individual within the social production requires the redefinition of the very concept of enterprise. For this reason, Fordism as an ideology is able to find a place for all those individuals that would otherwise present themselves in mass. It solves the problem of the supposed neutrality of the technical knowledge, which can eventually result into technical reason, namely into a technology of the individuals at work in society. This technology is not the endowment of some individuals, but the expression of a process that involves everyone and establishes the necessary social hierarchies. Apparently opposite to this solution is the hypothesis of a necessary democratic planning proposed by Karl Mannheim in 1940. In this case the problem of the organization of power lies in the foreground and is no longer deduced from the environmental changes, but it rather becomes the main object of political action. The coming new civilization imposes to think that State and society can work with the same complexity of a machine. Planning is not simply a State policy, but literally a reconstruction of man and society based on the ability to use the techniques of social control of the masses. Therefore, the planning should not be understood only in an economic sense, but as a social technology different both from individual invention and from mere administration. It is a political practice, possibly due to an organizational and intellectual evolution, which solves the conflicts through technical means, closing the gap between ideology and utopia, even if it sometimes seems a practical dystopia.