I know this was a mostly academic conversation but wanted to point out one tidbit. Mr. Ahmari brought up the small biz owner (petite bourgeoisie) and seemed to consider them an obstacle to the common good. I don’t know how you can speak for some sort of common good and just dismiss this large group of people (who vote and pay a good share of federal, state and local taxes).
The concepts discussed might seem alien to the average American, I’m afraid. We can imagine a common good but mine won’t match yours. If the goal is to figure out more or less commercial regulation or tax rates then we will get it.
If the goal is to get all Americans to think a certain way and agree to a policy prescription to implement it then I think he might be a little foolish.
Lastly. I don’t like looking to Europe for guidance on common good. I think of Europe as the result of thousands of years of ethnic cleansing. It’s still an ongoing project. Just let people figure out the common good on their own. I don’t want governments (and their armies) to do it.
Maybe Ahmari should also be considered post-conservative, since he's rejecting the market-good-government-bad principle that's been central to conservatism since at least Goldwater.
A stimulating debate, with plenty of both heat and light.
I would have liked to have heard Mr. Ahmari challenged more firmly on his discussion of pre-liberal societies. This sounded too much like Rousseau's mythical State of Nature translated into 21st Centuryspeak. I understand and sympathize with Mr. Mounk's urgency in getting to the discussion on Liberty, but the price was accepting too many of Mr. Ahmari's assumptions as givens, rather than as propositions that required proof, and for which, I think, proof would have been hard to come by if demanded.
When someone like Mr. Ahmari attacks Liberalism and Liberty, he does it by taking shots at the historical failures of the first and the shortcomings of the second. Allowing Mr. Ahmari to define Liberalism as placing individual autonomy above everything else is a distortion, and it's too easy from there to put the other side on the "yes, but" defensive. What's needed is an alternate, coherent definition: I would suggest the Enlightenment one that found expression in the American and French Revolutions.
The thrust of Washington's Farewell Address is that the goal of the American Revolution was the establishment of Liberty, and the purpose of the new Federal Government was Liberty's protection and expansion. For Washington, all of the structures and tools of the Constitution were means to that end, not ends in themselves. But what was Liberty?
The French Revolution provided the most precise statement of what Liberty meant to the Founding Generation in Article IV of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: "Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the fruition of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law." This is both an evolutionary definition, and a revolutionary one, because the range of Liberty changes and grows as our perception of "harm (to) others" changes and (ordinarily) diminishes, but never loses sight of the common good, represented by the community's judgment in law. This was the intuition that I thought I heard behind many of Mr. Mounk's best arguments, but we never quite seemed to get to the words that tie it up into a coherent whole.
I really enjoyed that episode. I am no fan of Ahmari, as I dont find his proscriptive arguments compelling for many reasons. But he does have important criticisms that will hopefully be heard on the right and I appreciate his sincerity. Way to go on the very respectful but firm defense of liberalism.
The mistake being made is to miss that the problem is corporatism and not capitalism.
I know this was a mostly academic conversation but wanted to point out one tidbit. Mr. Ahmari brought up the small biz owner (petite bourgeoisie) and seemed to consider them an obstacle to the common good. I don’t know how you can speak for some sort of common good and just dismiss this large group of people (who vote and pay a good share of federal, state and local taxes).
The concepts discussed might seem alien to the average American, I’m afraid. We can imagine a common good but mine won’t match yours. If the goal is to figure out more or less commercial regulation or tax rates then we will get it.
If the goal is to get all Americans to think a certain way and agree to a policy prescription to implement it then I think he might be a little foolish.
Lastly. I don’t like looking to Europe for guidance on common good. I think of Europe as the result of thousands of years of ethnic cleansing. It’s still an ongoing project. Just let people figure out the common good on their own. I don’t want governments (and their armies) to do it.
Maybe Ahmari should also be considered post-conservative, since he's rejecting the market-good-government-bad principle that's been central to conservatism since at least Goldwater.
A stimulating debate, with plenty of both heat and light.
I would have liked to have heard Mr. Ahmari challenged more firmly on his discussion of pre-liberal societies. This sounded too much like Rousseau's mythical State of Nature translated into 21st Centuryspeak. I understand and sympathize with Mr. Mounk's urgency in getting to the discussion on Liberty, but the price was accepting too many of Mr. Ahmari's assumptions as givens, rather than as propositions that required proof, and for which, I think, proof would have been hard to come by if demanded.
When someone like Mr. Ahmari attacks Liberalism and Liberty, he does it by taking shots at the historical failures of the first and the shortcomings of the second. Allowing Mr. Ahmari to define Liberalism as placing individual autonomy above everything else is a distortion, and it's too easy from there to put the other side on the "yes, but" defensive. What's needed is an alternate, coherent definition: I would suggest the Enlightenment one that found expression in the American and French Revolutions.
The thrust of Washington's Farewell Address is that the goal of the American Revolution was the establishment of Liberty, and the purpose of the new Federal Government was Liberty's protection and expansion. For Washington, all of the structures and tools of the Constitution were means to that end, not ends in themselves. But what was Liberty?
The French Revolution provided the most precise statement of what Liberty meant to the Founding Generation in Article IV of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: "Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the fruition of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law." This is both an evolutionary definition, and a revolutionary one, because the range of Liberty changes and grows as our perception of "harm (to) others" changes and (ordinarily) diminishes, but never loses sight of the common good, represented by the community's judgment in law. This was the intuition that I thought I heard behind many of Mr. Mounk's best arguments, but we never quite seemed to get to the words that tie it up into a coherent whole.
I really enjoyed that episode. I am no fan of Ahmari, as I dont find his proscriptive arguments compelling for many reasons. But he does have important criticisms that will hopefully be heard on the right and I appreciate his sincerity. Way to go on the very respectful but firm defense of liberalism.