Russell Blackford, "How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of NewBooks Network. This is your host, Moritz Azarajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel.

Today, I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Russell Blackford about a very timely topic, a book that he has recently published with Bloomsbury Press. The book is called How We Became Post-Liberal, The Rise and Fall of Toleration. Dr. Russell Blackford is a legal and political philosopher and is also a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Russell, thank you very much for accepting this invitation.

Well, thank you for having me on the show. I'm guessing there will be a lot of definitions that we need to set out when we go through this interview, liberalism. But before we start, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us how you became interested in this topic, political philosophy, and why you decided to write a book called How We Became Post-Liberal? Okay. Well, you're right that I'm a...

I'm a philosopher interested in legal and political philosophy. I have a legal background. I have a

fairly extensive and varied background, but I've been concerned for a long time about movements in our society towards the stifling of free and open public discussion, freedom of speech, and a kind of deprecation of the idea of individual liberty in general. Back in 2017,

I was working on a book called The Theory of Opinion, which was finally published at the end of 2018, beginning of 2019, which is about all of the forces in our society, whether it's from the left of politics or the right of politics or from the church, the state or just society, that pressure us to conform. That book was published and had a certain amount of success, which I was pleased about.

But it left a kind of blank, and that is, how did we actually get to having a society with those pressures and where...

It doesn't seem to be any powerful force in our society these days, which really favours traditional liberal ideas, ideas of individual liberty, ideas of freedom of speech. It often seems to be a clash of rival authoritarianisms. And that led to the current book, How We Became Post-Liberal, The Rise and Fall of Toleration.

Which is, I have to admit, a slightly pessimistic book. I think we are in a situation that's hard to extricate ourselves from. But I also think that coming to understand a bit about how we got into that situation can help us. It can help us understand it didn't have to be like that, that we can look at the way this particular social formation, if you like, has come about, has been constructed, and perhaps give us ideas to defend ourselves

to defend principles and ideas that I think are very worth defending. Thanks a lot for setting the scene. Well, I have a lot of questions I don't know where to start with, but maybe first, if you ask a hundred different scholars, political scholars, about the definition of liberalism, you might come up with a hundred different definitions, but there are some core principles they all have in common. And we're talking about post-liberal, post-liberalism in a way, but

In the context of your research, I was really interested in the title of the book, A Rise and Fall of Toleration. That is one of the core principles of liberalism as well, tolerant, which is not really maybe as much emphasized as other principles such as individual freedom for the individuals. But can you tell us, in your context of your book, how do you define liberalism and why is it that that aspect of toleration is important

is important for you and you have decided to put it in the title of the book as well. Okay. That's a pretty big question. But first of all, how do I think of liberalism? I don't think of liberalism as something that can be found in one or two sentences, you know, and it's not a...

just one simple claim and it's not even a political theory. It's really a kind of tradition or a kind of tendency within politics. It's a tradition of the way politics is carried on. But you're quite right. There are a few central ideas within that tradition. What are they? Well, they are things like toleration, individual liberty,

Meliorism, which is just the idea that we can make human life better, an idea of progress being possible. Progress being possible partly through open discussion of ideas. So these things all link together. And connected with all of that, an idea of social pluralism, that within society there will be different people and different groups that have different ideas about how to flourish together.

And they will want to live in different ways. And there's a question, well, how can they live in harmony? But those four things, revising just toleration, liberty, meliorism, which is kind of a belief in progress, and social pluralism, those four ideas fairly much go together and they form the basis of this kind of movement. Mm-hmm.

And you can identify more specific principles connected with those four big ideas. You can point out various values, various ideas of how we should live our lives that connect with those four big ideas. So, for example, liberals are big on freedom of speech. They're big on the idea of the rule of law.

which is litigation of arbitrary government power. You know, government has to act through law. It can't just throw you in jail without a trial, for example. A whole range of ideas like that are liberal principles.

And liberals tend, because they believe in individuality and individual freedom, that they emphasize the importance of people being allowed to be individuals. They emphasize ideas that it's good to be spontaneous, to be creative. Those kinds of concepts of how you might live your life are all part of liberalism.

So it's a pretty big movement with a lot of internal conflict, but also some central ideas, which I hope I've defined in a way that's reasonably clear. Yeah. And where does... Look, if we want to, I guess, trace back the roots of liberalism, we can go all the way back to Cicero, maybe. There are scholars who've done that. But, oh, I think one of the important...

let's say, roots of liberalism was Europeans' wars of religion and the idea of, again, religious tolerance. I'm interested to know what is the meaning of tolerance or toleration, again, in your book, and how is the idea of liberalism related with religious tolerance? Okay. I don't think you can have liberalism unless you have religious tolerance first. Right.

Certainly, I think that's true of Christian societies or historically Christian societies. Christianity was supposed to be a religion of love and peace, but it turned out to be a very intolerant religion.

And the logic of Christianity really explains how that came about. You know, Christianity has a concept of sin, which is not just acting in a way that's antisocial in some way and therefore should be governed by human laws, but which is actually a kind of defiance of God. And it has a concept of damnation or salvation. You know, we would all be damned for our sins, except that, you know,

Jesus of Nazareth, you know, sacrificed on the cross, his resurrection and so on, opened up an avenue for salvation. Salvation, through the logic of Christianity, is only through Christ. And if you want to attain spiritual salvation, you'd better have the right version of Christianity and how salvation works and the nature of Christ and so on, okay?

That in turn means that heresy really cannot be tolerated. If you start tolerating heresy, what you're going to end up with, bluntly, is a lot of people who literally end up in hell. You're tampering with the salvation of souls and the sheer immensity. In the case of each individual person, that they're going to spend eternity either in bliss or, if things go wrong, in torment. Now, that is a hard thing to put up with.

And therefore Christianity has been very insistent on getting the right version of Christianity. It's been insisted that you can't really tolerate the non-Christians. You have to try to convert them. And Christians had better not be heretics.

So Christianity ended up being a very tolerant religion. And as different versions of Christianity arose, they came into violent conflict. But that happened in late antiquity, in, say, the 4th and 5th centuries. It really came to a head in a big way with the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.

when it became impossible for one side or the other in the debate over the true version or versions were at stake. But the true version of Christianity, no one was really able to win that struggle. And we had huge religious wars in the 16th century, such as the French Wars of Religion and in the 17th century, the 30 Years' War, which absolutely ravaged Europe.

Millions of people died in that war and Europe was left largely in ruins. As that kind of struggle was going on with so much destruction taking place, a sentiment arose that this really can't be allowed to happen.

And thinkers, theologians, philosophers started thinking about, well, what is the role of the state, of armies, of justice systems and so on in all this? Is it really the role of those state authorities to be using their power, the power of fire and sword, as John Locke says, to try to impose the correct sort of doctrines for the purpose of spiritual salvation?

Or perhaps the state really is just there to deal with the things of this world, you know, to protect life, liberty, property, you know, perhaps try to help us in some way in our day-to-day secular way we live our lives. But perhaps the state shouldn't be becoming involved in issues of spiritual salvation. So that was the set of problems that faced European Christendom in the...

well, in the 16th and 17th centuries in particular, and leading into the enlightenment of the 18th century. I say that you can't have liberalism unless you have religious toleration first, because when you at least have a religion like Christianity, which is very insistent that only a particular way will lead to spiritual salvation, it must be that way, it must be through Christ, it must be the right version of Christianity,

It can't really tolerate dissent, so it can't really tolerate open discussion, at least of any issues that could impinge upon religion. I mean, that could include scientific issues, for example, if science starts coming up with findings or theories that challenge the inerrancy of the Bible. So really, you have to overcome that barrier.

before you can start even thinking more broadly about whether open discussion, freedom of exchange ideas in general and so on might be a good thing. You know, that very large liberal idea, that open discussion of all kinds is a good thing, you know, is really not even thinkable when a religion like Christianity is so much in charge as it was, you know, in the...

in the Christian kingdoms of Europe up until quite recent centuries. The idea of religious tolerance to me is also fascinating. And it's given the current situation around Europe or in America, and fortunately not so much in Australia, about religious freedom. In your book, you talk about political Islam and

And I'm interested to know if you think that political Islam poses a challenge to liberalism. That's maybe one part of my question. And the second part is that there are religious people living all over the world nowadays, and there are a lot of also Muslims living in Europe, in America. Yeah.

sometimes their religious beliefs come into conflict with principles of liberalism. Your freedom to criticize religion, your freedom to be an atheist, your freedom to choose your own sexual orientation or follow your sexual orientation. And that religious community might propose actions or do actions that are in conflict with liberal ideas. But at the same time, you can't, for example, a lot of conservatives might say,

deport them or, I don't know, they need to be banned. But again, if it's individual freedom, they also use that idea of individual freedom to express their discontent. So that's the second part of the question. But let's talk about the political Islam first. I know it's a packed question. There's a lot to unpack there. Political Islam is basically the idea that Islam should be controlled politically, right? Islam, like Christianity,

is a religion that historically has wanted political control. Now, Christianity's ambitions to obtain political control have largely been tamed. I say largely because I can immediately think of situations in the United States, say, where there's a very strong Christian right that would like to establish the United States as a theocracy. But to a large extent...

Christianity, having gone through all of that turmoil in the 16th and 17th centuries, has largely withdrawn back from its wish to be in political control. Islam has never really gone through that. There's still this very powerful aspect of Islam whereby Islamic leaders will seek political control, and if a country is under

The majority Islamic country, what you will often find is injected theocracy, right? And that theocracy will indeed impose what are understood locally to be the Islamic standards of conduct.

And so we see things like, as you say, the persecution of homosexuals. We see women being treated in a way that subordinates them. In some cases, that's taken to extremes with very strict rules about what sort of clothing women can even wear. Women's education can be out of bounds. So Islam has that tendency to it.

And that element of Islam or movements which take up that element of Islam and what we mean by political Islam or Islamism, you know, the idea that Islamic belief, Islamic doctrine should control the state and should exercise state power, should control what the law is, what you're allowed to do. Now, that's political Islam, right?

Islam itself has aspects that allow political Islam to exist. It doesn't mean that every Muslim is going around wanting an Islamic state or wanting the kind of Islamic state, the kind of repressive theocracy that we've just discussed. I mean, I would think...

that, you know, most Muslims just want to live their lives, you know, bring up their children, et cetera, in the way that most other people do. So I'm not someone saying we should go around persecuting Muslims, but we do need to be

willing to say that there is a tension between Islam and the idea of liberalism or of a liberal democratic society. There's also a tension, as I mentioned, between Christianity and a liberal democratic society, but that tension is largely gone because Christianity has been through a process where it's somewhat backed off.

Whereas Islam hasn't. So there's an issue there. There's a big issue there as to how you handle that. And I don't think there's a very clear way to handle it. We don't want to be oppressive towards ordinary decent Muslims who can be good people. We don't want that.

But also we don't want to yield too much. You know, I do worry that sometimes we want to be oppressive, it seems. Other times we want to yield too much. You know, we want to yield to claims, you know, we can't even have law. We can't even criticize Islam or we can't even think that Islam is not on the whole a good thing. You know, even those kinds of thoughts about Islam, critical thoughts of Islam,

can be stigmatised as being Islamophobia. Now, I think that's a concern. I think we have to stand our ground and be prepared to criticise all sorts of ideas, including religious ideas, including religious ideas that might be very precious to people. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

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Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving. Yeah, as you just discussed, it's a bit sometimes very challenging to unpack these ideas. I remember a few years ago, there was a university professor in the States, I guess, who lost his job because he was an art historian who showed the picture of Prophet Muhammad, which was published by Muslim scholars five centuries ago because there had never been a blanket ban on depiction of

prophet muhammad's face and he was fired from university because a muslim student complained that this is sacrilegious and the university being a liberal university yeah we can't insult religious so they put that professor i think they put him on suspicion to me that was just bizarre because first of all it was it had absolutely nothing to do with insulting a religion and sometimes you genuinely need to be able to criticize religion but where do you

There are some people or two people, let's say, say, oh, no, let's not talk about it. But at the same time, you need to have those critical discussions. And it becomes challenging in this respect. Or I do remember, I think it was last year in the United States, there was a local council. That was in Biden's time. I don't know, local council or something. I remember that incident. Yeah.

And look, I think a university that acts in that way is acting in the wrong way. Liberalism allows people to criticize each other's ideas, right? As you say, Islam wasn't even being criticized in this case. But let's say a professor of philosophy, philosophy religion, was criticizing various religions, including Islam.

Now, according to some definitions of Islamophobia, that might be considered Islamophobic. Islamophobia seems to be defined very, very widely. So it goes beyond the narrow concept of hatred of Muslims, say. It can be criticism of Islam if it goes to the point of thinking Islam on the whole is a bad thing. Now,

Now, it should be open to us to believe that Islam or Christianity or Hinduism or any other system of belief and practice is on balance a bad thing. That's a belief that should be allowed in a liberal democratic society and people should be able to argue for it. So even if an academic did put that argument in some appropriate context, such as a philosophy of religion class,

yeah that should be permitted now the idea of liberalism is toleration but toleration means that things that you object to are not punished some things at least that you object to yeah should be permitted now there's some things obviously can't be permitted we can't be allowed to go around murdering and raping and

There has to be some kind of laws, a set of laws and morals for the purpose of us being able to exist together in society. But a lot of things that we have objections to on various grounds, such as when things we like are criticised, they can be tolerated.

And that certainly should include criticism of religions or ideologies or personal beliefs or anything else. That raises another question for me about the toleration. I completely agree with you in this respect, that any system of beliefs need to be open to criticism. And I do agree that Christianity has had this long, long history of

where the church is not in that position of authority and power, whereas with Islam it hasn't really been the case. There was this golden age of Islam, but it wasn't again, political Islam wasn't a thing back then. So it mainly became an issue maybe in the 19th and 20th century. But that limit of, is there, can we set a limit to toleration, let's say? And it's not about Islam, because nowadays, you know, with what's happening around the world, especially in the Middle East,

Criticism of, for example, Israel is conflated with anti-Semitism. Or even if some people have a criticism of even Judaism, only theology, that could be misconstrued because of the history. I understand there was a history of violence. There was holocaust that happened. There's obviously some sensitivity, and it's not ancient history. It happened seven years ago, I believe.

But in general, is there a limit or should liberalism set a limit to toleration? Yeah. Look, I think there probably is a limit and it's hard to know where exactly you draw the line. The really classic cases that people point to are

Nazi hate propaganda. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you think of the kind of stuff that was being churned out by people like Julius Streicher during the Third Reich and indeed in the lead-up to the rise of the Nazi Party, I mean, that kind of anti-Semitic, Jew-hating propaganda...

set the environment for genocide. The Jews were portrayed as rats and vermin and pigs and dehumanized. And it was made apparent that it was appropriate to exterminate them. And if I'm going to get rid of them, if that meant killing them all, well, so be it. Now, I'd say that's beyond the limit of what can be tolerated. If you think of

The hate propaganda in Rwanda back in the 1990s when the Hutus went on a campaign of exterminating the Tutsis and hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Now, again, a kind of hate propaganda being pumped out day after day that provided the environment in which that could take place.

was all about the Tootsie Springs snakes and cockroaches and vermin. And again, the implication, sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes left as implication, was that these people weren't really even people. They were creatures that should be exterminated. Now, that clearly, I think, is beyond the pale, beyond the line of what could be tolerated. Now...

Just what else might be beyond that line can be debated. But harsh criticism of Israel, I think, should be fine. Even criticism of Judaism, if any... I mean, I don't know why anyone would bother criticizing Judaism, frankly, because it's not a religion that's... Yeah, as a religion, it hasn't been terribly dangerous. But, you know...

it's quite possible for someone who might be a Christian and who therefore thinks that Christianity superseded Judaism to point out what, from their theological point of view, is all sorts of faults with Judaism. So, well, that's the old dispensation. You know, the new dispensation is Christianity and that's the superior religion. It should be possible to say that. That's a theological claim that's up for debate. I...

i worry when i see very detailed and extensive definitions of anti-semitism that start dragging in all kinds of claims as being anti-semitic and therefore being beyond the pale

And some of those claims seem to be really no more than very harsh criticism of Israel and its policies as to how it acts in its struggles against its neighbours, the Palestinians, etc. That, I think, is a real encroachment on freedom of speech. And I scrutinise those definitions very carefully. I know that anti-Semitism, which to me just means hatred of Jews...

has been a huge problem, and not just in Nazi Germany, but for thousands of years. You know, going back to the ancient world, there was a lot of, you know, dislike of Jews by other ethnic groups, even in, you know, the time of the Greek Empire and the Roman Empire after it. So anti-Semitism, you know, the hatred of Jews was seen as, you know, this separate group of people that, you know,

hold themselves apart from us in some way and have customs that we don't like. And if we're Christians, you know, we blame them for Christ's crucifixion. And, you know, all of these stories about the Jews, which have led to pogroms over the centuries, I think that's the better pronunciation, over the centuries and to the Holocaust. We need to be conscious of all of that.

But a point can come where perfectly legitimate discussion of Israel as a nation state, which arguably has some pretty severe faults, can be rendered out of bounds. I want to continue this part of the discussion, but I'd better pause it because I wanted to talk about universities as well. And I want to mention that one thing I really like about your book is that you engage with a lot of contemporary issues. You also give us

really, really good insights back into history. When I was reading the history of liberalism some time ago, I came across Benjamin Constant, whom I did not know, and I was really excited to come across the name again in your book. So let's take a step back, talk a little bit about...

a bit of a history of liberalism, maybe in England and France, especially in France with Benjamin Constance, with whom some people may not be familiar with. But then I do like to continue this part of the discussion and come back to the freedom of speech, limitations and tolerance, universities, and more or less what happened in the 1960s. So can you talk about the development of liberalism as a political ideology during the French Revolution? We think it's like Benjamin Constance, I think, Madame...

I forgot her name. They were close friends. Yeah, Madame de Stael. Yeah, yeah, Madame de Stael, yeah. It would be great if you could talk about the development of political liberalism back then. Okay, okay. I mean, liberalism as something that actually has a name attached to it really only arises in the early 19th century, right?

But it has inputs. One of those inputs is the kind of ideology associated with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. People like Benjamin Constant...

were fans of the French Revolution, right? They embraced the French Revolution, but they embraced the French Revolution up to the time of the terror under Robespierre. The French Revolution went off the rails pretty quickly. But the basic ideals of the French Revolution, basic ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity, overthrowing theocratic oppression and oppression from the aristocracy and the kings and

Those ideas were pretty powerful, pretty attractive. And it's unfortunate that as so often happens with these things, extremists got in control and took the whole thing very much off the rails. But someone like Benjamin Constantin and others at the time, having lived through all that,

still held to those original kinds of ideals of the French Revolution. And that was one set of inputs into what became liberalism. Liberalism had other inputs, particularly in England,

It had inputs from utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who wanted to kind of revise our notions of how morality and the law should operate. And that was fairly consistent with the ideals of, say, the French Enlightenment.

It also had inputs from economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, people like that who were examining it in a systematic way, how economy works, how resources are allocated, how wealth can be produced.

religious non-conformists who had been ground down by oppressive laws as to what they could or could not do in countries such as England, which had established churches, were another component that fed into liberalism. And I guess that's what four streams that I've identified of people who, between them, formulate this new set of ideas to become liberalism with the kinds of

principles that we discussed earlier of toleration, of not having natural hierarchies, not having groups of people who are oppressed, accepting that there will be a plurality of groups in society which should be allowed to live in harmony rather than some being subordinated to others. That's kind of a potted account of where liberalism comes from in the, as I say, nearly

early 19th century, but with precursors, very strong precursors through the enlightenment of the 18th century. And a

Of course, there's a lot of opposition to liberalism as it arises. There's opposition from the church. There's opposition from the aristocratic landowners. There's opposition from anybody who has something to lose, power to lose, perhaps, from a set of ideas based upon those streams of input.

And there we get the struggles throughout the 19th century and then right through to the present day between the ideas of liberalism with their own internal tensions and the ideas of those who have vested power. I think liberalism was used as a derogatory term in the early 19th century, if I'm not mistaken, for us.

That's true. And especially, well, perhaps all over Europe, that's true. But particularly in Britain, the idea was that liberals were seen as these radical people who would overturn the social order. And there was very much an anti-clerical, an anti-church element of liberalism on the continent, at least. Mm.

Now, there's also a Christian element in liberalism as it arose in Britain in the 19th century, because some of the people who had input into the creation of liberalism were religious nonconformists. In other words, Christians who were not part of the Church of England and who'd been subordinated because, you know, they're kind of heretics. Yeah.

So there is that religious input into liberalism, into the Anglosphere, but there's also a sense, going back to that time, that liberalism was something rather radical and dangerous, and that therefore could be used as a term of abuse. Yeah. Let us come back to the 20th century. Do you think that...

Postmodernism is also partly responsible for what nowadays very loosely we call post-liberalism or post-liberal culture. Because in the book you talk about how, especially in America, the liberals were divided over issues such as gender or free speech in the 1970s. And postmodernism is usually one of the culprits named sometimes very loosely, you know, anything we don't like is postmodern. Yeah.

So do you think that postmodernism is partly responsible for this discontent with liberalism? I think it's more that a certain discontent with liberalism led a lot of activists and people who wish to help subjugated groups to look for other theories, other theories apart from liberalism as the basis for that. So...

In the 1950s and through the 1960s, liberalism had a lot of prestige. Ideas such as John Stuart Mill's harm principle, where you only prohibit things if they actually do some clear harm to somebody. Those kind of liberal ideas that you'll find even in 19th century writings had a lot of prestige and seemed to be

increasingly influencing the law and influencing social policy. And they were, of course, invoked to support the struggle of, say, American blacks who were, you know, rebelling against the subordination that they continued to face even after the American Civil War and even deep in the 1950s and beyond and even to some extent even to the present day.

Liberalism, though, ended up being a disappointment to a lot of people who were involved in those struggles. The swift, radical social transformations that a lot of people wanted didn't happen. What we saw was incremental gains under a regime of relying on liberal ideology, but we didn't see the radical, total social transformations that a lot of people wanted.

And I think an impatience with liberalism developed. That happened with the civil rights movement in the US, it happened with the feminist movement, and it happened with other movements which were trying to liberate various oppressed groups.

And once you start becoming impatient with a set of political ideas, that's a kind of foundation for your thinking and your activism, you look around for other ideas. So that's why I say it was more that an impatience or frustration with liberalism led people to latch on to post-modernist ideas rather than post-modernist ideas led to the

Yet to disaffection with liberalism, or at least I think that's the main way it worked. There may have been a bit of both going on, but I think that's the main way it worked. Now, when we're talking about postmodernism, that can mean lots of different things, of course. But in this context, we're really thinking about the philosophical ideas of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Noah Hulot.

Baudrillard, Lyotard, we could name these sorts of thinkers who were thinkers with very complex theories, very complex social critiques, very complex theories of language and much else.

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But what was latched onto was not the subtleties, the complexities, the nuances of what these thinkers were saying. It was a kind of watered down or vulgarized version where the thought goes something like this. There's really no kind of ultimate truth. There's only different perspectives on truth, such as Nietzsche, for example, might have thought, but so did some of these thinkers, uh,

There's no ultimate justification one way or another for the various institutions of society. And there's really not even any ultimate way of interpreting or understanding laws, even if they seem to be in pretty clear language. What does exist, though, in society, which we can identify, is all sorts of power relationships, relationships where certain groups dominate, certain groups are subjugated.

And often you can look at what's at stake in those relationships of domination and subjugation. And you may, having laid that up, then take a side. Now, that's perhaps a vulgarized version of a vulgarized version. But something like that, something like what I just said, is the understanding of postmodernism that started to run through a lot of the thought that

supported activism as a kind of alternative to liberal principles.

And even now, you'll hear people who, when they look forward, their justification for taking certain lines of activism or certain approaches to political struggles, really just look at, well, who is the subjugated group in this context? And we will side with that subjugated group. So a frustration with liberalism leads to a preparedness to grab onto other kinds of theories that help us understand society.

Part of what was grabbed onto was this rather vulgarised version of French thought, which boils down to this, who do we side with? Who is the subjugated party here? And looking at everything in terms of relationships between groups, rather than perhaps looking at issues on their merits or looking at individuals on their merits when they're caught up in all this. So we no longer...

Think of individuals so much as being unique individuals with their own, you know,

very specific value systems, virtues, perhaps foibles as well, interests, etc. We start thinking of people increasingly as just intersections of different groups that they belong to, groups which we may support or groups that we may be hostile to because we see them as oppressive or privileged groups. That's more how I understand it than postmodernism. Yeah.

driving out liberalism and leading to an environment where liberalism is deprecated. But of course, once that vulgarized version of postmodernism becomes very popular, it does tend to drive out other things. So there's a bit of it both ways. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to make sure that I have a friend that I disagree with about postmodernism. And I think he's sometimes, you know, his criticism of postmodernism is more or less that vulgarized version of

And I've argued with him lots of times, so I'm going to make sure that he listens to this part of the podcast after it's released. With postmodernism, we also had the rise of neoliberalism, which is different, of course, from liberalism. It's not in this sense. But this whole new economic mode, neoliberalism, you know, capitalism, rampant capitalism, 1980s up to now. I personally think...

I could be wrong, but I personally think that when you see people going for more right-wing or sometimes extremist politicians,

And they call anybody they don't like liberals. I'm talking about the more liberal governments in the United States or Canada or even here in Australia. It's more like a discontent with the economic situation that they have. And they take it out on those liberals wherever they are. But do you think that neoliberalism also played a role in this growing discontent with liberalism? I think that...

The effect of things like privatisation, globalisation, the deregulation of capitalism, those kinds of movements, which some people will call neoliberalism, those did have adverse effects on some groups of people. If you're a rural worker in America or if you're in manufacturing industry in America...

And those industries will be damaged. Yeah, factories will be shut down. Towns built around certain factories or whatever. Yeah, maybe city that goes to towns. You're going to be pretty badly affected and you're going to start becoming pretty cynical about a system that you're in. So, yes, I think what is often called neoliberalism is,

Referring to those kinds of economic strategies, I guess you'd call them. Yeah, that has had an effect on... I'm providing it for just right-wing populist movements. Right-wing populist movements can start to seem like an alternative to the system that you feel has betrayed you. There's a lot to say about that. Yeah.

Sorry, I was just going to say there's a lot to say about neoliberalism because it's not really liberalism. There's a whole history to it, which perhaps I can't go into too deeply. But my understanding is that that term neoliberalism was coined back in the late 1930s and

And it was coined by a group of political scientists and economists who actually were liberals, actually were part of the liberal tradition. They wanted to have a society that was a strong economic society, but not a completely deregulated society. They wanted to have a welfare state.

So, yeah, the money that was the wealth that could be created by industrial capitalism would be used partly to help the poor. They were not against the welfare state. They wanted a strong government to provide at least a set of rules which capitalism could operate. But they did have theories that you would have a stronger economy with less regulation, right?

Now, those people like Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and the person actually coined the term neoliberalism, a German economist and political scientist or sociologist called Alexander Rostow.

those people had an influence on a lot of economies, including West Germany after the war. Now, West Germany was a welfare state, but it was also a state that tried to have a strong capitalist economy, right? So that's where neoliberalism originally comes from. But what happened in the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher, was you've got people who were not particularly liberal at all,

But he latched on to some of the economic theories of these earlier thinkers and wanted to run a very deregulated sort of economy, even to the extent of union-busting tactics. Their precursor, someone who even earlier really seized upon that way of trying to run an economy but was radically non-liberal, was Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

Pinochet was influenced by economists from the Chicago School, who in turn had those sorts of influences. I'm talking about going right back to the 1930s. And so when he came to power in 1973, he puts in place this horrible dictatorship, but he was influenced by those kinds of economic ideas and tried to have this kind of deregulated economy in cello.

His critics started using the term neoliberalism to refer to his policies.

And from there, that term was picked up by French thinkers who wanted to criticise those kind of very strongly pro-capitalist policies in Europe. And then later on, when Thatcher and Reagan came on the scene, the term neoliberalism wasn't used that much in the 1980s. It was time when people started applying the term neoliberalism to Reagan and Thatcher.

And so who were not really very liberal at all. Yeah, they're pretty conservative people. They're not people who you'd say were great exponents of the liberal freedoms that we've talked about, freedom of speech, rule of law, individual liberty in general. They're conservative figures, not liberal figures.

But because they're following very similar economic plans to Pinochet, which ultimately go back to some of these earlier thinkers, they get called neoliberals. Yeah. And so we have this expression neoliberalism, which has some connection with liberalism.

But often the politicians who are putting in place the so-called neoliberal policies are not liberal. They're not liberal politicians. They can be very conservative politicians, as Ronald Reagan was, or they can be outright bloody dictators. I mean bloody in the literal sense, like Pinochet. Yeah.

And I think even Milton Friedman or Frederick Hayek, they did not like to be called conservatives. Frederick Hayek wrote a lot about the conservative. But yeah, when you read their thoughts, I guess you are. But yeah, it's...

I suppose to their discredit, though, they did think that Pinochet's economic policies were the correct policies. And perhaps they did have some merit for Chile's situation. I don't know. I'm not an economist. I haven't studied that.

But of course, once they start saying that, they are seen as supporting someone who is actually a terrible dictator. So that's not someone you really want to get mixed up with. Yeah, yeah. And I want to ask you another question as well. There is another economist that I follow his writings. His name is Jason Hickel. He's very active on social media. And when...

When Biden lost the election, he wrote a very long tweet about why the problem is real liberalism. And some of the points he raised to me, they were really worth noting. And I'm keen to know your thoughts. It's a long tweet. I'm not going to go over everything, but I just read a part of it. And I'm keen to know your thoughts. So he says that, so he's having a go at liberalism. He says, liberals try to hold two commitments at once.

On the one hand, they are firmly committed to capitalism. On the other hand, they express support for principles like human rights, democracy, equality, freedom of speech, environment, and the rule of law. The duality is the core of liberalism, but there is a problem. Capital accumulation requires cheapening of labor and nature. And then it goes on to say, these are in conflict, and liberalism has always kind of stooped down to capitalism and has squashed capitalism.

has quashed any socialist alternative. And that's why we have this situation where people are going more for the right-wing politicians. And he says, well, liberalism is dead. We need to think of something else here. He's a radical anti-capitalist, right? He's anti-capitalist. He's a very harsh critic of capitalism. And if you are somebody who...

as this guy is, as Marx was, and others we could name. If you really want to overthrow the capitalist system, you want very drastic and very quick change. Now, there are risks in seeking change in that way. Even if you know what the right changes are going to be, what historically happens is when

When revolutionaries seek that kind of radical, total, swift change, what you usually get out of it is some kind of oppressive dictatorship. So I'd be a bit careful what I wish for.

in that sense. But it's true that liberalism only brings about progressive change incrementally. I mean, that's the nature of it. That's the theory that change will come through, you know, through open discussion, through ideas clashing, and that will be sorted out through a process. It may take time.

And it's not surprising that people who think that we're in some kind of emergency situation and we need radical swift change, they will become impatient with liberalism. It just does not produce the kind of almost apocalyptic change that revolutionary communists, for example, but others as well, will want. So there's going to be that tension. And in a situation where you really do need some radical change...

uh yeah liberalism can let you down that that that is a problem with it on the other hand what's the alternative you don't want a situation where you've got a government that doesn't believe in the liberal principles like the rule of law freedom of speech etc etc i mean um he goes in a situation after all where he can say these quite radical things and you know he's he's

doing pretty well as far as I know. He's a professor somewhere. He's probably fairly wealthy himself. In most societies, if you start saying very radical things that go against the very fundamental institutions of that society, you're likely to come to a bad end. At least in a liberal society, you can

You can deliver radical criticisms and you'll be listened to even. You'll be allowed to do that. You'll be allowed to try to find people who agree with you or to try to change the system. But there's no guarantee that you'll be successful. Indeed, if you're putting forward radical views that go against the very foundational institutions of your society and therefore you want to

a total change of your society, well, of course, you're going to find it more difficult getting those views accepted than someone who's putting forward views that are consistent with those existing socialist institutions. So, of course, he's going to be up against it. Of course, he's going to be frustrated. But at least he's in a society where he gets to argue his case without being thrown in jail or burned at the stake or worse. And he's...

He's more into, and I'm not an economist myself, I haven't really studied that deeply to know what degrowth is, the theory of degrowth. And he usually, yeah, discusses environment and capitalism together, and he's a critic of liberalism. And I've had that problem myself. Like when I read Principle of Liberalism and all the liberties that individuals have that have been enshrined by thinkers, union members, or let's say politicians who have been fighting for these principles,

or activists who have been fighting for these principles. I love all those principles about liberalism, but at the same time, I'm critical of liberalism too.

for the common criticism that are usually laid against liberalism. And I do think that, for example, if these days you mention socialism somewhere, especially in the United States, you're immediately called a radical or you're called a communist. Even Biden is called a communist, which doesn't make any sense. He's a capitalist. He's a centrist. He upholds some liberal principles, but

But I do think, for example, that, yeah, there are some socialist, maybe economic, and more or less I'm talking about the economy here, alternatives or changes or more involvement of government, maybe regulating the industries, the energy sector, for example. And this is a big topic even here in Australia that you and I live, this whole nationalization of the economy.

Great maybe was a mistake to privatize everything, the energy crisis. So what I'm saying is that the bits and pieces of every piece of ideology that I agree with, but I've been able to come into terms with something called maybe socialist, liberal. It has best of both worlds so far maybe, but again, it's a theory. In practice...

It's very difficult to put into practice. And certainly, I guess that could be the segue to my next question. There is a crisis in liberalism. That's why we have the rise of what is called post-liberal. Now, what does that mean? I'm going to ask you, but I guess it could mean authoritarian kind of thinking. People like Patrick Deneen maybe were very much advocating for having religious leaders

elements in our lives, maybe use a government to implement religious principles as well. There are people like John Gray whom I don't think has this vision of post-liberalism. But is there a crisis in liberalism? And if there is, what is that post-liberalism? Yeah, look, I think there is something of a crisis. I think liberalism has lost its prestige. And

in what we call liberal democracies. That is ideas like freedom of speech, open inquiry, just individual freedom in general. They're no longer expressions, terms to conjure with, at least in politics.

I suspect a lot of ordinary people, yeah, do think that freedom of speech and all those other things I just mentioned are valuable. But when you hear political debates, those are not really the terms that are being used. And when they are used, they're often used as a weapon by individuals who are on the political right, right?

who feel that somehow their rights are being denied to them. So that's an unfortunate situation that we find ourselves in from the point of view of someone like me. I'm someone who does think that the liberal principles we've been discussing have been a great social advance. I strongly support them. So it's unfortunate from my point of view that they've lost a lot of their cachet.

Now, had that come about, well, you know, I've written a whole book on that subject. But partly it's come about because there is a limit to what liberalism can deliver, at least how quickly they can deliver the sorts of changes that people might want and which might be necessary, even. So that is a problem with liberalism. The trouble is there's no real alternative that I see. Theocracy, dictatorship...

just conservative sorts of government, just illiberal democracy. Those are probably not going to deliver you the changes that you actually want any more quickly. And so there's this struggle, well, how do we produce needed changes? I think that struggle can only take place within an environment of open discussion, even though

praising open discussion may not be something that has a lot of prestige attached to it these days. I think really you're going to have to try to run that kind of discussion within a kind of liberal framework that's about the best that's on offer. And it's just going to be very hard. We do need that. We need some fairly drastic change, if only because of what we're doing to the earth from an environmental perspective.

And it's certainly true that capitalism does have a kind of logic to it that eats up resources on a large scale. And that has to be dealt with. Some countries are doing that more than others. The US, which is what Hickel was really talking about, I gather, is a bit of an outlier, I

There are very strong traditions in the United States which are rather different from those of any other First World country. For one thing, it's a much more religious country than Australia or the nations of Europe, say. And there are doubtless reasons for that, partly historically because the United States, as we now know, was largely founded in

by other people, but largely founded by religious groups who were fleeing Europe. But those religious groups were very fervent religious groups. So it's always been part of the American tradition. There's also been this American tradition of a kind of rugged individualism, now praised individualism before, but rugged individualism in a sense of

Yeah, not just having your own individual personality and ideas, but actually setting yourself against society almost. Being very self-contained and independent and resistant to any kind of encroachment that might be there for pro-social reasons.

The whole spirit of free enterprise, which I think has a lot to be said in its favour, can be taken to extremes, and it's probably been taken more to extremes in the United States than in most other countries. You could find exceptions like maybe Pinochet took it to extremes in Chile. You could maybe come up with other examples, but

There's been a willingness to regulate trade and financial markets and so on, and to use the wealth that they produce for social benefit in terms of infrastructure and redistributions in Europe, which has been much more strongly and successfully resisted in the United States.

So I guess what I'm saying is a lot of what Hickel would be thinking of when he's talking about American developments are very much specific to the US. They're not necessarily what you'd be seeing in France or Germany or Italy or Spain or the countries of Scandinavia, where liberalism and political theory in general has taken a different form.

And what is called liberalism in the US is really very like European social democracy. European social democracy, of course, has had a lot of successes. It's been criticized, of course, but it has had a lot of successes. So this does get complicated, but it comes down to, yes,

Progressive social change will be resisted more effectively in some countries than in others, and it has been resisted particularly effectively in the US. I think that's just clear. Yeah.

When I usually ask the last question about how you see the future, it rarely ends on a positive note when we talk about politics these days. But this time, most of the people I've talked with actually live either in Europe or in America, but you live in Australia. And what you mentioned about those principles or liberal principles that need to be upheld, and I completely agree with you. Just I guess it was a couple of days ago that...

against the—in the United States, again, the administration deported some immigrants despite the fact that the judge had asked for them to stop. To me, it's a really, really worrying thing because it's a violation of that independent judiciary system. And what has been happening in universities, they have been defunded and funding is conditional on accepting the demands from Trump's administration.

And when I hear these things in Australia, if a politician wants to do these things, to me, it's really, really scary. Australia, I think, is doing way, way better than America. And when the politicians start talking about woke agenda and all these things, to me, they are more or less American things that are being exported to other countries, cancer culture, freedom of speech on universities. I mean, there is a crisis, but maybe not in the sense that it's played out in America. But to me, it's a really scary thing when they talk about

defunding the Department of Education or what work agenda that needs to be addressed. But you know what I'm talking about. I'm keen to hear your thoughts about the future of politics, where it's going. It's a broad question, I know, in Australia where you and I live. Look, I think Australia is muddling through reasonably well so far. You can't say that about the US at the moment. The US is

a right-wing populist government. We have an individual in the form of Donald Trump who is now on a kind of program of retribution against his enemies, against individuals, and against systems of thought that he thinks are his enemies. Right.

And the result is that he's in the situation almost like a dictator coming to power with an agenda for radical change. Now, radical change of a different kind, in this case, radical change of a reactionary kind,

But what he's unleashing, therefore, is basically chaos. And a lot of it, of course, is very illiberal. So that's the situation that America has plunged itself into. The extreme polarisation of society in the US is part of the cause of that. I think to some extent, the politically progressive elements in the US must be some of the bane for this. Mm-hmm.

I think in some ways they themselves, by also being illiberal, have created unnecessary enemies. They've alienated a lot of ordinary people.

who see themselves as being, in a sense, oppressed. I mean, that's partly because of what we were talking about earlier, yet the neoliberal economic policies have done a lot of damage to a lot of ordinary people in the US and thus alienated them from the system and made them open to seeking radical change and voting for someone like Donald Trump. That's part of the problem. But part of the problem also is that they just see quite extreme...

policies based upon the sacralization of certain identity groups and the demonization of certain other identity groups and

and, yeah, cancel culture, which you mentioned, where if you say certain things, even though they may be, you know, quite legitimate arguments at least, you know, at least arguments that's legitimate to put, you can be, yeah, you'd have your book withdrawn from publication or an academic article, you know, withdrawn from publication or you could be banned from turning up at certain places. You might even lose your job. And this does not go unnoticed, right?

And ordinary people in a country like the US are going to start seeing progressives who may have some good ideas starting to look oppressive, starting to look like they are a kind of enemy, a kind of enemy to things like free speech. Now, once progressives start to look that unattractive, once they start being that alienating to ordinary people,

it makes it a lot easier for the other extreme, which might be even worse, to get into power. It becomes a lot easier for a lot of ordinary people to vote for someone like Trump as a viable alternative. How foolish that may be from a larger point of view if you have a larger understanding of what's going on. So I think that progressives in the United States have to bear some of the blame for what's happened. And it's not as if they weren't warned.

I mean, there have been people warning them for years that if they keep going on with that kind of illiberal approach themselves, with all the call-out culture, the cancel culture, the insistence on some quite bizarre ideas, which we can maybe talk about. If they keep going on like that, they're going to alienate so many people that

Yeah, another extreme, which is even worse, is likely to be embraced. I mean, I've been saying that for a very long time, longer before I wrote this book. My earlier book that I mentioned, The Tune of Opinion, talks about this. But other people too, you can find a lot of people who've been talking about this for years. So there's been plenty of warning out there.

But there's been no real effort to heed that warning. I would say that Biden himself was by no means at the extreme of this. I think he was somebody who was in many ways much more moderate. But

He became an easy scapegoat to heap all this stuff onto. You're right, yeah. And the funny thing is that it was a few months ago I was doing another podcast about a book called How Government Made America, which was not a takedown of neoliberalism, but it was about the role of government when we talked about Biden's administration. Now, I know that what happened in the Middle East really hurt his legacy as well.

but it was also talking about a lot of other progressive things he did in the United States. The investment in infrastructure, which was unprecedented, their jobs he created, but none of that came up. It was completely overshadowed because as you said, he became an easy target. And then on the other hand, you had Trump, which who completely overshadowed him. And yeah, people went from bad to worse.

And he's using a lot of the powers that was left to him by Biden and Obama administration to be able to do, to be able to seek, let's say, retribution on his enemies. He has this immense infrastructure power in his hands. They can do unprecedented things and he's doing that. But as you mentioned... Well, that's right. But you mentioned... I think the election of Trump... So I just wanted to say, as you mentioned Australia, you're right. Given what's happening around the world, even in Europe...

It's doing way, way much better, and I hope it stays this way or it doesn't, or at least it listens to the sounds of warnings, you know, because you certainly don't want this to end up like the United States. Sorry, I think I interrupted you. No, it doesn't matter. You mentioned Europe, though. One thing that Australia...

Doesn't have, which is a good thing. We don't have a history of ultra-nationalisms like they have in Europe. Yeah. Yeah, this idea that we have to go and conquer New Zealand, so...

Nobody in Australia thinks like that. We are basically a pretty peaceable place. Even the culture in our military seems to be very much, you know, we are a professional group who are here to bear arms and we have to protect the country. But there's no sense that the military wants to take over or wants to be used to go and grab territories from other nations or to...

You know, to grab perhaps parts of other nations that are ethnically close to Australia. The fact that we're such a multicultural immigrant society is part of the reason for all that, no doubt. Yeah. But if you go to Europe, you know, it's not an exaggeration to say that a lot of those countries are full of neo-Nazis. Russia accuses Ukraine of being full of neo-Nazis.

And that's to some extent justified. There are ultranationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, but there's a lot of them in Russia as well. Yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of them in Romania and Serbia and even places like France and Germany, right? We just don't have those sorts. I mean, we traditionally have not had those sorts of people in Australia. And when in recent times we have seen a few neo-Nazi groups around, which is worrying...

Yeah, it causes extreme alarm. We really do not want those people here. Yeah, yeah. And then hopefully we will continue not to answer them at any large numbers. So that's another one which we're fortunate. You're right. And I'm sometimes, you know, kind of uplifted when I see ordinary people reacting to these neo-Nazi groups on the streets in Adelaide, I guess, just calling them out. I said, good, people are aware. Yeah.

Dr. Russell Blackford, thank you very much for your time to speak with us about your book. Really enjoyed the book and I strongly recommend it to our listeners, how we became post-liberal, rise and fall of toleration. Thank you so much for your time. Once again, thank you, Sascha, for having me.