Liberalism and the History of Modernity

We are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s November 11, 2024 session. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube.

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We’re going to try to look at this question of liberalism: what it is, what are its origins, and what is the nature of the crisis that it now faces. And pretty much, is this the first crisis of American liberalism. We’ll try to go through that.

First, a few words about the election, post-election, and Trump’s cabinet picks. The cabinet picks are a way of understanding how he sees himself governing over the next four years. On this question of his cabinet; well, I’m like everybody else. When I saw him trot out all these neocons and Zionists of the worst type, I’m saying: the guy has turned on the people that elected him. And I associated it with his being a word that begins with a B, but which I won’t use. But then he announced Matt Gaetz to head the Justice Department and Tulsi Gabbard to head the Department of National Intelligence. 

And I’m saying wow, what does this mean in the face of these other people? And so I had listened to podcasts by Alexander Mercouris and Scott Ritter. Scott Ritter was on the Garland Nixon podcast, and I kind of recommend that discussion. Scott Ritter and Alexander Mercouris like everybody else were more than disappointed when he trots out Rubio. And even this guy Hegseth or whatever his name is. And the National Security adviser. And of course you know, the mainstream media played all of these clips of them making all these statements about Israel and Zionism and how, you know, “There is no West Bank,” it’s, you know whatever the Zionists call it, and so on. 

But then these other two (Gaetz and Gabbard) come down. And so Scott Ritter says—and I don’t agree with him on this—that the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard to head this inter-agency that unites all of the intelligence, security, Deep State institutions. You know probably the center of a lot of what we would consider state power. At least a command center of state power. When I say a command center: they are decision-makers and they carry out decisions in ways that neither the State Department nor the Defense Department or other departments can. Because at the end of the day: American foreign policy—which means policy to uphold and consolidate the power of American empire. That’s precisely what it is. I mean, these agencies… And if you ever thought there was a democracy, just reference these organizations. 

Scott Ritter said to appoint Tulsi Gabbard, the ultimate outsider who herself was not a Republican until a couple, few months ago; to head those agencies which include the CIA, National Intelligence, I don’t know the names of all of them—is literally an attack and a provocation against the Deep State. 

I mean it is something that has not been seen in 80 years, or ever, because this whole configuration of intelligence and coup makers and people who have assassinated leaders all around the world, who decide what the mainstream media line is. It comes directly from the CIA and these other Deep State institutions. And he said—he didn’t say it this way but I think what he meant—is that it was Trump literally saying that he; his government, will be a move to seize state power. And that’s why Ritter said it’s a revolution. 

It is just his saying that this is who he wants for the job. She’s not been confirmed. But it is, I mean, it is so far outside of what is imaginable. What we can imagine. In the normal working out of politics and government in this country. What am I trying to say?

For me, it’s beyond imagination. That Trump would appoint the head of all the intelligence agencies, a person that seems to be taking the position to destroy the CIA. And the other aligned agencies. 

And if that is what this represents, then one could call it at least a step towards a revolutionary overturning of the most dangerous elements of the state. The most undemocratic, the most secretive. Have meddled in elections and societies all over the world. Have assassinated leaders, and so on and so forth.

The other is Matt Gaetz to be the head of the Justice Department. And this is what Mercouris and Scott Ritter said. And I find them both to be quite informative and well informed. That—he didn’t say this but I’ll say it—one must consider it an attack upon the liberal state and its institutions. The other thing is Matt Gaetz, the head of the Justice Department. The justice department oversees the FBI, oversees federal investigations and so on. 

Ritter said that Tulsi Gabbard will be the closest person to Trump on a day-to-day basis. That Marco Rubio in the State Department will be marginalized and in fact will report to the president. The same with the DOD. But here is the point. It seems that Trump wishes to govern as, as they say, a “dictator,” not just on the first day. In other words, the president’s office, the presidency will be the center of a command system. 

There will not be the State Department doing its thing over here, and whatever they do. And other departments doing whatever they do. On foreign policy, he (Trump) will be the determiner of foreign policy. We’ll have to see what the implications of that are. 

But the person nearest to him on a day-to-day basis reporting intelligence, reporting other things to him will be Tulsi Gabbard. Who could have ever imagined this. A Samoan, Hindu from Hawaii. As far from the state and the Deep State and the main centers of politics as you could get. And then of course Matt Gaetz, who is a congressman from Florida. Never practiced law although he has a law degree, going to be the head of an agency with this much power over investigation, over secretive spying on citizens. 

And is this Trump putting a wrecking ball to the Deep State?

Mercouris and Ritter feel it so. And I would just say, let us keep our eye on all of this. The last time a president attacked the CIA was John F. Kennedy, who said that he wanted to cut it up into 1,000 pieces and cut it and throw it into the ocean. And a couple years later he’s assassinated. I think there’s some connection here. 

But at any rate, as the New York Times and other mainstream media pose the question, we are facing a populist attack upon the institutions and ideas of liberal democracy.

First of all let me just attempt to define what is meant by liberalism. Liberalism is the political and ideological banner of the rising, revolutionary bourgeoisie in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. 

It is wrongly associated with people who support gender rights, trans rights, Black rights, you know. Liberalism is wrongly identified as progressivism, and even leftism. That is not what it is. You know, like if you say, “Well my friend is liberal.” You know, people like us, maybe, would be predisposed—“Oh he’s a good guy, she’s a good person; they support more civil rights,” more you know, yada yada yada. 

If you say a person is a conservative, you know your first assumption—oh that person wants to cut Social Security, wants to restrict the government, do away with the Department of Education and a whole number of what we would consider retrograde policies. So liberalism is progressive, conservatism is retrograde. Well that’s all wrong.

Liberalism is the banner of a rising class in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and even up to the 20th century, which I will explain. It is the ideology which opposes the autocracy and totalitarian state of the church. You know, it’s not for nothing that in American political discussion and constitutional legal questions, there’s always the talk of the separation of church and state. Well because under the Holy Roman Empire, the church was the state. And the ideology of the church was the state’s ideology, to a certain extent. So when they say “separate church and state,” they’re saying society should be governed by secular, liberal values. 

You can be a Burkean conservative, even up to Ayn Rand-type of libertarian conservative, and still be a liberal. You know what I’m saying. Because of the values of liberalism and the values of the liberal state. And this kind of intersects with Trump’s governing philosophy and the appointments of Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz. And that’s why I say it’s an attack upon liberalism. Because it appears to be an attack upon the liberal state. And maybe it is.

The dislike in elite discursive circles of what they call “communism” or what they call “fascism,” which they equate as the same thing. And what they’re saying is that each of them attack the values of the liberal state, which I will explain.

Just a parentheses here. There’s reason to believe, or to argue that even French thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau were not liberals in the English sense of the word. The English definition of liberalism became the predominant one. 

Liberalism is an ideology of a class rising against an old regime. It is not for nothing that we refer to the highest level of knowledge production and university academic education as “liberal arts,” you know what I’m saying. Freedom of thought, freedom of discourse, and on and on, that the university is to uphold is associated with the liberal arts, you know. 

So liberalism stands for the agency of the individual. In fact it frees the individual from the state and from the control of the state and its ideology. And says that it is permissible, in fact necessary that the individual has the right to criticize the state and state ideology. Obviously we’ve come a big distance from that these days, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.

It upholds the idea of the individual. Of reason. Of law. And that is why you have to separate the state, which is theoretically organized on the basis of law. In the United States we have a Constitution which is the fundamental law. But it is frankly the law upon which the state is organized. So if you say, “Well I’m going to the Supreme Court.” You’re saying, or the Supreme Court accepts you to argue before; what the Supreme Court is saying is that these issues that you want to have settled are constitutional: the fundamental law of the country. And in one or another way are reflected in the state. 

So the state, which is organized on the basis of law, also exists to uphold the law and to protect the rights of individuals under the law. So citizenship is not insignificant. It has huge meaning, although we take it for granted these days. To be a citizen means to be protected by the fundamental law and by the state.

So there is a conservative way of arguing the liberal agenda, and this goes back to Edmund Burke and John Locke and others. And there is a conservative way, so-called conservative way. Usually in modern, or today’s discourse, the conservatives say, “We’re standing up for what the founding fathers intended.” Like you know. And the liberals would say that the fundamental law of the country should be fluid and flexible. Relating to the times, you know. 

But they’re both liberals. What we call classical liberals. Adam Smith is one of the foundations of liberalism. The overturning of the Smithian, Marxian approach to political economy, let us say in neoliberal economic theory, is also liberal. So liberalism is not owned by the Democratic Party. Or by this or the other movement associated to the Democratic party. Once again, it is an ideology upholding the separation of church and state, upholding the rights of the individual to think, to do research. Upholding reason as a principal definition of what a human being is. Upholding law. Upholding what we call these days, secular society, wherein pluralism: many views, many approaches, can fit into this liberal state formation. 

In a certain sense we might say the first great act, and the cause of European liberalism was Martin Luther in 1517 tacking his 95 edicts on the door of the Catholic church. And proclaiming that man’s relationship with God did not have to be mediated through an institution like the church. In fact, he was also saying—and it was a political act—that the state could not undermine the rights of an individual, or individuals.

And thus, for 400 years there were wars and revolutions and counter-revolutions throughout Europe. In other words, you know, our romanticized visions of the Russian Revolution and the storming of the Winter Palace and all of that type of thing. Well it often doesn’t happen that way, and certainly in the bourgeois revolutions to overthrow the rule of the church, and of the landlord class and all of their retinue; it took hundreds of years. And there were wars, they sometimes appeared to be wars of nation against nation. But in the end they were wars of one class against another. 

In other words, capitalism did not come into the world being pushed in a wheelbarrow by you know, and say, “Oh we’ve arrived, let’s establish capitalism.” The church and the feudal system fought tooth and nail. And often it would lead to compromises in the English Revolution, where you end up with what they call a “constitutional monarchy,” although England doesn’t have a constitution, but where the monarchy, which claimed to be a representative of God and the Church of Peter. Or at least associated with that. 

So gradually the monarchy is limited in its power. And the bourgeoisie expands its power. So you get all these different interpretations of the English Revolution. Some people say 1639, 1640 to 1650. Other people say 1640 to 1680. But any way you look at it, it’s a long period of back and forth struggle. 

The American and French revolutions which come in the late 18th century both benefit from the English and Dutch and other bourgeois revolutions. And definitely the American Revolution and the French Revolution. They too are a back and forth in the establishment, ultimately, of the rule of one class and a singular state. 

But the American Revolution, contrary to what people like my friend Gerald Horne say, that it was a counter-revolution, on any measure of what constitutes a revolution. At that point in history, with the task of democracy and separation—not just from a foreign country that controls you—but to establish a new way of thinking about the state. Highly significant.

And the American Revolution was a—some words I use because early in the morning I can’t think too well. The American Revolution is a pure form, a pure form of the bourgeois democratic revolution.

Now of course the great conundrum is slavery. But we will return to that. But it does not deny the essential character of the American Revolution and the establishment of a new type of state, controlled by a different class and different class interests. 

And hence it was a liberal revolution. And all of the writings of the people in it, the main people: be it Jefferson or be it the Federalist Papers, be it Madison. They are all talking about pretty much the same thing: the establishment of a new type of state. That is governed by law and by a Constitution, a written Constitution. Which was approved by all of the citizens of the then-13 colonies who had the right to vote, meaning property owners, you know. But nonetheless. 

And of course some of the most revolutionary speeches and statements made by people like Jefferson and maybe Madison, maybe Hamilton. Certainly the Federalist Papers. But Jefferson becomes this flame, this torch, of liberal values. And those values and those pronouncements, especially as they are embedded in the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, are repeated again and again by revolutionaries of the 20th century. Like Ho Chi Minh, like Mao Tse Tung. And of the 19th century, like Marx. These are enduring values. And whether they were fully implemented or embraced by all of society is not the question we want to deal with right now. 

So, what in the bourgeois or liberal revolutions do we hold on to, and what is no longer valuable? Now of course, one of the things that we want to transcend or get away from is the hypocrisy of saying one thing in speeches and on paper, and doing the very opposite in real life. But that is possibly one of the internal contradictions of the capitalist class itself. I just want to say all that just to say that the period of liberal revolutions is in fact a revolutionary period. Confined, though it be, to Europe. And from Europe, reshaping in certain ways humanity’s sense of itself, and the rights of human beings. 

What we therefore call modernity is the epoch of capitalism and the epoch of liberal values and such. Nobody anywhere on this planet, except if you’re, you know, a follower of a cult or something, or live in a very isolated village. No one can deny this.

And in fact the system of knowledge creation and knowledge production institutionalized in the liberal university or the liberal arts, is modeled everywhere in the world, you know. And no one would consider himself or herself a revolutionary and deny these values of the bourgeoisie. 

To do so is a high act of nihilism. And you hear it all the time, I mean extreme postmodernists say that everything of the modern epoch was useless and oppressive and on and on, you’ve heard it, you know. But that is not true, and we’ll have to talk about that.

The American and French revolutions are the highest stage, I would say, of the bourgeois revolutions. And this is important for us because to talk about the American Revolution is to talk about an originary for the United States’ revolutionary moment.

So if we talk about three American revolutions, we have to talk about the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights period. But we can talk about an American revolutionary tradition. That is unlike, let us say, the Chinese Revolution or the Russian Revolution, because the history and specificities of the U.S. are qualitatively different than they are. 

It is fair to say that Russia had not had a successful bourgeois revolution. It was the Russian Revolution that carried out the task of the bourgeois revolutions, which were championed by representatives, ideologues and so on, of a bourgeois class. In Russia it is the Russian Revolution. That brief period in China of Sun Yat Sen, where he proclaimed bourgeois and democratic values. And thus it was the Communist Party who declared the People’s Republic—underlining Republic. Being representative forms of governing. People’s Republic of China.

It was a bourgeois revolution headed and led by Communists. It seems like a contradiction, but it’s not. And Mao and all of his followers understood what the American Revolution was, what it represented. Ho Chi Minh, the same thing. Kim Il Sung. They all did.

And that they understood modernism, modernity, issuing from the European revolutions. And that’s not to put Asia or Africa down. It’s just to acknowledge that every geography, every region, every civilization does not play the same role at every stage in history. 

Europe—that was a backwater at that time. Yeah, you know, for most of the epochs of human development. There is no great—until the Renaissance and so on. But the great developments in human civilization come from Asia and Africa, for the most part. But then Europe, that is on the fringes geographically of the major centers of civilization, is where the great revolution of the modern world initiates from. And that’s not unusual either, you know.

The French Revolution is the other example. But these are different revolutions, different bourgeois revolutions. With different ideologies.

Edmund Burke and John Locke are not Voltaire and Rousseau. They are different. Very different. One of the great differences is that French philosophy and French theorizing were defined by an understanding of the organic nature of social relationships. As opposed to British thinking, which is based upon the aggregate nature of collective activities, social activity.

In other words, British and American thought would say that social groups, society itself, is an aggregate of free-thinking individuals. Who choose to be a part of society. French thinkers like Rousseau would argue that there is something organic bonding the social solidarity and social revolutions. 

Let me give an example. You might recall that Rousseau makes the argument that government must reflect the general will. This is a very important concept. The idea of a general will does not exist in English thought to my knowledge, in any major way. The English would make the argument: it is the will of all. Which suggests the will of each individual, the summation of that, is the will of all. That’s why, you know, elections, voting, you know. The will of all. The aggregate, which is quantitative, which is addition, you know. One by one; as opposed to the general will which starts not from the individual but from the organic whole. 

Now, each side for theoretical and ideological reasons makes statements about a state of nature. The English thinkers, especially Thomas Hobbes, see the state of nature as a state of hostility, barbarity, brutality, murder. And that people agree to form a state, a society, in order to preserve, to survive, to protect themselves. So even though they give up freedom in the state of nature, they gain safety. You’ve probably heard some variation of this—you know, “People running around killing each other. Do we take guns away, or do, you know, whatever.” But it’s safety from, and freedom from the state of nature. Now the French argue that the state of nature was a very peaceful, idyllic place. The very opposite argument. But human beings do not form civil societies or a state in order to protect themselves, but in order to create a better situation. 

So the differing positions on the state of nature are very important. The English believing that individuals decide, for the sake of safety. And the French saying that human beings in the state of nature existed in societies, but shows as a group, to go beyond the limits of the state of nature, which can only be found in civil society. 

Now in French anthropology, they make constantly a separation between barbarism and civilization. And it’s not as bad as it sounds, you know. Barbarism being the state of life of human social existence, before the state. Of what we call civil society—civil meaning society governed by law. And thus civilization. It’s not that civilization is so much better, unless you take the English point of view. But civilization is a new dispensation, a new way of organizing social life whereby the state, a state is instituted.

Civilization is always the period where state formation takes place. Barbarism is the state of nature, the state of, well what Marx called primitive communism. And in fact there are arguments that can be made and based upon anthropological studies where in Africa, there were the two systems existing side by side. For example there is in the long history of African cultures, nations, empires, a very weak development of private property. 

All productive land was owned collectively, and each person worked, you know, they would agree to a certain amount of time to produce food and other things for the society. A very weak development of private property. However, I don’t think any civilization has developed private property and individualism to the extreme that the West has. And of course capitalism institutes this even further.

But the French Revolution was even more radical than the American Revolution. And it had many political trends; in fact the whole idea of the left and the right has to do with the seating of the various factions of the revolution in the parliament. On the right were the more conservatives. On the left were the more revolutionaries. In the French Revolution you had all of these parties, in fact the Americans—George Washington and I think even Jefferson and in the Federalist Papers–argue against political parties. Because they said they would just lead to further division, you know. But the French, in their revolution, had multiple political parties. The Jacobins, the Communards, being the Communists, and others; on the right and left.

But the French Revolution, whose ambitions were so high and almost took on what could be called a socialist revolutionary character. Because there were those elements who were ultimately executed, and internal civil wars. And then the rise of Napoleon, to bring stability in a revolutionary time.

By the way, if this is in our country a pre-revolutionary moment, one can expect enormous instability, and struggle, and chaos. We will come back to that. But Napoleon becomes this figure which will unite the French people, do away with the internecine political struggle. But also he goes beyond this democratic, revolutionary and democratic forming of the questions, to declaring himself an emperor. And he is going to conquer other societies. Now, everybody is not opposed to him conquering other nations or other societies. Because they said, “On the banner of Napoleon will be written equality, fraternity, and liberty.” (Laughs) Liberty, equality, and fraternity.

And so Beethoven and other intellectuals welcome Napoleon taking down the feudal states in Germany. But then when they realized that Napoleon was only interested in establishing an empire under his rule, they said, “No, man. This is not what we were hoping on.” So then France descends into a very long period of internal struggle, where people are looking–and this is what Les Miserables, Jean Valjean and all them cats, you know.

But what the revolutionaries were attempting to do is to restore the French Revolution; this is in the 1820s. And so you get this long period that will eventuate in 1870 with Louis Bonaparte, the 18th Brumare, Louis Bonaparte. And all of this, you know, Man of Destiny and a Farce, you know. And that’s why Marx said, yes, “History comes twice.” But not like Hegel thought. It comes first as tragedy: the Man of Destiny. And then as Farce. 

The ideological preconditions of the bourgeois revolution—and this is as important as the events themselves; the ideological preconditions. In other words it took years, decades, for a cadre of revolutionary thinkers who could advance the fundamental ideas of liberalism and bourgeois democracy—they didn’t exist. There were unusual figures that advanced these ideas, but they were usually attacked by the existing regime of the church and landlords and so on.

Such thinkers were René Descartes. And the revolutionary idea, if there ever was one, especially at that time: that I think, therefore I am. 

I am—not because I am a child of God. Which would be the church; “I exist because the church has allowed me, or brought my existence into being.” The church being the representative of God, you know. 

But I think, therefore I am: my identity is associated with my individuality, with my ability to think, with my ability to reason. And it’s not a far leap from that to the American Constitution, especially the first ten amendments, that protect the rights of the individual. Not just establishing the structure of government, but to protect the rights of the individual.

And so when Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am,” in the 17th century, he is literally saying, “The church can’t tell me who I am,” you know. It’s almost like today saying, you know, “I’m not going to pay taxes because the government is corrupt. And it cannot define my civic existence.” The English thinkers come a little bit later. Well John Locke and then Edmund Burke. The German thinkers, who were rationalists. Kant himself is an atheist. Atheism is not anti-religion as much as it is anti the doctrine of the state, you know, and the church of course. 

Kant himself supported the French Revolution—but the most revolutionary elements of it. Kant’s critiques of reason, critique of judgment, critique of morals and ethics or so on; Kant has three major critiques. The word critique should be understood as investigation. I mean, I know we’ve got it kind of confusing these days; when you say ‘critique’ that means ‘I’m going to critique you.’ No (laughs) that’s not… Unless you meant in the sense of ‘I’m going to investigate.’ You know, something like that. It is really a word, a concept that refers to investigating. Scientific investigation. 

His Critique of Judgment, his Critique of Pure Reason, and his Critique of Practical Reason. Those are the three great critiques of Kant. And they are great. And what he argues in effect, that artistic judgment—that’s what the critique of judgment is—how do you measure art? What is art, what is great art? And Kant felt there could be a rational criteria for it. We can criticize it today and say it wasn’t complete enough; but he believed that reason was the path to judgment and to morality. 

And out of Kant comes the great systematic theologians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Neibhur; people who argued that the existence of God could be justified, or argued through reason. 

And then of course the final version of liberalism is Marxism. All of this philosophical thinking was grounded in certain movements of art and thought which precede the exact revolutions. For example the European Enlightenment. The Renaissance in its multiple forms. The Protestant Reformation, which are all of these revolutionary movements and wars that proceed from the struggle to overturn the state power of the church. 

Hence there’s been a long march to consolidate the bourgeois state, which is the state of the bourgeoisie and its ideas and values. Out of this comes a new civilization and a new form of civilizational state. Rooted, again, in the values of liberalism. And again, they are the rights of the individual, law superseding all individuals and even institutions; reason, science, and the university. The liberal arts university, as opposed to the medieval university.

Again, the state, which is secular, is separated from the church. And hence, in theory, multiple religions and multiple ideological predispositions can coexist, and debate and so on. Preferably non-violently, in a secular state and in a secular society based upon secular values. 

Again this was a long drawn-out process. The old state is ultimately contained and brought under the law, whereas the church did not adhere to any law but biblical law, theological law, et cetera, you know. That state is finally eviscerated. Like in England you still have a monarchy—that has no power. And the English people pay taxes so these people can, you know, have horses and talk trash, you know.

Again, I want to talk about four revolutions, and I’ll just name them. The English Revolution of the 17th century. The American Revolution of the late 18th century. The French Revolution of the late 18th century. And the Haitian Revolution. 

I’ve already mentioned some of the philosophical developments in this period of these bourgeois revolutions. And that’s why philosophy is important. If properly understood, and if you know how to study it. 

There’s one way of studying philosophy which is completely hermeneutic. Hermeneutics is a method associated with Jewish textual study. In other words, to know the Torah, there have to be highly trained scholars who know how to interpret texts. You see what I’m saying. Medieval universities were really about training priests and other Church officials. But also those able to interpret the Bible, at least the Catholic Bible, which is not the same as the Protestant Bible. We deal with two different Bibles by the way. 

Oh by the way, you know, the Catholic Bible has more books than the Protestant Bible. And the Catholic Bible has more books and looks at certain disciples of Christ differently than Protestants. And I think one of the figures that the Catholic Bible—I think one of the chapters in the Catholic Bible in the New Testament is a chapter devoted to James, the brother of Jesus. Who was a quite interesting figure, by the way. But the Protestants don’t. What I was trying to get at: there are many philosophical movements within this overall movement of politics, of revolution, and so on. 

Most students and teachers of philosophy, as I was saying, read philosophy hermeneutically. They read the text; they don’t read the context of the text. You know, like we read Baldwin, but we read him in relationship to the lifeworld of the Black Freedom Movement. We read King in the same way. We read Du Bois that way. Most departments of philosophy are just totally committed to reading texts. 

So you don’t really understand philosophy as movements of ideas. And thus the ideological problems that different philosophers were trying to solve—and I want to emphasize: the ideological problems that philosophers were trying to address and solve. Doesn’t that sound unusual? Because most philosophers, and philosophy professors, and philosophy textbooks—if you ever want to be bored, read interpretations of different great philosophers. They cease to be great and they are like corpses; like Kant is a dead man in his coffin. There’s no life.

Well, why was he using reason to solve the problem of morality? Or address how we arrive at a moral place, the moral imperative? Or John Locke. Why did he make property the foundation of happiness? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of property, the pursuit of wealth. 

Why did Thomas Hobbes, for example, say that the state emerges out of a state of nature, of barbarity and brutality? You know, what were they seeing, and did these words have specific meaning for that time and the conditions of their societies at that time, you know. And even if we lift them from that time and apply them to now, we have to know what is specific and what is general. 

And thus we do justice to them, you know. For example, if I said that Immanuel Kant was not just a writer of philosophical critiques, but he was an atheist. That he never got married, you know. That he supported the ultra left-wing of the French Revolution. Knowing this about him makes sense of what he was trying to do. Or Hegel, coming out of Kant. Why did he invent a different logic to the logic of the church, and the logic of Aristotle? Why did he do this? 

And I would just say, Aristotle’s logic, what they call Aristotalean logic, or symbolic logic, is the logic of identities. I don’t care where you go—up to today you can do A.I., you can do algorithms, or you know, zeros and ones on the computer. (Laughs) I turn the floor to Samir and Jerry on that point. 

But the idea of a logic that is not based upon identity, but a logic based upon negation. The negation of the negation, you know. And he took that part of Aristotle’s logic, which was a throwaway: the law of the excluded middle. And he took that and built a logic upon it. 

But why did he have to come forward with a logic of conflict, rather than a logic of identity? I think it is explained by his understanding of the French and Haitian revolutions. And his observation of what he felt were the failures of Kant, especially as Kant—and this is Hegel all the way—I mean, Hegel literally cussed Kant out. He said, you’ve conceded too much to the English. To Locke, and to Hume. He literally said it. Now, he didn’t use curse words but you can imagine, he was so angry that he would have to go to cursing.  

So he says that the English have negated the possibility of knowledge of the thing-in-itself. The thing as in its essence. David Hume and John Locke said we can only know things as they appear to us. Their phenomenal form, their sensory form. Hegel says we can ultimately know what is not sensorially given. And this is the role of reason in the Hegelian sense. 

All these great philosophical movements occur within the framework of a larger ideological struggle against the church. Against oligarchy. Against totalitarianism, of the church.

American philosophy is, more than not, a derivative of English philosophy. And therefore we usually refer to the schools of thought that are English and American as Anglo-American philosophy. German philosophy dominated Continental European thinking up until the 20th century, and the rise of Nazism in Germany. It is in that moment that French existentialists thinkers such as Sartre, such as Camus, such as others, emerge. 

And outside of perhaps Descartes of the 17th century, the greatest Renaissance of French philosophy is in the 20th century. And it is existentialism. 

But liberalism, and I would emphasize mainly American liberalism, has gone through changes and crises. The first great crisis of American liberalism was produced by the anti-slavery struggle and Reconstruction. Its first resolution was to amend the Constitution and establish citizenship rights to people who were previously seen as property. 

But in extending civil rights—civil meaning law-based rights—of the slaves, of the former slaves, you were extending it to society in general. 

And that is why the Civil War and Reconstruction is a revolution in the democratic sense. And must be seen as such. And any other kind of articulation is revisionist history and generally just B.S. Just laziness, it doesn’t make sense. 

The second crisis of American liberalism was in the period of the Great Depression and the New Deal. That’s obvious. The extension of democratic liberties and rights to working people. Franklin Roosevelt’s acknowledgment of the Wagner Act, the right of workers to organize. And that the state—and this is very important, this is an expansion of the liberal concept—the state must take action to protect the least of these in society. Whereas classic liberalism wanted to be confined to protecting the rights of the individual from the excesses of the state. 

The third great crisis of liberalism was what we call the Civil Rights Movement. Every crisis of American liberalism, or most, have been associated with some form of the expansion of democratic rights. 

Liberalism is now in a crisis. The rise of Trump, the rise of the movement around Trump, most popularly expressed as a populist challenge to liberal values. You hear it all the time. It is a lazy person’s way of talking about this crisis, that populism threatens liberalism. That the values of populism go against liberal values. That populism leads to either communism or fascism; that’s the way they talk. 

They are right, however, that this is a reckoning point. Either liberalism, as a mode of organizing the state and society, and managing society and social processes—either it can expand the rights of the individual, including the economic and social rights of the individual. Or it ceases to have significance. It becomes irrelevant. And that is what the election this year, in a certain sense, can be interpreted as. A rejection of the liberal elites by a populace, I like to say popular movement of the people; dissatisfied with democracy and those who claim to defend it in the state.

So liberalism does face a crisis. Two major works in the period of the crisis of liberalism appear. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Those ideas are being debated in so many different circles. But for our work, David Brooks and Ross Douthat. They are debating, I think in one or another way, the question of the crisis of liberalism, the end of history, and the clash of civilization. I would just remind you that the state is not just as liberal theory, political theory has stated, an emergence out of secular society. It is a civilizational institution. Designed to defend a certain civilization, certain civilizational values. 

In the long struggle over what liberalism is, the Black struggle has played perhaps the most pivotal democratic role. If you listen to Martin Luther King’s speeches, he in so many different ways, very brilliantly, far more brilliant than I think David Brooks or any of these so-called liberal theorists. He, Martin Luther King was dealing with the crisis of liberalism at the middle of the 20th century and how it could be resolved. One of the things King says in the essay My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, he says he has to go beyond the civilizational construction of the state and of liberalism, that Western American thinkers have presented. And he was in effect saying that to truly advance American society required a reconfiguration of the civilizational nature of the state. And hence he would argue Gandhi is the greatest Christian alive, which meant that Gandhi upheld the values that were defined in the Bible and in Western democracies more than most Western Christians. 

But the Black struggle has been an engine for the resolution of an earlier expression of the crisis of liberalism. And may inform us in our thinking about this crisis of American liberalism. 

I think we have made the correct decision that Du Bois, Baldwin, Martin Luther King and others—but those three in particular ground a discussion of the liberal state. By first of all establishing a distinct chronology which links the struggle for a new democracy to the struggle against colonialism, and for a new world order. Free of the hegemony of liberal democrats who have now become neoliberals and neocons. It’s very interesting that neoliberals—that’s obvious, liberals—and neocons, which, neo-conservatives—all agree to everything. So the neoliberals and the neocons, who are both committed to a global U.S. dominated system which they call a law-based system. And both are committed to endless wars. But neocon, and neoliberal—which I think makes a point I was trying to make in the beginning. That you have liberal formations of liberalism, and you have conservative versions of it.

One expression of the question of modernity and liberalism in the Black social system is to be found in the works of E. Franklin Frazier, especially his Negro Family in U.S. History and W.E.B. Du Bois. And here I would say his Philadelphia Negro and Souls of Black Folk as just foundational.

E. Franklin Frazier; and his work is groundbreaking. Published in 1939. E. Franklin Frazier comes out of the Chicago school of sociology, which in the ‘20s and ‘30s, perhaps up to the ‘60s, was the dominant [school] in sociology. However, the most productive and perhaps most creative was the Atlanta University school of sociology headed by Du Bois. 

And this is not just a statement, but if you look at what was produced at Atlanta University. Du Bois had a different vision of sociology which did not adhere to the liberal idea of sociology as expressed in the Chicago school of sociology. And so E. Franklin Frazier writes this really brilliant landmark, groundbreaking sociological study of the Black family—and I would put slash social systems—from slavery, to urbanization, or modernity.

And it doesn’t sound at all like what Du Bois does in The Philadelphia Negro or in Souls of Black Folk. It sounds like the opposite. He’s not Du Bois. He is adhering to a cold-blooded, unapologetic liberalism; that Black people under enslavement were pre-modern. And of course the long march through slavery and through the destruction of the Black family. And Frazier concludes that all of those values have to be pushed aside. And just a footnote, that Frazier’s  sociology sounds more like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber than it does like Du Bois. 

Two thinkers looking at the same phenomenon: Black family, Black social system. But they arrive at different conclusions. Frazier’s arguing for an assimilation: a rejection of our past, a cultural past, and the adoption of values more in line with bourgeois liberalism. And such. And that the family, the Black family which is highly female-centered; in other words, women in the Black family and the Black social system have more authority and power than white women in the white supremacist social system.

And it doesn’t take much examination to see how it is executed. And you could just see in the character of Black women a strength that you don’t see in other parts of this society. This is historically constituted.

Frazier’s saying Black people will enter modernity through white values. Du Bois says that Black people will enter modernity on their terms, as they are. And Du Bois goes so far—because the civilizational context is always there in Du Bois. Like in Black Reconstruction he starts it: the Black Worker. But the statement that stands out to me is: “The slaves were everything African.” Or he will write in the essay The Damnation of Women, he will use this concept: the African mother ideal. 

So he’s always, he will say he writes The Souls of Black Folk as an African. So Du Bois is not accepting, uncritically as it were, Western civilization as the final statement on what is civilized, what is not civilized, and what, you know, all of these questions of art, and music and so on. Du Bois upholds the civilizational integrity of the African American. And you know for us, we are able even as we did the interview with Alfie [Pollitt]; we were able to see certain things that a liberal would not, because we were looking at him with Du Boisan, or Baldwinian eyes. 

And then of course, among their great contributions—I’m talking about now Baldwin and Du Bois—they said that liberalism is compromised in fact, unto its death, by its racism and colonialism. No one is saying that Jefferson was wrong: all men are created equal. The question is well, who do you define as a man? The words are good. But then when you get to the sticky details, it becomes something else.

It’s Baldwin that says that the nation will enter modernity only with the elimination of whiteness. And hence America becomes the last white nation. And by so doing we achieve our country. You know, it’s literally breathtaking when you think about his contribution. To resolve the unresolved. To answer the unanswered. To raise questions that few had the courage to raise.

Even the great John Dewey or William James or Reinhold Nebuhr, Paul Tillich; these great avatars of American progressive thought could not consistently think about, investigate, in fact build a theory of the future upon a radical transformation of American civilization—and hence of liberalism, if it is to survive.

There are no two ways about it: American society is in a crisis. But it is not just a crisis of political parties; will this party continue to exist? And not just a question of whether or not Trump will destroy the American government. As it currently exists. And I think that we must look at all of this with clear eyes, with deliberate thought, and not to be afraid. I mean, there’s no reason—I mean, I know I have friends that are still weeping and crying. I know long-term relationships are breaking up (laughs), people being put out. I got a friend, he can’t call me until his wife go to work. Because of the delicateness of the situation in the household. One totally committed to Kamala (laughs)—anyway, any critique of the Democratic Party is seen as, “Well you can’t support Black women, huh. If you can’t support Kamala, you can’t support me. And if you can’t support me, you need to get out of here.” You know how it can get tight. And even daughters and fathers (laughs) are entering into contradiction. But we don’t face that in the Free School because we were never blinded to the nature of the political process, its contradictions and its promises.

And that has held us in good stead. I mean, I think most of us are very calm about the whole situation. In fact we’re not surprised that Trump won, and we’re not enthusiastic about Kamala Harris to begin with, or Joe Biden. 

So we go forward in the throes of a crisis; I kind of end where I began. Are Trump’s appointments—and we don’t have to dwell on this because we’re talking about liberalism—but are Trump appointments, especially Tulsi Gabbard and Max Gaetz. Are these appointments designed to so undermined the existence of the liberal state as to change it irreversibly? Are we in a crisis not only of the ideology of the state, but of the state itself?

Can American liberalism as it is construed by university intellectuals, as identity politics. As freedom from society. And you hear this through some of these writings, that the intellectuals no longer feel they have a responsibility to society. In fact they have utter contempt for the people in a society. Can their sexual, racial, gender norms be imposed upon a society who reject them? 

Are their experts that they trot out anytime a sticky issue comes up. Can they be trusted? Are they so separated from society that they do not know the people, and they’re all saying this now, the Democrats—“Oh we didn’t know the working class.” Oh surprise, surprise. How can you know what you have had utter contempt for? And that’s, you know, Richard Rorty’s great book Achieving Our Country, I think it’s worth looking at.

This crisis is a crisis of the state. It is a crisis of the people, the masses rejecting the state, and hence liberalism.