Can Protestant atomization be overcome?
And should it be?
(This is a lightly edited version of an essay I wrote for a law school seminar on capitalism and democracy.)
Introduction
Protestantism, it has to be remembered, is only masked, momentarily, as a religion. What it is underneath, and enduringly, is a way of breaking things.
- Nick Land, The Atomization Trap, Jacobite Magazine
European political philosophy, from Hobbes to Mill, consists essentially of efforts to construct and justify new foundations for society in the destabilized wake of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation did much more than dictate new church authorities and tweak a few doctrines pertaining to salvation: it swept away many (macro-scale) political entanglements with the institutional Catholic Church and introduced an entirely new (micro-scale) self-conception in relation to truth, first of the religious variety and later all others. The fundamental unit of Protestant society was no longer the fief, the parish, or the guild, but the atomized individual. It is this individual that almost all these European political thinkers begin with when trying to derive the characteristics of the good society from first principles.
An atomized individual is one who conceives of him- or herself as final authority on matters of conscience, ideology, association, or other relevant characteristics by which an individual can be distinguished from the surrounding society. To the extent an atomized individual submits to an outside authority with which he disagrees, he does so only externally and begrudgingly, as the result of an internal calculus that such submission is more tolerable than the consequences from not submitting. His thoughts are not initially taken captive to the obedience of any authority he does not choose, and the authorities from which he derives his own thoughts and ideological commitments are made by his continuing choice of and assent to those authorities, not by their intrinsic authoritativeness. Naturally, his associations are voluntary, with exit of some form or another always remaining an understandable (if not positively sanctioned) option. His rallying cry is Luther’s (probably apocryphal) “Here I stand: I can do no other.”
Armed with his own Bible, telescope, rational mind, or empirical senses in turn, the Reformation man gave way to the Enlightenment man, and on into Modernity, becoming more thoroughly atomized along the way. The Reformation method of changing society, what Tocqueville saw as the common method of Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire, flows from the basic presupposition of the primacy of private judgment. Luther did his part to unlatch society from Mother Church, Descartes from any sort of inherited dogmatism in religion, Voltaire from religion at all; it fell to the social thinkers of post-Reformation Europe to replace Christendom and its corresponding hierarchies with an entirely new foundation.
These thinkers were thus involved in answering a distinctly Protestant-flavored question: how do atomized individuals socially cohere? Their answers were concerned primarily with how societies produce and maintain liberty and equality for their citizens. The preeminent importance of liberty and equality appears obvious given the above definition of atomization: if man is atomized, then liberty (the independence of man from man) and equality (the non-domination of man by man) are fundamental to his nature. Social arrangements that render man in fact unfree or unequal are thus predicted to decohere; human beings will tend to settle into arrangements that more closely mirror the innate qualities that their natures predict.
We see these themes even in Thomas Hobbes, who seemed to value security more than continuing liberty or equality: the act of man in the state of nature to come together and create a sovereign has legitimacy precisely because man is free and equal. In other words, liberty and equality for Hobbes are the preconditions of meaningful political participation, although their ongoing role once a sovereign is established is less pressing for Hobbes. The central roles of liberty and equality become all the more explicit and thoroughgoing in John Locke and the American and French revolutionary political documents, which place the two values front and center in their blueprints for democratic governance. Democracy, as it approaches universal suffrage, increasingly guarantees formal liberty (subject to the general will, the tyranny of the majority, or what have you) and substantive equality. Adam Smith’s notion of the market society is founded on “natural liberty” and its consequent equal treatment of all in economic matters; capitalism is thus a system of substantive liberty and formal equality (with vastly unequal outcomes resulting from everyone’s equal entitlement to transact voluntarily). The promise of capitalist democracy is that it maintains the two societal virtues in a tense balance: when capitalism threatens equality too much, democracy reins it in; when the tyranny of the majority impedes liberty too much, the iron law of the market finds a way around the roadblock. In sum, both democracy and capitalism are aspects of the great answer to the question of how atomized individuals form a society; they presuppose, rather than prove, that man is of necessity atomized.
At this root Karl Marx struck. Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Essence of Christianity was itself a grand exposition of the distinctly Protestant character of atomized man, probably did not believe himself to be saying anything controversial when speaking of a human essence or human nature as a set of characteristics possessed by each individual. For his boringness, he became a punching bag for the animating idea of the most vigorous political movement of the 20th century. Marx’s counter-proposal was the first truly alternative anthropology to find purchase in the European consciousness after the Reformation. But Marx’s effect seems, in retrospect, to have been something more like a surface treatment than a true reorientation of man. The seductiveness of private judgment was not displaced by inculcation in revolutionary practice, and 20th-century left-leaning groups splintered off of each other in a pattern reminiscent of Christian denominations in the American South. Many of today’s states that still call themselves Communist have essentially market-based economic systems. This isn’t to say that history has settled the battle between individualist atomization and Communist collectivism, but to the extent Marx was correct about the reality and power of thought being its real claim to truth, atomization still seems to be winning.
Knowing all this, is de-atomization achievable at all, and if so how could it be done? Marx took a shot at the king, and the perception since 1989 has been that he narrowly missed. Nietzsche, as the intellectual godfather of the other influential 20th century collectivist movement, seems to have missed by a wider mark. It remains to be seen which shots not yet taken might land, but reviewing the history of internecine Protestant disputes—discussions of which troublemaking social facts needed addressing, which aspects of a society contributed to its resilience—can give us an idea of where the weak points might be. If Protestant atomization is the end of the history of anthropology, it is so because to decide, for yourself, knowing what it is, for or against it is to be complicit in it. Anti-atomization, as an ideology propounded by an individual, seeking the voluntary assent of his fellows, performatively presupposes atomization. The least atomized communities today are those that have successfully shut out accurate information about the rest of the world; the most effective way, and perhaps the only way, to escape atomization may be never to atomize in the first place (think North Korea).
Lasting de-atomization may be impossible, and avoiding the phenomenon in the first place has come with substantial costs. So the natural follow-on question is whether and why it might be desirable even to try to overcome atomization. Once again, the answer will draw on the history of internal debates about how to kludge together a social system on a foundation of atomized individuals, as well as Marx’s and Nietzsche’s external critiques of the most favored kludges. Slapping a moral valence on atomization as a general trend is easier said than done; you might as well ask whether “growth” or “dynamism” is good or bad. In all such cases, the answer is clearly that the goodness or badness of the abstract principle depends on the context. All we can do to provide a useful answer, not abstracted to the point of meaninglessness, is describe what we lose, and what we gain, when we unglue society and reconstitute it on an atomistic foundation. Burke provides a fond glimpse at the society we lost, Locke and Smith give us the dual cores of atomized society—democracy and capitalism, and Marx provides an internal critique of the system and a jumping-off point for the next would-be rebuilder of a collective social foundation. I will thus focus on these thinkers in exploring the relationship between atomization and social order.
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek proposes a method of reading the major works of a canon subversively by situating their claims in light of a “minor text” from a disfavored or counter-hegemonic tradition. I propose to thus “short-circuit” the project of Protestant political philosophy by reading its claims in light of Nick Land’s brief essay “The Atomization Trap.” This reading identifies a rejected and disavowed premise that nevertheless explains the trajectory of the post-Reformation political philosophy canon: the sort of “human nature” that makes democracy and capitalism especially desirable is not the universal essence of humanity, but a distinctly Protestant phenomenon that is still progressively instantiating itself and has not finished eating its way through our organizational principles. This atomization premise implies that liberal capitalist democracy is not, in its current form, the end of history. If human nature were stable, there might be a means of making permanent a system of political legitimization, built upon features like those of democracy and capitalism. But progressive atomization destroys the bare possibility of stable rules for political legitimization. Even if atomization has an endpoint, we aren’t there yet; capitalism and democracy will have to evolve or else be cast off as mere inherited dogmas by the ever-more-atomized man of the future.
I. Burke: Actually, Inherited Dogmas are Good
Edmund Burke stands in a contrast to his contemporaries that becomes much more starkly apparent in light of the atomization premise. Burke’s history-first pragmatism always stuck out from the theory-driven approaches of his contemporaries, but his support for the American Revolution and opposition to the French allows a cursory reader to lump him in with the faction, internal to the Protestant project, that favored Locke’s take on natural rights over Rousseau’s theory of the general will. But a closer reading of Burke reveals him not as a conservative Protestant, but as a crypto-Catholic, in anthropology if not religion.
Burke’s basically Catholic outlook is apparent in his objections to the French Revolution and his theory of political inheritance. Burke’s appeal to sentiment in his description of the end of chivalry in favor of the age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” is characteristic of his general approach. Chivalry is an exemplary institution of the sort that an organically integrated (i.e. non-atomized) society generates: it establishes particular modes of ritualistic behavior between persons of different rank, especially across gender lines, and by doing so simultaneously entrenches the underlying class and gender stratification of power in the society and (according to Burke) makes the lower-ranked members of that society happier with their lot, since the classification binds the nobles and knights along with them and tempers the force of the exercise of raw power by its normative strictures. Such an institution could sate the inherent human desire for recognition by means of a “pleasing illusion” rather than by tampering with the class ranks on which the social order was built.
The state of flux of the rest of French society, beyond the basic political liberty that the French Revolution achieved, was Burke’s ground for refusing to congratulate the French on their achievement. Burke’s analogy of social order to an entailed inheritance implies that conditions are attached to its transfer to each successive generation, and that these conditions require perpetuating certain norms of the prior generation’s social order. The English fee tail entrenched male primogeniture norms (and particular aristocratic families) by binding real property to their continuance; Burke sees the perpetuation of social order in much the same way, as contingent on the continuation of hierarchical social norms and strictures. His litany of institutions and societal qualities enjoyed by the Kingdom of France and lost or degraded by the Revolution—“laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved,” etc.—serves to illustrate the problem inherent in trying to convey social order without complying with the entailment.
Hobbes’ fear of instability is the nearest analogue within the Protestant canon to Burke’s anti-French Revolution sentiment, but Burke is clear that his objection lies elsewhere: not merely against the political act of rebellion against a monarch, but against the entire worldview animating the revolutionary project in France. Hobbes’ argument against a right of revolution depends on the atomistic individual owing it to himself to obey the sovereign that he or his countrymen chose, since consent to the principle of popular sovereignty and majority rule in the initial act of choosing a sovereign is consent to the sovereign that the process produces. Atomized man could (and for Hobbes, must) thus consent to the given sovereign despite his private objections to certain sovereign prerogatives or policy choices. But Burke could care less about what sort of political order human nature is said to predict.
Burke’s objection to the Revolution is more basic: reconstituting society by theorizing about human nature in the abstract and upsetting every institution not derivable from first principles is an inhuman, disembodied endeavor. Human societies, Burke claims, have historically developed organically by trial and error, not according to an ideological plan. They function as a complex ecosystem, with intermediating institutions such as the nobility and clergy, between the sovereign and the individual. These institutions temper and obscure the workings of power on the populace, making the subjection, inequality, and social immobility endemic in old-model societies more tolerable, as part of a unified whole with its own richness and grandness. (You might be a tenant farmer, slaving away in your lord’s fields to produce your quit-rent wheat, but your fealty is unimpeachable, and besides, the last will be first in the kingdom of heaven.) The revolutionaries’ project—to strip these intermediating institutions of their power, deposit whatever power remains in the assembly, and hope the society continues to hum along as it did before but with some fundamental inequities rectified—is therefore a pipe dream. There are simply too many variables to control for when trying to replace an entire social order with one derived from first principles.
Burke’s different perspective on the American Revolution is therefore more a function of the circumstantial prudence of the Americans than their ideological differences with the French. The American Revolution lacked many of the society-disrupting characteristics Burke would later lament in reflecting on the French Revolution. Burke notes that the Americans, as a distinctly Protestant (and dissenting-Protestant at that) people, had an intrinsic attachment to English-style liberty and self-governance; moreover, before the Revolution they had lived out this internal impulse by forming popular governments, subservient to the crown, within many of the colonies. A change in allegiance from the crown to their own government, set up according to many of the principles already existing in the colonial governments, was therefore much less drastic a shift than the French abolition of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the entire feudal system of obligations and privileges, as well as the disestablishment of the Church. Moreover, according to Burke, the colonists’ idea of liberty was more consistent with the English tradition, theoretically passed down as part of the “entailed inheritance” of English political order, than were the efforts of England to bring her colonies to heel. Such a revolution is fairly describable as a restoration of old principles, freshly adapted for a liberty-craving populace. Not so the French Revolution: there is no indication that the positive radical liberalism, rather than mere grievances with feudalism, of the assemblies was shared by the common man.
The different growing pains that the French and American republics experienced are traceable to the different suitedness of the government systems for governing the people of each republic, as they existed at the time of the revolutions. As a predominantly dissenting-Protestant group, and as a colonial society, the Americans were much more zealous for and experienced in self-government by the time of the Revolution. The French citizenry was largely Catholic and subject to feudal social arrangements; the elite lawyers who represented them in the Assembly, and whose ideas of human nature reshaped the state, were often not. Recriminations, executions, and a few more iterations of the republic were to follow in France. But America’s chief issue was less inexperience than internal division between the two sorts of freedom-loving Protestants Burke mentions: the southern slaveholders and the northern post-Puritans.
Burke’s perspective on atomization is complicated; he is no raging ideologue for or against it. He proposes that mashing a not-yet-atomized social order together with a new political order that presupposes atomization is a dangerous game. But when the people are already atomized, being the sorts of Protestants that are “most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion,” self-government that presupposes atomized man might work out just fine. So Burke cannot really be read to endorse either the individual or collective conception of human nature; he simply endorses individualist government for individualist man, collectivist government for collectivist man, and gradual transitions of government as the population individualizes. But his rosy depictions of feudal France give a helpful account of the sorts of virtues that a pre-atomization society is uniquely suited to incubate.
The problem with trying to retain a social structure that can incubate the virtues of chivalry and mutual respect between feudal classes is the system’s vulnerability to headstrong atomizers, which the history of the French Revolution illustrates. Burke seems to see the writing on the wall for the remaining pre-atomization societies in Europe as he chides the French for ruining the noble and mutually trusting exercise of sovereign power for all other insufficiently liberal states. Notably lacking in Burke is any indication that France should try to regain the virtues she has lost. Such a project would presumably be impossible, since once the pleasing illusions of feudal power have been stripped away, all there is is the bare exercise of political power motivated by atomistic ideology; reinstalling the illusions cannot fool anyone. The Revolution made the king and nobles into mere men, who died like any other; with them died the mystique of royalty and the comforting feudal structure according only to which power could legitimately be exercised. If government is to be rational, and rationality is to be judged by private judgment, then anything that can be judged to be in the public interest is doable, and nothing is beyond the reach of the State. And this sea change in the relationship of sovereignty to the individual, once accomplished, is irrevocable. A power that has shown itself willing to cast off all its limits once cannot be trusted to stay within them in the future.
II. Locke and Smith: How to Save Liberty and Equality From Each Other
Liberal, rational government has as its basis only the self-sovereign, contracting individual, so the only real limits on power at any time are those that nearly everyone is convinced are important. This makes social cohesion risky, since the rules governing decision-making for the society are subject to change based on popular whim. The project of liberal political theorists is thus to show that each self-sovereign individual properly ought to agree to certain limits on power, based on some first principles that everyone in the society already agrees are valid. For Locke, these principles are religious: the notion of a natural law that governs man in the state of nature, with God as judge when no human judge is available, is crucial for Locke to establish that there are limits to the power of a state over an individual. Mill appeals to utilitarian ethics to fill much the same role in a later, more secular age. Both were doubtless aware that the true cause of governments’ confining their exercises of power to the proper sphere, defined by Locke’s natural-rights theory or Mill’s harm principle, was not the principle itself but the deterrent effect of the popularity of the principle.
Adam Smith’s project is similar in that he is aimed at convincing atomized society to adopt a set of norms that promotes social cohesion, but his norms are economic and deal with statecraft only secondarily. The laws of supply and demand may be essentially laws of nature, but the sort of person who is likely to think in terms of, and carry on economic activity in knowing accord with, the laws is atomized man, not the feudal peasant. (The peasant pays his tithe-wheat, not because he is at least indifferent about having the benefits of satisfying a religious duty rather than a tenth of his wheat, but because that’s what peasants do.) Capitalism produces social cohesion for several reasons. First, it requires minimal restrictions on buying and selling along with a strong property regime, decreasing the chance that the populace will grow weary under oppressive state restrictions on their ability to earn a living while increasing the initial value of the investments that the people feel secure making. Second, its convincing theoretical foundation makes whoever wields sovereign power in a society at any given time less likely to implement restrictions that hamstring its productive power. Third, it flatters the ego of atomized man, telling him he does good for society by seeking his own good, and thus encourages its own continuation among the common people.
Despite their advantages, both liberal, natural-rights-based governance and capitalism are vulnerable in certain ways. Liberalism, more than capitalism, is endangered when the populace stops believing in it, be that because of security exigencies, a new sweeping ideological fad, or simple demographic shift or a reaction thereto. (The recent rise in popularity of illiberal-right nationalist parties in Europe can perhaps be attributed to this sort of dissatisfaction with liberalism.) Modern secular man may consider Locke’s discussion of the source of natural rights mere superstition and either support the political recognition of his own favored set of human rights (data privacy, broadband Internet, etc.) or reject the idea that there are real limits on what a democratic sovereign may do to respond to emerging needs. He may do so at no cost to himself, as long as his opinions are not too esoteric, but may face social sanction if his expressed ideas are repugnant to his fellows. This process is often slow but can be sped by large-scale social crises.
The fact that one can, as we Americans do, write the rights down in a Constitution and laws slows the disintegration process of the liberal consensus but does not arrest it. Laws have to be interpreted by people at the time they are applied, and if the underlying concepts need to be adapted (in the view of the appliers) to new circumstances, they will be. Thus did liberty, a consensus rallying-cry of our Revolution, morph into “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” one of the most divisive declarations of right in today’s climate.
So liberal democracy relies on social sanction to preserve its list of limitations on sovereign power, by which liberty is protected from the tyranny of the majority. Which particular liberties are protected may change, but the facts of democracy and limited government tend to persist. Capitalism’s productive power improves the material conditions of many members of society; those persons have a vested interest in its continuance and often derive extra political power from their economic power if they so choose. But when the sort of economic activity that robust market capitalism tends to promote leads to economic downturns, as happens with some regularity, democracy tends to react by restricting economic activity of various sorts. (Price controls as part of the New Deal, Dodd-Frank after the financial crisis, etc.) Rarely do such restrictions destroy or permanently hamper the power of capital in a society, but they do tend to sate the impulse of democracy to punish capital for its excesses. And capital inevitably increases its power despite the restrictions, by moving over to less regulated sectors of the economy, refusing to comply and paying the occasional fine, or some other workaround.
For its part, capitalism tends to secure liberal democracy against becoming illiberal. The interests of capitalists are aligned with those of the property-owning class throughout history, in favor of social stability rather than popular uprisings. Social stability comes in part from atomized man being content rather than being subjected to oppressive restrictions on liberty. Capital is thus unlikely to deploy its political power in support of internal changes that illiberalize society. (In recent years, capital has actively withdrawn economic benefits from U.S. states that have passed arguably illiberal laws, such as HB 2 in North Carolina.) This is not to say that capitalism tends to liberalize states that are already illiberal (Singapore comes to mind) but that the effect of capitalism is relative stability in whatever sort of political order a state already has.
So both democracy and capitalism are theoretically vulnerable to being abolished within a state by acts of popular sovereignty, but the two tend to reinforce one another. When a democratic society has higher economic liberty, the more-capable tend to outcompete the less-capable to a greater degree than when economic liberty is low (which is not to say that society approaches a pure meritocracy, just that the proportion of wealth attributable to merit increases). Inequality thus increases without any gentle, overarching social myth that justifies it; if you’re poor, the capitalist myth goes, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough, or you made bad choices. Democracy reacts to inequality by instituting redistributive systems: single-payer health care, Social Security, etc., which either restrict economic activity or appropriate the proceeds of it through taxes and fines. When democracy gets too far over its skis in an attempt to restrict or appropriate, capitalism finds a way to exploit the market inefficiencies created: whole cottage industries spring up to reduce the transaction costs created by new regulations, companies restructure compensation packages to exploit loopholes in the tax code, etc. And the relatively free movement of global capital means that no one democratic sovereign can hamstring it too much.
With this relationship between democracy and capitalism in mind, let us examine how successful Locke and Smith respectively are in their projects of building a lasting society on the foundation of atomized man. At first glance, Locke seems like a lost cause; he presupposes far too much in the way of detailed points of theology to be convincing to a modern, secular reader. But many of his conclusions are equally reachable by means of the implicit premises that seem to underlie much of contemporary liberal ideology. Smith’s empirical foundation still has its devotees, but his reliance on theology actually fares worse than Locke’s. Overall, the fact that both democracy and capitalism have survived as long as they have despite the falling out of fashion of many of their proponents’ premises implies that something in the nature of how atomization has proceeded up to this point, rather than external facts like particular theological doctrines, produces democracy and capitalism.
Locke finds the equality of man in his common creation by God, and his rights as set down in the natural law which is written on man’s conscience. We know that God made us free and equal by simply reasoning about our natural state, once antiquated concepts like the divine right of kings are shown by reasoning from the Scriptures to be false. God reinforces this rational judgment that all men by nature are free and equal by writing the natural law on our consciences, such that we feel that oppression is wrong. The natural law allows us to distinguish government from organized crime and valid claims to property from false ones. For Locke, all this is apparent simply from pondering the nature of things, in light of the Scriptures.
The finer points of Locke’s theology are no longer agreed by social consensus among historically majority-Protestant countries, but the basic thrust of his conclusion is still widely accepted. The notion of rights that inhere in each person equally by virtue of our humanity is still common, even if we no longer agree on what basis those rights exist. But this doesn’t get us all the way to a stable political order; we need some criteria for evaluating claims of right and deciding whether an asserted right the government is infringing is a real right such that the government foreswears its legitimacy by infringing it.
This lack of consensus on a method of evaluating claims of right threatens the Lockean project, but not terminally; as long as atomization remains, so do some self-evident rights. Some rights and liberties are inherent in the atomized self-conception; e.g., the right to one’s own opinions (and therefore freedom of religious belief if not necessarily practice) is necessary to exercise private judgment. Human equality is also inherent in the atomized self-conception; all of us have access to reason, so no one can dictate authoritatively what truth is, including ethical truth, for another; therefore no one has any authority over another’s actions not constructively consented to by the other. To the extent that society continues to be full of atomized individuals (and there is reason to suspect that it will), these rights will remain self-evident.
Other rights and liberties follow from the implicit premise of providential history, the sort of post-theistic Protestant worldview that uses phrases like “the wrong side of history” to condemn political stances with which it disagrees. This worldview is not inherent in the atomization process but is a strong corollary to it; the legitimacy of private judgment implies that many modes of being and living in the world, formerly repressed as improper on the basis of certain past superstitions or other theories now believed false, are just as honorable as the historically hegemonic modes. This worldview employs the atomization method to its conclusion—at least to whichever conclusions are fairly cognizable by the society at the time (it took four score and seven years for Americans to realize that “all men are created equal” meant regardless of race, and another 55 to realize “men” should be read there as the neuter noun for all of humanity). Since atomization tends to produce this worldview, it could become fixed in society to enough of a degree to form a sufficient social consensus of the limits of power.
Reading Locke subversively through the lens of atomization thus teaches us that it doesn’t really matter what the ground of rights is, as long as there continues to be sufficient social agreement on what it is. Since the atomized conception of the individual and the truths that it implies are the only continually self-evident truths in an atomized society, those are the liberties that everyone can agree the government exists to protect.
The most important liberty for the project of achieving social cohesion through liberal democratic capitalism is the right to appropriate and own property, and while Locke’s foundation for the property right is solidly provable all the way down to the nature of the atomized individual, he does not succeed in legitimizing any particular arrangement of property titles. Locke’s basic property argument is that every man owns his own labor, and therefore mixing one’s labor with material from the commons converts that commons-material into property, as long as the taken material is not wasted and as much and as good remains in the commons for others. This theory can explain how some property was created, but it provides no support for the current arrangement of property ownership, as there is no way to tell which parcels of land or chattels were taken from the commons in an original legitimate act and which were not. Locke argues that the use of money is a constructive consent for others to take more than they need from the commons, since the waste problem is solved, but the historical legitimacy problem remains: which titles descend from legitimate takings, where as much and as good was left for others, and which do not? Some takings were illegitimate when they occurred if the entire world is now parceled up. Other takings were accomplished by clear violations of the law of nature, as articulated by Locke. Should those be reversed as well?
One solution to the problem of property legitimacy is to deny the problem and hope that the democratic sovereign doesn’t get riled up over any morally questionable genre of property claims (e.g., the claims to much of the land formerly held by Native American tribes, or a resistance to paying reparations for slavery) enough to threaten the stability of a wide swath of property rights. In practice, this has worked out well, but there is no reason intrinsic to Lockean political theory why it must. It follows that, although the entitlement to property in general is provable from the atomization principle, and stable in a society where everyone can trace their property claims back to a legitimate taking from the commons, the particular arrangement of property titles that we have in any of today’s liberal democracies is not.
So the property-holder may have surety in the institution of property in general, but not in any title of his in particular, aside from that which he mixed his labor with in appropriating it from the commons. (Even property validly appropriated by another and transferred may be suspect, since the right to alienate property can be subject to limitations.) But perhaps it is too much to ask that the rightful owner of Blackacre be provable from historical facts and the nature of man, with no other premises involved. Maybe a little title risk is acceptable on the terms of liberal democracy—the risk can likely be mitigated through other means.
Capitalism and its market-society norms provide the residual risk-mitigation. Adam Smith’s vision of market society replaced the settled feudal order with atomized individuals entering into voluntary arrangements. Such arrangements allow people to acquire things they value more by trading away things they value less, so every rational trade increases the wealth of the nation. But every trade for goods presupposes clear title to the traded goods. So a society that wants to unlock the wealth-generative power of capitalism will generally develop clear rules to disperse clouds on title and statutes of limitation beyond which possession can be conclusively presumed to carry title. And since the political power of capital in capitalist states is high, these rules are insulated from change.
So if capitalism is stable, it can fill the property hole in the liberal-democracy puzzle. Unfortunately, capitalism is as vulnerable to a populace that ceases to believe in it as liberalism is. Smith’s account of the stability of capitalism relies on a sort of providential history quite different from that which now predominates in modern liberalism. For all of the economic benefits that the empirical analysis of capitalism suggests are present, Smith’s case for capitalism was as much psychological as based on a rational analysis of the material circumstances. For Smith, the ambition to accumulate, to gain the trappings of the slightly better to-do man in the street, encourages the sort of economic activity that makes everyone better off. His metaphor of the invisible hand, applied to figures such as the rich landlord who produces far more wheat than he can consume, refers to subconscious psychology, or perhaps divine providence, rather than a calculated decision to take advantage of economies of scale—otherwise the hand would not be invisible.
Smith concedes that it is hard to trust that markets will satisfy the needs of the populace as well as planned arrangements do. It does take a leap of faith, as a newly post-feudal ruler, to liberalize the wheat market and then cross your fingers that the farmers collectively produce neither too much wheat, such that they cannot recoup their costs and are ruined, nor too little, such that the poor cannot afford bread. Smith justifies this leap of faith by an appeal to divine providence, which was probably more convincing to his audience in 1776 than it is to many liberals today—few of whom believe that the same divine providence, which ensures the “right side of history” comports with the Good, also ensures that farmers don’t misjudge demand and glut the wheat market.
But all is not lost: we now have centuries of empirics on how well markets function to provide goods at marginally above the cost of production, and what we formerly used to trust in providence to produce, we now trust in our own scientific skills to predict. And the great thing about science is that it too is an implication of atomization: the ability of private judgment to interpret the world requires there to be an interpretable world out there. So capitalist market norms, armed with empirical data on poverty reduction and economic growth, can provide a practical stopgap where liberal theory doesn’t require that we continue to recognize all the property claims we currently do.
In sum, both Smith and Locke argue for their preferred systems of social order on religious grounds that have largely fallen out of fashion. The rousing success of their preferred systems despite the secularization of society suggests that the real ground of their systems is not some religious metaphysic that society no longer swears by, but the presupposition of human nature as atomized. Since the important elements of both liberal democracy and capitalism are reasonable conclusions from the presupposition that human nature is atomized, they are likely to continue until atomization either goes too far for them to continue to generate social cohesion or gives way to a new collectivism. I propose that only the former is reasonably possible—atomization is a one-way ratchet.
III. Marx: Against the Bourgeois Atomizers
If the story Burke tells is a cautionary tale about what happens when you atomize your sociopolitical relations, Marx’s story is a cautionary tale about atomizing your economic relations. But unlike Burke, who contented himself to be an outside critic of a quickly atomizing society not his own, Marx found himself in the unenviable position of trying to re-collectivize his already atomized society. His method of trying (and failing) to do so is instructive for our question of how atomization could perhaps be overcome.
Marx substitutes a Hegelian historical inevitability for Smith’s doctrine of providence and unsurprisingly comes out with the opposite answer as to the structure of the good society. This could be as much a result of the sort of capitalism each thinker was exposed to as anything else. Smith’s vision of capitalism in 1776 was a relatively rosy one, populated by newly post-feudal towns full of artisans and rural farmers newly working for themselves. Marx writes during and after Britain’s industrialization, where the much more efficient use of unskilled labor was in grimy city factories, which were often undercutting the small-time artisans of the towns and drawing them into the cities as well. The trajectory of the health and well-being of workers under capitalism between Smith and Marx was not promising. It is no wonder that Smith came out extolling the invisible hand while Marx emerged predicting that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Marx recognized that the atomized view of human nature was a perspectival ideology, emerging from a particular social and material context, not a universal truth. Marx viewed human nature, not as an “abstraction inherent in each single individual,” but as “the ensemble of the social relations.” Therefore, the whole edifice of liberal-democratic capitalism, designed as it was to feed atomized man’s inherent wants and needs, could be supplanted by an alternative system without running into any fundamental, human-nature-level disconnects between the populace and the set of relations that constitute communist society. Marx describes atomized man as “alienated,” in that he conceives of some things that are properly part of himself, most notably his labor power, as separate from himself, and able to be exchanged for commodities. Alienation for Marx is a spiritual loss with attendant social and psychological effects, and when accompanied by the material deprivation which capitalism necessarily inflicts on the worker, it makes the relation at the heart of capitalism—the exchange of labor for wages—fundamentally unsustainable.
Marx’s materialism and otherwise quirky metaphysics (derived from Hegel, who as far as Protestants go was a rather quirky one already) make his vocabulary difficult to translate into familiar concepts from the Protestant political philosophy canon. In addition, the fact that Marx operated under a fundamentally different conception of human nature than the liberals means his concepts do not translate very well. But Marx’s critique of capitalism, that the entitlement of capitalists to the surplus-value of the labor-power they buy ends up destroying social cohesion and makes a revolution inevitable, is essentially an argument that unbridled liberty destroys equality. But does it? Liberty and equality certainly threaten one another, but the balance of power seems to wax and wane rather than trend toward one value destroying the other in liberal, capitalist societies. If Protestant political theory had been getting human nature that wrong for 300 years, one would have expected a little more difference between how liberal capitalism worked in theory and in practice.
A possible answer is that neither Marx nor the liberals got human nature exactly right. Perhaps human nature is malleable with a change in social relations, per Marx, but atomization is a one-way ratchet, and once you’re atomized, your nature is well suited for liberal-democratic capitalism and not much else. The efforts of 20th-century regimes bearing the Communist appellation to create a post-atomized human nature, to create the “New Soviet Man” or other such fantasies, bear this out. What the failures of Soviet policy mean for the theory of communism is an open question, but the evidence on the possibility of de-atomization suggests that it’s hard to do, if not impossible.
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Conclusion
The progress of Protestant political philosophy, from Hobbes to Mill, is best explicable by means of a progressive atomization premise. Man continually runs more and more inherited truth-claims under the lens of private judgment and splinters off into factions that in various measures accept or reject the old way. The only inviolable truth-claims are the ones underlying the process of private judgment itself, and those are inviolable only as long as the atomized man is not willing to abide logical contradictions in his thought.
I use “atomized man” as a stock phrase, but there is no reason atomization has to stop at isolating individual human beings from each other and from their social groupings. Perhaps the fundamental unit of the society of the future will be minds rather than mind-body complexes, and the norms of the inviolability of the body or respect for dead bodies will be dispensed with as so much old-fashioned sentiment, like prohibitions on blasphemy. The separation of a person’s gender identity from what have traditionally been called biological facts about sex may end up prefiguring this development in our atomization process. Perhaps the division will go further, and the fundamental unit will be the will rather than the intellect. That could get us to a place where people stop agreeing with the logical implications of private judgment while continuing to exercise it. The empirically useful categories, like logic, are less likely to become socially controversial than the merely traditional ones, but who knows. Perhaps this is the future that Nietzsche saw, and went mad.
Since both liberty and equality are validly derivable from the process of private judgment, as long as logic holds sway some types of equality-guaranteeing and liberty-guaranteeing social systems should remain valuable for social stability. This will likely involve some form of popular sovereignty and private ownership of the means of production, as these are tried-and-true pillars of relative social stability when combined. This phase may last a long time, or it might be rendered obsolete by developments in technology: superintelligent AI-based governance or hyper-efficient fully automated corporations. One can hope that technology renders our economy functionally post-scarcity before social cohesion stops being possible.
Outside of some exotically futuristic technological solution, or the grace of God, I do not know how atomization can be overcome. Surely through no merely human effort. Elective communities, even explicitly anti-atomization communities, simply reinforce the primacy of private judgment; their initial and continued existence is the result of a private judgment made by their members. The Communists tried revolution and the destruction of the atomizing class, but their revolutionaries had been atomized first. Our best hope may be to say some prayers, but not everyone can do that in good conscience.
I suggest we keep talking to one another. It won’t put off the end indefinitely, but it might help.
