The Liberal Spirit of System

You’ve probably heard of Adam Smith’s much-celebrated takedown of central planning in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

Except—this is not a takedown of central economic planning. Smith is talking about those who would change political society without regard for the “established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more of those great orders and societies, into which the state is divided.”

Smith isn’t arguing against ideal plans for government or the abstract concept of “system.” He’s in favor of those things. What Smith is doing in this, a favorite passage among fans of small government, isn’t a condemnation of utopias. Smith is arguing that those who have ideas about how to make the world better should implement those ideas through what we’d now recognize as liberal politics. 

Smith has a lot more to say about the love of “system,” especially in especially Part IV, chapter 1. Earlier in the book, Smith talks about the human tendency to confuse the “beauty of a system”—the perfection of its design, the way it’s all worked out and rational and understandable to us! Chef’s kiss!—with our assessment of its effects. 

Smith doesn’t use these words, but he’s talking about a conflation of form with function. It’s something we do all the time. We tend to fixate on the means for achieving something, whether it’s by doing it the way it’s been done before, or doing it in the way we imagine would be perfect. Sometimes, this fixation means we lose track of whether or not our chosen form actually accomplishes the goal. As Smith puts it, “we sometimes seem to value the means more than the end.” 

This confusion is the source of Smith’s parable of “the poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition.” The poor man’s son spends his whole life struggling for wealth and power, and at the end of his life looks back and realizes that he wasted time and effort on “mere trinkets of frivolous utility,” akin to the fancy toys accumulated by someone who likes gadgets. 

What happens to the poor man’s son is this: Smith says that if you ask someone ambitious for wealth and power why they want it, they might say that they want for their life to feel easy and safe. Wealth and greatness are observably grand, beautiful, and noble. Feelings of ease and tranquility, though, are accessible with much less observable (and more achievable) levels of material wealth, levels that don’t encourage ambitious behavior. 

Yet Smith says that it’s a good thing that people are driven by the search for more perfect means to achieve our ends. Ambition for power and riches can lead someone to fritter their life away by neglecting more achievable or praiseworthy goals, and finding even better ways to do things really does make people happier. Those who can afford to look for cleverer or more aesthetically pleasing ways of meeting their needs rather than simply being satisfied by their needs being met. Meeting this demand encourages economic activity and innovation, both increasing overall wealth and rewarding those who provide more perfect trinkets or services. As rich people spend money on these things, they distribute the money that used to maintain landed estates and courts to ordinary laborers. In this way, the “poor man’s son” passage leads pretty directly into Smith’s first (and best) use of the “invisible hand” metaphor: in which rich people, in their pursuit of better and better means, “divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements.”

This is how Smith rolls, and it’s why we still learn from him. The effects of this impulse are good, provided it’s let loose in a commercial society. And it really is bad that the poor man’s son squanders his life chasing wealth and power. 

The poor man’s son is like the man of system—he got carried away by an idea and so threw propriety out the window doing something that, when constrained the right way, benefits society. We tend to find systems attractive, so it’s important to plan whatever systems we mentally inhabit so that they work well. As Smith wrote, “The same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order, of art and contrivance, frequently serves to recommend those institutions which tend to promote the public welfare.” After all, whether they’re acting in the market or in politics, people are people. 

Smith describes possible reasons for getting into politics. The first is ambition, like the ambition that drives the poor man’s son. This sort of striving can bring out the worst in us. In the halls of power, success can be the result not of “the esteem of intelligent and well-informed equals,” but “the fanciful and foolish favor of ignorant, presumptuous, and proud superiors; flattery and falsehood too often prevail over merit and abilities.” Most of us share Smith’s worry about politics motivated by personal enrichment. Smith also says that admiring the powerful can corrupt our moral sentiments. It’s best not to give that power to the worst among us. 

The problem for society is how to encourage better people to end up on top.

Continuing with reasons that people get into politics, Smith gestures at those who are in public life because they’re primarily motivated by concern for the wellbeing of others. As with elsewhere in his writing, he does not think benevolence can provide enough motivation to take care of everyone in a large-scale society, where we are socially distant from most people. As in the distribution of material goods, we need a more universally felt motivation as a backstop. 

To motivate someone without ambition or sufficient benevolence to act in the public interest, Smith encourages playing up the appeal of systems thinking about how governments function and how they might be improved. He encourages the study of politics: “Nothing tends so much to promote the public spirit.” The urge to improve systems of government, based on a common human desire to find better ways of doing things, can motivate someone who would otherwise have no interest in serving the public. 

When thinking of the spirit of system, most market liberals think of the man of system passage and condemn both him and his real-world exemplars. We consider ourselves fundamentally different from a man of system because we believe in distributing and weakening the power of the state—the source of coercive power we’re most worried about, and that a man of system relies on. 

And yet. Free trade is a system of economic policy. A system Smith thinks it’s absurd to expect we’ll see realized. The simple system of natural liberty isn’t easily achieved, no matter how enchanted we are by its elegance. Liberals are positively enamored with systems, and the more different our ideal system of government is from the one we have, the more at risk we are of the idea running away with us until we lose sight of the people affected. 

It seems like advocates of small government aren’t immune, after all. This is why the late Steve Horwitz cautioned: Don’t smash the state. A man of system, who looks down at the chess game, declares the whole board corrupt, and flips it so that the pieces shatter across the ground is not better than someone who forces those pieces into their right place. 

Smith and Horwitz aren’t recommending an indifferent, anti-systematic quietism.
They would ask us to find the right constraints on how we implement the systems we want. Propriety in government as spelled out by Smith looks like today's liberal politics. Liberals’ respect for dissenters as individuals, with a right to principles of motion all their own, precludes forcing through a system that few people will support. 

What makes illiberals dangerous isn’t the mere fact that they have a vision. It’s their lack of respect for the rights and dignity of those who disagree with them. Usually, this tendency looks like limiting the decisions available, perhaps by making it illegal to build or open a business the way someone imagines. In extreme cases, it’s the willingness to let the pieces shatter—dissidents left to starve, or sent to gulags and reeducation camps. There’s no need to compromise on behalf of the people written out of politics, no need to constrain the spirit of system.

In contrast, when we want change, liberals need to convince others that our system is better than the status quo. We can’t take public opinion for granted. Our job is to change it. We will rarely completely succeed. And so, instead of liberal utopias, we “establish the best [system] the people can bear,” as Smith put it. That doesn’t mean, and it shouldn’t mean, that we can’t have ambitious ideas about how politics and government ought to work.

There’s also a temptation to believe in a sort of anti-system available to us in the form of conservatism. A principled commitment to stability and incrementalism as good in themselves might seem like a guard against the inflexibility of the man of system. 

F.A. Hayek described in conservatism a propensity to rely on what has already been proven workable and directing change based on preserving or pursuing those proven institutions. Conservatism is in this way also overly concerned with form when it considers how to fulfill different functions. 

Conservatism’s preoccupation with means over ends can also lose track of individuals when it binds the hands of reformers in the face of the sort of injustice that needs to be ripped out, root and branch, or the sort of problem that can’t be solved through tinkering. An obvious example of putting incrementalism before individuals comes from those whose concern about the radical political change pushed for by the US Civil Rights movement in the United States led them to defend southerners’ ability to maintain segregation and discrimination. The entire idea of “states’ rights” prioritizes collectives over individuals. 

The further the world drifts from a liberal consensus, the more dramatic a liberal program will become compared to the status quo. The ability of liberals to fall back on the conservative anti-system alternative will be weakened. That’s fine, though. Liberals need not hold any kind of commitment to incrementalism as good in itself. Liberal incrementalism is a byproduct of commitment to individual dignity and respect and the corresponding unwillingness to sweep aside dissenters. 

This makes it easier for liberals to pursue more sweeping reforms. After all, such reforms represent some of our greatest victories—think of the abolition of slavery or the enfranchisement of women. In countries where institutions have failed to act as liberal guardrails, or where they’re in danger of failing, liberals can feel free to move beyond preservation or restoration.

Smith doesn’t talk about it, but it strikes me that there’s another sort of man of system. A sort who, upon encountering a chessboard with pieces that have principles of motion all their own, gets up from the table and goes home.

We’re not accustomed to thinking of someone who won’t engage with politics on principle as a man of system because the effects of that choice are very different—dictators are unquestionably worse than abstainers. The chess metaphor still illuminates a similarity. Someone who will never choose the lesser of two evils is reacting based on an imagined better world with imagined humans that move the way the chess pieces ought to.

This man of system is also enamored with a vision of the world—so enamored that he cannot bear to improve things only partway. Contrast this again with Smith’s man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence: “When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong.” 

But it’s complicated. That imagined, ideal system ought to matter, too. We should care about our ideals enough for them to motivate us, and so departing from them needn’t be an easy call. Propriety has to do with weighing when compromising can ameliorate a wrong better than standing one’s ground. That means there’s no cut-and-dry single answer, only a demand that we attend to, and strive to be realistic about, politics. We're stuck with the need for discernment.

Understanding that something is meaningfully given up when we compromise away from a deeply held belief also encourages us to think about how and whether we might draw attention to the world’s shortcomings while still participating, when that participation is called for. 

In a famous example from 2002,[1] French left-wing voters handed Jacques Chirac a landslide victory to stop the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen in a runoff presidential election. Lest anyone think they were happy about it, those voters symbolically washed their hands after the ballots were cast—evocative messages that a vote for Chirac was necessary, but distasteful. This message was also clearer for observers than abstaining (which might be done on principle, because of busyness, or out of apathy) would have been.

And, while those who warn against the man of system might not like framing it this way, a positive spin on Smith’s spirit of system is not a new idea for classical liberals:

That’s Hayek, too, of course, here mirroring Smith’s conviction that a fleshed out idea of how things ought to work can provide motivation for individuals to do the work of improving government and society. 

Hayek departs from Smith when he insists that an inspiring vision of a free society has to be held by people who will not bend: “They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. The practical compromises they must leave to the politicians.” Trying to change public opinion, as Hayek advocates—he argues those who only pursue practical politics “have done nothing to guide” public opinion—puts one firmly within the political work of persuasion. Hayek’s framing rejects this, though, holding those with inspiring liberal visions apart from those willing to engage in politics. 

Smith shows a different way, one that doesn’t require people to choose between conviction and political action. A motivating ideal subject to liberal politics doesn’t have to be only a destination, one that has to be reached in its entirety to be worthwhile. A spirit of system can, instead, give us direction and a way to assess the costs of different options. We need not become a man of system simply because we’ve adopted an ideal, nor should we insist that every compromise is good for liberalism.

Finally, ideals don’t have to look like a barely recognizable utopia. Liberals are often too modest about what our convictions imply. Ameliorating the wrong when we cannot establish the right sounds more like Judith Shklar’s prescription for political “damage control” in The Liberalism of Fear, an idea that is often contrasted with more aspirational politics.

Shklar also says that “It used to be that the mark of liberalism was that it was cosmopolitan and that an insult to the life and liberty of a member of any race or group in any part of the world was of genuine concern.” We’d do well to remember that eliminating the politics of fear for everyone, no matter how modest it sounds, is something we’ve never achieved. We've not even brushed our fingertips against it. 

Freedom and equality are aspirational values, not something defined by what was already achieved. And so liberals have to be willing to imagine better. Liberalism doesn’t require anyone to give up their visions of an ideal world as motivation. It only constrains how those visions are pursued.

Notes

[1] The 2002 French election example comes up in this conversation between Toby Buckle and Jacob T. Levy on The Political Philosophy Podcast during a discussion of voting abstention.