As Larry as Happy

What I learned from my politics tutor at Oxford.

If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?

- Larry Siedentop, The Invention of the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

Sir Larry Siedentop, 24 May 1936 to 12 June 2024. (Photo via Wirtschafts Woche)

The following post was inspired by the memorial service for my undergraduate politics tutor at Oxford - Larry Siedentop. I offer some fond memories of his teaching, an introduction to his thought, and some reflections on why his distinctive account of the history of liberalism may have relevance to understanding the global predicament known as the metacrisis.

The metacrisis now has a range of definitions, but I think of it as the crisis within, between and beyond the crises of our time; the multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that militates against adequately responding to epochal challenges like ecological collapse and imperious technology. I have written and spoken about the range of meanings of metacrisis but this post focuses on the relationship between Liberalism and the metacrisis, which is a relatively neglected part of metacrisis inquiry and helps to put the value of my politics tutor’s work in perspective.

Liberalism means both too much and too little. It means too much because it is the defining feature of culture, the air we breathe. To be liberal is not so much to vote Democrat in the US or Liberal Democrat in the UK, but rather to live what we have come to see as normal life - a life with familiar social, economic and political institutions that is more or less free. Yet Liberalism means too little because we rarely reflect on where it came from, and all the different things it can mean. Liberalism is complex and limited and problematic in a range of ways no doubt, but the fact that most people take Liberalism for granted, or attack it without understanding it, is a large part of what is going wrong in the world.

For some, for instance, political theologians, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, liberalism’s lack of self-awareness is the essence of the metacrisis. In Rowan Williams’s review of their book The Politics of Virtue back in 2016, he put this point elegantly:

“There are crises and there are meta-crises: a system may stagger from one crisis to another but never recognise the underlying mechanisms that subvert its own logic…If we are now panicking about the triumph of a politics of resentment, fear and unchallengeable untruthfulness, we had better investigate what models of human identity we have been working with. Our prevailing notions of what counts as knowledge, our glib reduction of democracy to market terms, our inability to tackle the question of the limits of growth – all these and more have brought us to the polarised, tribal politics of today and the thinning out of skill, tradition and the sense of rootedness. Treating these issues with intellectual honesty is not a sign of political regression but the exact opposite.”

This growing awareness of ‘underlying mechanisms that subvert their own logics’ is partly why Larry Siedentop’s historical recasting of Liberalism as the defining moral and spiritual achievement of the West is important. Larry was also an intriguing and engaging fellow I am glad to have known. I am keen to share that gladness here, which has made this a lengthy post, so if you are keen to get to the analysis, go straight to the text below the image of his final book.

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Back in the day, in the second term of my first year as an undergraduate at Oxford, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around to see my politics tutor Larry Siedentop. He neither smiled nor asked how I was doing but delivered a message like he was delivering a parcel: “I am very encouraged by your work”, he said.

Larry had a distinctive voice, soft and sonorous with periodic quickenings and crescendos, shaped by influences from his Dutch ancestry, love of France, American enthusiasm and, through time spent with the English establishment, a presumptive aristocratic gravitas. Two of my college friends - Laurence and Dan - would imitate the dulcet tones for fun for years afterwards. They would respond to almost any promising idea I had, for instance where to go for dinner, by saying: “Oh I’m vehhrry encourragged by your wuhrrk”, or variations, “Oh yes I’m really vehhrry encourragged…”.

At the time, I was encouraged too, and I managed to thank Larry before he briskly walked away. I remember he moved with deliberate speed, eager to get somewhere more important than where we mere undergraduates were; like the Senior Common Room, High Table, or to retreat to his ‘rooms’ - the plural amused me as a modest status claim; it was not a home as such, but an expansive designated college dwelling, not merely a room.

That was 1996, at Keble College, when I was studying (or reading as they say) Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE). Larry was referring to my first politics essay on Jean Jaques Rousseau’s distinction between ‘the will of all’ and ‘the general will’ which is relevant to democratic legitimacy and the rule of law, but also the risk of totalitarianism. I hope to return to this distinction another day.¹

My essay was several pages long and handwritten. That detail speaks to how times have changed. We were at the early stages of the analogue to digital shift. While some students already had laptops, and others were even online, most of us were not yet familiar with today’s writing modality of fingers-to-keyboard-to-screen-to-printer; and all that this means for searching and copying and pasting and editing. Most of us still worked with books and notes and a wrist-to-hand-to-pen-to-paper manoeuvre and all that it meant for planning, creative commitment and sore arms. My final exams in 1999 went very well, but at that earlier point, as a wayward fresher from a comprehensive school in Scotland, I lacked confidence and was still surprised to find myself at Oxford. I remember feeling equivocal about Rousseau. I was unsure if he was a goodie or a baddie, but that probably meant I was thinking rather than merely copying or paraphrasing. Larry had written ‘Excellent’ at the top of the essay, handed out at a tutorial the day before, and that’s why he was very encouraged. Timely praise lingers for decades, especially when it is gratuitous.

I still feel it today.

*

Keble College, Oxford University. Matriculation day and the day of the service October 19, 2024.

Last Saturday I returned to Keble College Oxford to attend Larry’s memorial service. I cannot say we were close, and I doubt he would remember me, but I remember him well. He was one of the gatekeepers who interviewed me before I was offered a place. People talk of getting admission to ‘Oxford’ as if it’s a daunting institution, which I suppose it is, but ultimately the decision is made by the one or two people you talk to at the interview. The first line of my statement for admission makes me cringe now because it’s so vapid: “I have a passionate interest in current affairs”. Knowing now of Larry’s conviction that intellectual history is indispensable for understanding the present, it must have raised an eyebrow, or two.

“You say here you have an interest in current affairs”, Larry said, before pausing, furrowing his brow and looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and anticipatory disappointment.

“But why just current affairs?”

I was thrown and I don’t know how I recovered, but I must have. Larry was my tutor at some point during each of my three years at Oxford, and he taught me Comparative Government (French, US and UK systems) Political Theory, and The Foundations of Modern Social and Political Thought.

*

I feel blessed to have experienced the Oxford tutorial system, a distinctive intellectual enculturation. The system may have evolved, but back then we had three intense eight-week terms a year, and each of those weeks typically featured lots of reading, two essays and two tutorials, or tutes as we call them. Larry was generally warm, but he was also aloof, intellectually formidable, and a kind of dragon. A tutorial with Larry always felt like entering a lair.

While studying US Politics, I sat with three other students (from memory: Cherayar, Amber, and Lizzy). Larry usually began with some convivial chat, but this week he went straight for a question about the separation of powers in the US constitution. He asked us to detail the extensive powers of the President, which we did. But then he posited a hypothetical scenario of the Executive (The Presidency) trying to do something before asking why it mattered what The Legislature (Congress and the Senate) thought of the idea. We were all floundering, offering one lame guess after the other. Larry looked increasingly displeased, silently shaking his head, waiting some more, until he exploded in exasperation:

“The Purse!”, he said. “The Purse!”. “Don’t you know that Congress has the purse?”²

In many (though not all) situations, The President needs Congressional budgetary approval to enact his (or her!) agenda, which is why the US system is often gridlocked. After saying this, we all looked sheepish, contrite, not much the wiser, and Larry seemed to give up on us, for that week at least. We were only a few minutes into an hour-long process, but Larry said: “I think we’ll end it there. It would appear that none of you have done the reading you were supposed to do for today, so I see little point in continuing. See you next week.” And off he went, as if into the sunset, leaving us in the dust.

Yet ever since then, I’ve done the reading.

*

I remember a similar moment of reckoning and may even have mixed them up. We were a few weeks into Political Theory, having studied John Rawls and Liberalism and now considering Libertarianism, principally through the thought of Friedrich Hayek and Robert Nozick. Larry set out the case for minimal state interference, with taxation framed as a kind of theft, and government regulation framed as damaging the wisdom of the market and crippling hard-earned freedoms. From this libertarian mantle of the heroic individual and the meddling state (not his view) he asked us why justice was not better served by letting things be as they are. He also asked what might be missing from this account. Again I remember that his eagerness to get past the basics and stuck into the critical inquiry was met with our ambient floundering. At such moments we tended to avert his eyes, which were not so much fierce, but incredulous.

“Well go on then, what’s missing? What are they missing?”, he asked.

We students looked at each other, hoping one of us would save all of us.

“Well, is it just, is it fair, does it make sense?”

“Not necessarily!”, I said, but I lacked the intellectual amplitude to explain why.

“What then is remiss here?” “What do we have to call into question?”

We were silent, and Larry looked at us all askance, a weary expression on his face, until again the punchline felt like it could only be his to deliver.

“The justice of the original position!”, he exclaimed.

“How on earth do they account for the fairness of how resources and opportunities are already distributed? How can they justify leaving things as they are when things are only as they are due to prior injustices?”

He was referring to the role of history, war, theft, plunder, luck and inheritance in how resources are distributed. It was an obvious and necessary idea, but only when you thought about it. Larry particularly loved the experience of deepening thought so I can see why he sometimes grew frustrated. Without students rising to the challenge, the conversation couldn’t even begin, and I think he was easily bored.

No wonder then that he was exacting. He probed with questions that knocked you off balance, but he was also thrilled when you responded to the challenge by reaching beyond your prior grasp. As we heard in his memorial service, he would often say: “Yes! Yes, go on…” as if delighted that we were slowly finding our way to where he had already been for years. I also remember him saying “Very good, very good” which was a kind of provisional purring whenever a tutorial answer moved the conversation along, but not yet the full excitement of the intellectual hunt.

*

Once I had to ask Larry’s permission to miss two tutorials so that I could take part in a chess tournament in London. That’s a big ask in an eight-week term and Larry looked perturbed. I tried to explain that this was a rare chance to acquire a Grandmaster norm, I needed three for the Grandmaster title and already had one. He had little appetite for the details and no apparent love of chess, but something piqued his interest. Later it became clear that he’s a fan of titles (Sir Larry Siedentop CBE). In the memorial service, he was even called, with all due affection from colleagues of many years, a bit of a snob. He grudgingly agreed to let me go and seek my title, simply saying: “Well I do like ambition.”

After graduating, I swiftly completed the requirements of the chess Grandmaster title but missed university life. Larry briefly came back into the picture when I emailed to ask him for a letter of recommendation to study a postgraduate degree in Philosophy (BPhil) at Oxford. I am told that he never really adapted to email, but the message was conveyed to him and he called me a few days later saying both that he was glad to do so, but grumbled that I should have given him more notice. I would probably have seen more of him if I had gained entry, but I was not offered a place.³ I have thought of Larry periodically since then, hearing him on the radio for instance, and enjoying the critical acclaim for his latter books Democracy in Europe(2000) and Inventing the Individual(2014).

It felt strange then, showing up last weekend (October 19th 2024) because it had been so long. My undergraduate days were a quarter of a century ago, but gratitude for Larry’s role in my intellectual formation endures, as does the joy in the memory of his distinctive character. I was glad to discover this joy is widely shared, as is the inclination not to call him Dr. Siedentop, Sir, CBE etc. For those blessed to know him even a little, ‘Larry’ is the highest of his titles.⁴

*

When I reached Keble Chapel (where The Light of the World resides) I felt relieved that I had not imagined the invitation. October 19 2024 was matriculation day in Oxford and autumn sunshine illuminated squads of youngsters wearing sub fusc having just been ritualistically initiated into their new status as students. That was me once, but in 1996, and it felt dream-like to be caught up in it again, walking past old haunts and cobbled streets, full of memory.

There were about fifty others present at the service.⁵ The outbreak of nostalgia on my walk from the station had left me feeling relatively old, so it helped that I was one of the youngest people there. I had hoped to attend with others from my cohort; people I had laughed with, studied with, and staggered home with, but none were there. However, I sat behind a woman I recognised from the year below. I did not know her name and in a moment of nostalgic over-familiarity, I guessed it wrongly.

“Are you Ruth?”, I said.

“No”, she said.

“Oh sorry, but were you in the same year as Laurence, Dan, Divya, Ivan and others?”

“Yes”, said Hellie.

Her face was just familiar enough to be reassuring. I did not imagine it all. I really was here all those years ago. We were in a similar predicament at the service - both in doubt about whether we should be there - and we spoke more than we ever had back in the day. It felt validating to connect with a stranger - 25 years later than we might have - over the shared memory of Larry.

*

The service was elegant. Keble College Chapel is beautiful and the choral music is sublime. We heard about Larry the Don-about-college who was arbiter elegantiae (yes, I had to look it up) on all major matters of design and decoration. We heard of Larry the teacher urging his students to get to the point, by which he usually meant his point, though typically it was a good point. We also heard about Larry the lifelong friend who would call up on Friday nights and ask: “Any plans for the weekend?” as his way of inviting himself over for dinner. We also heard about Larry the scholar and writer, culminating in Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014) which I turn to now…

*

The Legendary Isaiah Berlin supervised Larry’s doctorate. The thesis was called The Limits of Enlightenment completed in 1966, on the counter-enlightenment theorists Joseph de Maistre and Maine de Biran. From my experience with Larry, I imagine his thesis also included some Francois Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Alex de Tocqueville who were among his main go-to theorists in our tutorials, and he published a wonderful short book on Tocqueville in 1994.

Larry’s main area of expertise is the history of French Liberal Thought, which sounds niche but is surprisingly generative and relevant to contemporary societal questions. Larry did not adhere to the professional heuristic that an academic must ‘publish or perish’, and preferred to take his time to develop and communicate his main ideas. I admire him for that. The influence of Isaiah Berlin may help to explain why Larry is best thought of as an intellectual historian rather than a philosopher, a political theorist or a political scientist (he was sceptical of the very idea). He also had a preference for books, book introductions and book chapters. As far as I can tell, he never published a peer-reviewed paper in an academic journal. Some would say that’s an achievement.

While Larry’s writing is always characterised by vitality and trenchant clarity, after reading a significant amount of his work, you recognise variations on a theme. In this respect, Berlin’s popular essay on The Hedgehog and the Fox comes to mind. The title stems from a line from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus:

“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing."

I believe Larry can fairly be characterised as a hedgehog.

So what then was the big thing that Larry knew?

*

It is foolhardy to attempt to distil a lifetime’s scholarship into the expression of one idea, but if I had to (Larry would ask: And do you have to?) it might go like this:

The West is losing its way because it has forgotten the meaning of its (Pauline and Augustinian) Christian roots. That inheritance is fundamentally about rejecting natural inequality for the recognition of moral equality as the basis of the social order. That perspective should create an abiding reciprocity between individuals as soul-bearing citizens of conscience who recognise each other’s interiority and collaboratively fashion a shared life worthy of emulation.

Larry’s writing is crisper (I almost said much crisper) but this is roughly his idea as I see it. For instance, in his epilogue, he quotes from Agobard, the archbishop of Lyons (this extract was read at the service):

There is neither Gentile nor Jew, Scythian nor Aquitainian, nor Lombard, nor Burgundian, nor Alaman, nor bond, nor free. All are one in Christ…Can it be accepted that opposed to this unity which is the work of God, there should be an obstacle in the diversity of laws in one and the same country, in one and the same city, and in one and the same house? It constantly happens that of five men walking or siting side by side, no two have the same terrestial law, although at root - on the eternal plane - they belong to Christ.

Larry comments: “In this urgent voice from the early ninth century we can still hear the moral heart of Christianity beating beneath the surface of social conventions.”

From the early ninth century? Inventing the Individual is mostly about neglected thought from what is too casually described as ‘the Middle Ages’. While some have a mental map of history as the ancient world, centuries of stagnation, renaissance and modernity, Larry sees it differently (p350):

What is characteristic about historical writing in recent centuries? It is an inclination to minimize the moral and intellectual distance between the modern world and the ancient world, while at the same time maximizing the moral and intellectual distance between modern Europe and the middle ages.

Larry thinks we tend to romanticise the Greco-Roman past, which was often brutal, and we tend to give too much historiographical importance to the Renaissance because it signifies a discontinuity, that is, in Larry’s terms, “misleading”. Instead, says Larry (p339):

The Foundation of modern Europe lay in the long, difficult process of converting a moral claim into a social status…Renaissance humanists did little to further the logical and ontological enquiries which had enabled medieval thinkers to replace one conception of society with another.

The moral claim here is the case for ‘equal liberty’ and the social status is equal subjugation to and participation in what became the nation-state.

*

Why does Larry’s alternative genealogy matter? It matters because we live in a time when liberalism - and the liberal social imaginary - feels exhausted. We live in a time when it matters that we understand who we are and how we got here, and we do not ask ourselves enough. One response to exhaustion is to recuperate, part of which surely means taking time to understand the moral depth and intellectual breadth of the liberal tradition. Many believe modernity is collapsing because we have lost our way, while others (for instance Ivan Illich) see the institutions of modernity as characterised by their corruption of Christianity, which is a variation on Larry’s themes. We live in a time when many feel individualism is the problem, and yet those same people may not have given much thought to where the idea of the individual came from, and what we cease to lose through that lack of understanding.

Meanwhile, some people are surprising even themselves by returning to religious Christianity, which does not indicate the way forward, or even a newfound truth, but a kind of cultural remembering. While Larry was not a believer in any conventional sense, I remember in an interview with Nick Spencer for Theos he said: “Let’s just say I’m a fellow traveller.”

*

Larry’s insistence that Liberalism is a great deal broader and deeper than assumed ensures his work will remain relevant. Much earlier in his career Larry had penned a chapter called Two Liberal Traditions (1979) where he compares the relatively familiar Anglo-American liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill focussed on individual rights, limited state power and free markets; with the French liberal tradition of Montesquieu, Benjamin Constant, Francois Guizot and Alexis de Tocqueville and Raymond Aaron. That lesser-known tradition is about what Berlin had called positive liberty (and Constant had called the liberty of the ancients). That kind of liberty involves active citizenship and self-realisation, in which the state often has an active role, social bonds are protected to guard against excessive individualism and equality is co-extensive with liberty (but an even more important touchstone).

Larry starts his 1979 essay (when I was two!) with a striking line: “Nothing reduces the value of discussion about modern political thought more than the contrast commonly drawn between ‘liberalism’ and ‘socialism.’” French Liberalism is a kind of hybrid of liberalism and socialism that calls many of our distinctions and assumptions into question, but is closer in spirit to what we would today call ‘social democracy’ than ‘liberal democracy’. Even as far back as 1979, I believe Larry saw the moral heart of Liberalism as a recognition that we are equally subject to something, whether the Pope, the State, or God. That recognition informs a political sociology characterised by the moral impetus to help each other work towards the common good, not through heroic individualism but through community activity and the meditating institutions of civil society. This vision is probably why Larry asked us to write an essay comparing John Stuart Mill’s emphasis on individuality with Tocqueville’s individualism - I remember really enjoying that one. On Mill’s account, creative self-expression free from coercion and conformity actually strengthens social norms. This idea is contrasted with Tocqueville’s fear of individualism in which people withdraw from public life and social norms and shared life are undermined. This concern led Tocqueville to argue for not so much the moral but the moralising case for civic participation; the contention is that we grow and cultivate virtue by contributing to the public sphere.

**

There is more to say about Larry’s work, but it’s time to ask what it means to me today.

I admire Larry’s narrative nous and remain grateful for his teaching and inspiration. I am also impressed by the way he has expanded horizons on what Liberalism means, for his spirited defence of ‘The West’, for his attention to neglected Medieval thought, and for his disclosure of the moral depth in our traditions. I can also see that Larry’s repeated reference to “innerness” as a critical feature of a healthy society may have informed my work on Spiritualise, the creation of Perspectiva, and it has therefore been an important part of my life’s work. This emphasis is clear in Larry’s scene-setting quotation for Inventing the Individual, which also gives a nod to the validity of calls for a ‘transformation in consciousness’ to contend with the challenges of our times.

History does not study material facts and institutions alone; its true object of study is the human mind: it should aspire to know what this mind has believed, and felt in different ages of the life of the human race.

-Fustel de Coulanges

*

I am not sure I have the scholarly muscle to critique Larry, but I would like to think he would be very encouraged by my attempt to do so. In essence, I think the one big thing Larry knows is very important, and it is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of ourselves. However, it leaves a great deal out. I am reminded of John Stuart Mill’s line:

In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.

It is not fair to indulge in whataboutery, but there is a great deal that Larry tacitly denies. I think it’s fair to call his work Eurocentric, and when he’s not talking about Europe he seems much less sure of himself. That matters for a generation more inclined to think of the planet than the polis. Larry was concerned about the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism but I didn’t ever sense a sound grasp of Islam or an appetite to deepen it. Larry often spoke of ‘Asian despotism’, an idea developed by Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws (c1748) and used by Hegel in his Philosophy of History lectures (c1837), but I don’t remember him reflecting on its validity or what it might mean today. Laarry was of course well-versed in everything he taught and wrote, but I do not (and did not) sense curiosity towards, let’s say, Gandhian thought, or Deweyian Pragmatism, and nor did I ever come across him properly contend with technological advances or with feminist or ecological perspectives.

Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect this kind of breadth, but it speaks to the matter of authority. Larry’s academic focus on French liberalism and the Christian roots of the West gave the work an elegance and depth it may not have had without such focus. However, it is said one cannot properly understand one’s mother tongue if only that one language is known, and one does not know one’s home town if one has never travelled. In a similar spirit, I sometimes feel Larry’s liberalism, for all its acuity and depth, lacks worthy ideological comparisons; his writing is sometimes just a little too self-referential, even repetitive, and therefore brittle. Samuel Moyn’s critical review of Inventing the Individual in The Boston Review- Did Christianity create Liberalism? also makes this kind of case, and has a deeper charge:

There is a major difficulty for anyone, including Siedentop, who tells a Christian story of liberalism’s origins. They must explain how, against its original purposes, the Gospel’s message was brought down to earth, applied right now to radically new aims and institutions that Jesus and Paul would not have accepted. The reversal is stark: from a refusal of the relevance of Christian moral beliefs’ to politics to a revolution in this-worldly assumptions about the subordination of individuals to hierarchy. You need an argument to show how this happened. Siedentop doesn’t really have one. He just knows the reversal occurred.

I admire Samuel Moyn’s work, which informed my Open Letter to the Human Rights Movement and the gradual loss of my liberal innocence, so I take his critique of Larry’s last book and broader project seriously. The essence of Moyn’s critique is that Larry does not quite explain what he is so keen to describe; that’s partly because Larry does not entertain enough counterfactuals, anomalous evidence, alternative explanations, or awkward counterpoints. The form of the argument is often: X happened, and X led to Y, but Moyn suggests Larry does not explain how X led to Y nor consider other reasons why Y came about. This point applies to the big matter of how Christianity led to Liberalism but also to some of the building blocks of that case.

I wonder how Larry would respond to this critique. He was quite fond of the word ‘bogus’ and may have simply wielded that. Arguably Moyn misses the wood for the trees, and the entire book, Inventing the Individual is ‘the how’ he is looking for within the pages. Maybe, but Moyn’s reasoning seems so intricate, respectful and careful that I am unsure. To be honest, I was glad to read it, not because I wanted to see my old tutor criticised, but because it puts Larry’s earlier remark to me: “Well I do like ambition” into perspective. Larry’s work was ambitious, he sought to explain the West to itself, and if he merely described and did not quite explain, he did so brilliantly and evocatively and, for most of us, compellingly.

While it does not mention Larry directly, a source more sympathetic to Larry’s project is about liberalism’s lack of self-awareness: Geoff Mann’s It Was Not Supposed To End This Way:

…Today, more than two centuries of arrogant triumphalism seem to be degenerating into what one could be forgiven for calling permanent emergency. If spiraling political economic inequality, the disintegration of democracy (however nominal), and the rise of macho racist nationalism did not seem challenging enough, climate change alone promises a red alert that is unlikely ever to turn off. “Progress” is not one of the things we expect the Anthropocene to inaugurate. One might even go so far as to say that if the Anthropocene has a plot, it is usually presumed to be tragic…

This has potentially devastating implications not only for the liberal metanarrative, but for liberalism more broadly, at least partly because it seriously destabilizes its capacity to provide its proponents, or anyone else, with some sort of useful historical and geographical orientation. Growth, progress, consensus, reason, reasonableness, equilibrium: none of this can be depended upon at present. Even liberalism’s conception of what it means for something to go wrong, the promised finitude of the moment of crisis, does not work anymore…

All of which is to say that the reality management system by which history is assembled for Spaceship Earth’s most privileged passengers has failed, and those passengers do not know what to think or do because the categories that are supposed to make sense of experience are increasingly inadequate. The tragedy of liberalism is its inability to narrate the end of progress. Yet this is the impossible task asked of the Anthropocene.

Larry would no doubt ask: which liberalism is he talking about? While I am not aware of Larry commenting on the Anthropocene, climate change or any other environmental or ecological matter, his work is precisely about “useful historical and geographical orientation” that liberalism otherwise seems to lack today. Moreover, Larry did not frame ‘growth and progress’ as the heart of the liberal project, and to the idea that “the categories that are supposed to make sense of experience are increasingly inadequate” Larry might have said: Well of course, haven’t you read my work?

*

Finally, I did not catch all the finer details of the story, but one of the speeches at the service relayed the following anecdote that informed the title of this post. Larry lived to be eighty-eight years old and I am very encouraged by his life. Towards the end, he was looked after in a nursing home and part of his care involved daily exercise, which he was not always inclined to do. On one occasion, after a successfully completed exercise session, he came inside and was greeted by his main carer who asked him if he felt happy now.

“Happy?”, said Larry, with a note of disbelief. “Do you know what happiness means?”

Larry towards the end of his life. Image via EW magazine.

1. I haven’t thought about this distinction for years. Now that it comes to mind it feels strikingly relevant to many of the issues I have been working on. The will of all (volonté de tous) reflects aggregate opinion and private interests; some want this and some want that for reasons that are mostly their own, and it leads to outcomes that may please some more than others even if it seems to reflect preferences more or less fairly (consider the outcome of a democratic election). The problem is that the will of all is a compromise between limited perspectives and is unlikely to lead to the kind of more far-sighted and wiser outcomes that become possible when people set their own interests aside and think dispassionately about what is for the greater good (In The Unconscious Civilisation, John Ralston Saul does not, from memory, quote Rousseau, but he argues quite persuasively that dispassionate interest in the public realm is required to avoid corporatism and for democratic health). We might even say that the will-of-all, while being ostensibly fair, actually feeds Moloch.

The general will (volonté générale) is very different, good in some ways but scary in others. The general will is about transcending private interests to get to a vision of the greater good, in which people ‘think as one’ and reflect on what is best for everyone. I can’t explore this fully here, but what is coming to mind is how deliberative democracies work to draw attention to something like the general will, how this distinction informs some of our practices in the antidebate, how it applies to the challenge of the unintelligible We, and what it means for peace. That said, there are many sharp critiques of the idea of a general will; for being vague and pseudo-metaphysical, for lending itself to authoritarian interpretation etc. It’s one thing to imagine a ‘general will’ arising from a functional UN to achieve unprecedented cooperation to keep the world within planetary boundaries, but it’s another to imagine, say, another Trump Presidency in which ‘the will of the people’ is for millions of people to be deported.

2. All direct quotes of Larry are based on my personal experience and memory. They should be taken as my attempt to be true as possible to the spirit of what was said rather than as verbatim. Except for the first one! He really was “Very encouraged by (my) work”…

3. This was a curious decision. I received a high (2nd of four quadrants) First Class Degree from Oxford with papers mostly in philosophy, with recommendations from three Oxford tutors including Larry. This was the first of many rejections I have received from academic institutions and the first of many signs from the world to look elsewhere for fulfilment and belonging.

4. While preparing this reflection, I was particularly impressed by Patrick Nash’s Farewell in The Critic - a wonderfully elegant depiction of Larry who “cultivated, admonished and enriched” in equal measure.

5. I recognised Ed Balls, Robert Skidelsky, John Tasioulas and I was particularly happy to get a few moments with my former economics tutor Tim Jenkinson. Tim asked what I was doing and I said ran a charity that works mostly on climate change and also publishes books (it comes out differently every time). He probed further and I said we are interested in the relationship between systems, souls and society in theory and practice; I then gave an example closer to his world, where the case for post-growth economics needs to have a sound philosophical theory of human nature to support it (a version of the flip, the formation and the fun). I didn’t know what to expect in response, but he said(paraphrasing): “Oh, there was a BBC radio programme by a guy called Oliver Burkeman where that came up - I remember that line ‘systems, souls and society’.” I said that was me, and felt relieved.