SMITH, TOCQUEVILLE, AND FOUCAULT ON WHAT IS WRONG WITH ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM
My friends at AdamSmithWorks published one of my new essays, “Smith, Tocqueville, and Foucault on the temptation of enlightened despotism.” (It’s another excerpt from my ‘liberal art of government-credo’ that I am writing. It is ungated there, so feel free go to read it. I am grateful to the paying subscribers of my digressions to put me in a position to create such content. So below, with gratitude to them, I have reproduced the essay (behind the pay-wall after the first paragraph).
There is a persistent strain in liberalism to be mistrustful of politics and to be impatient with the political process. The problem is that if you turn your back on politics you end up being tempted by very bad political options. For example, you can be tempted to put your faith in transitional ‘enlightened’ dictators (as some neo-liberals were in response to General Pinochet and the Latin American crises during the 1970s).1 Or, as is more common in our age, a technocracy that disguises the sectorial and special interests it promotes behind jargon and the authority of science as a means to silence others. There is an important connection between these two examples and that impatience with politics that I illustrate using the writings of Adam Smith, Tocqueville, and Foucault.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to digressionsimpressions’s Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.