Blogs > Liberty and Power > Robert Nisbet and "the ecological community": shared roots

May 14, 2007

Robert Nisbet and "the ecological community": shared roots




Tim Sydney sent this comment to my Ecology and Classical Liberalism discussion below. He raised issues that I think are well worth discussing, but the thread he posted on has lost its monenbtum. And so, with his permission, I am reposting it here in hopes it will generate some good discussion.

Tim Sydney wrote:

Another linkage between 'classical liberalism' and ecology is provides by Robert Nisbet.

Although he avoided the 'classical liberal' label, Robert Nisbet was probably the doyen of conservative sociology and his definition of conservatism, definitely Burkean, was decidedly hostile to militarism and the emerging neocon and Christian Right agendas.

Nisbet's sociology was definitely anti-statist but not anarchist. He sought a new community based on "a new laissez faire", one that would revive a network of intermediate institutions and communities between the individual and the central state, the only recipe he believed that worked against centraism. His new laissez faire was not a reversion to 19th century style laisser faire. With these qualifications in mind, I still think "classical liberals" are right to think of him as "one of their own."

Anyhow in his book "The Social Philosophers" (1974), a survey of historically influential social thinkers, he defined six broad classes of community, and grouped the various social thinkers into this scheme. The half dozen types were the military community , the political community, the religious community, the revolutionary community, the plural community and the ecological community.

The last he defined as "the close, cohesive interdependences symbolised by the small household economy, the interdependences among organisms and between organisms and the environment which are natural, in contrast to those which are contrived or artificial; and the profound sense of a web of life existing between man and the rest of nature that man endangers only at his own peril."

Into this class of thinkers Nisbet placed Saint Benedict of Nursia, Sir Thomas ("utopia") Moore, Proudhon, Kropotkin, the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith.

Perhaps paralleling Nisbet's thinking here, John C. Medaille has called Adam Smith, "The Forgotten Agrarian" (see his PDF here).

Medaille quotes "Wealth Of Nations" in his article lead: "“[The Agricultural System]… is, perhaps, the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political oeconomy, and is upon that account well worth the
consideration of every man who wishes to examine with attention the principles of that very
important science.”

So there is a definite "ecological" / "agrarian" thread in classical liberalism. Some of the American 20th century agrarians like, for example, Louis Bromfield (see Joseph Stromberg's summary here) combined a concern for the soil, free trade, anti-militarism and conservationism. They were "green" back when greens were something you ate and predated the more socialistic oriented greens of today.

The distributists, whose leading thinkers had roots in the anti-imperialist wing of the UK Liberal Party early in the 20th century, paralleled many of the concerns of the agrarians. Distributist Hillaire Belloc'a "The Servile State" was in many ways a forerunner to F.A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom".

In recent years E.F. Schumacher, the 1970s pioneer of "small is beautiful" and "alternative technology" has himself migrated "right-wards" to be closer to the Distributists. (See article here).

This survey shows that historically there have been movements and tendencies close to, sometimes parallel to, sometimes overlapping with, classical liberalism that have not only adapted to an ecological viewpoint, but have helped develop it. So the task of greening classical liberalism may not be quite as counter-intuitive as many both inside and outside the classical liberal movement think.



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John C. Médaille - 6/5/2007

Chesterton and Belloc didn't feel it necessary to challange "economics" directly, because they really didn't have a dispute with economics per se. This is clear in Belloc's "Economics for Helen," which would be recognizable as more or less standard theory or neoclassicism. Rather, Belloc thought of economics as a "mere arithmetic" from which many different kinds of systems could be contructed through political economy. And (pardon the shameless self-promotion) my new book (The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace) lays out the case for the need for a "distributive principle" in order to make economic theory complete.

By the way, it is somewhat fortuitous that I discovered this blog at precisely this moment, since I will be at George Mason over the weekend to give a paper at the History of Economics Society conference.

John C. Médaille

"A dead thing can go with the stream...
but only a living thing can go against it."
-G. K. Chesterton
http://www.medaille.com/distributivism.htm
john@medaille.com


John C. Médaille - 6/5/2007

Gus,

Thank you for citing my article. It provides me with sufficient excuse to announce my new book on the same subject:

I am proud to announce the publication of my book, The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace, by Continuum International.

The overriding theme of this book is that the original unity of distributive and corrective justice that prevailed in both economics and moral discourse until the 16th and seventeenth centuries was shattered by the rise of an individualistic capitalism that relied on corrective justice (justice in exchange) alone. But an economics that lacks a distributive principle will attain neither equity nor equilibrium and will be inherently unstable and increasingly reliant on both government power (Keynesianism) and consumer credit (usury) to correct the imbalances. Catholic social teaching, by contrast, emphasis a greater equity in the distribution of land and other means of production, and the just wage, and thereby leads more naturally to economic equilibrium and social justice. Finally, the book shows many examples of functioning systems, both large scale and small, that operate on the principles taught by the Church and produce a high degree of both equity and equilibrium.

I am also proud to have two very nice "blurbs."

‘In this remarkable book John Médaille succeeds in showing how the more radical elements in Catholic Social teaching can be turned into really practical projects for building an alternative to capitalism. He shows that the key is to alter the culture of the business and the corporation in order to ensure that political and economic purposes, distributive and corrective justice become once again integrated, as classical philosophy and Christian theology alike demand. *The Vocation of business* supplies us at last with some keys for the turning of Christian critique of liberalism into a new from of effective practice.’

John Milbank University of Nottingham

"John Médaille has produced a tour de force - a book that manages to give the reader just enough insight into the various thinkers and subjects treated without overloading the reader and without missing anything important out. The careful yet unequivocal judgement on neoconservatism and the chapter on Distributism are particularly good."

Helen Alford OP, Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Angelicum

Take a look inside this book at Amazon.com (http://tinyurl.com/3bdmud ). You may contact me at john@medaille.com
John C. Médaille

"A dead thing can go with the stream...
but only a living thing can go against it."
-G. K. Chesterton
http://www.medaille.com/distributivism.htm
john@medaille.com


Tim Sydney - 5/19/2007

I noticed that the current issue of Independent Review has an article on Chesterton - Belloc and distributist agrarianism.

"“Chesterton and Belloc: A Critique”
By Marcus Epstein (The American Cause), Walter Block (Loyola University, New Orleans), and Thomas E. Woods Jr. (Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Conservative heirs to the agrarian romantics, G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc believed the Industrial Revolution had made the English working class less secure because whereas small property holders had been able to live off the land during hard times, wage earners were dependent on their employers. Chesterton and Belloc advocated land reform and other “distributist” policies to resolve this predicament, but their proposals would have required state action on a scale that would have violated their own anti-socialist principles."

Not on line.


Tim Sydney - 5/15/2007

The distributists, at least as represented by Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton, were reacting to the cartelised and centralised capitalism of their day. Their aim was to more broadly distribute the ownership of land and business away from the big business / big government system they opposed.

There are some overlaps between distributist thinking on land and agriculture and that of libertarians who have come to revisionist views of the "enclosure" movement in Britain. See here for a libertarian critique of the enclosures.

In general neither Chesteron or Belloc were economists and were, if anything, skeptical of economists and economics. They were not 'free market' advocates but certainly opposed the same enemies more explicitly libertarian oriented thinkers. To a certain extent they focused on the moral and culture dimensions of centralisation rather than the economic. They went on to influence the work of novelists C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien.

C S Lewis in his non-religious writings developed some critiques of the
"omnicompetent state" , technocratic big government and the Fabian socialist movement. His sci fi novel "That Hideous Strength" is directed towards these foes. This work has parallels to more explicitly libertarian / classical liberal works such as Hayek's "Road to Serfdom".

Tolkien's work too incorporates a kind of "distributist utopia". The Shire. A kind of traditionalist agrarian miniarchy, with highly limited government. There are parallels even here for libertarians. Tolkien was impressed with medieval Icelandic society and the Icelandic folklore was a major influence on Tolkien's imagined worlds. Interestingly David Friedman has expounded on various libertarian features of Icelandic society.

Tolkien's apparent anti-technology stance is an issue for many classical liberals, and something that made his book popular with the counter-cultural left in the 1970s. Still it should be remembered it is more "techno - skepticism" than "technophobia". Tolkien was concerned with weapons, pollution and environmental destruction. He saw them not as a result of technology per se but as a by-product of powerful technology being deployed by dominating political powers.